True to its name, Mutations has a kind of convoluted history. Promotional posturing aside, Mutations was clearly an essential project for Beck himself, weary from endless worldwide touring in the wake of Odelay . We desperately needed it. After working on the road for that long, you just get bottled up and need to go and do something really quick. People can spend two months on one song, and every day you re just picking it apart.
People spend days working on a high-hat sound.
You can spend weeks mixing a song. It can drag on and on, and I think creatively it s really frustrating. We were confined to just two weeks because Nigel had other commitments. We knew the record was done when the car service came to take him to the airport. OK, I guess that s it.