Cycle: "Country Down" - 2014 Morning Phase tour breakdown
reaching for sunlight Song stats: Beck performed “Country Down” at 19 of the 57 shows this year. Most of those were front-loaded too, he played it 7 out of 10 times on the first leg, and 5 times in a row on the second leg. Then it was not played at all on the 4th and 5th legs, before a few more near the end.
Band lineup:
Beck – vocals, acoustic guitar, harmonica Smokey – slide guitar Roger – keyboards, backup vocals Joey – drums Gus – acoustic guitar, backup vocals Justin – bass Jason (after the first leg) – acoustic guitar (and I believe he did the keyboards in SF when Roger was sick).
Breakdown: I'm just sort of picking songs at random to look at here, but having looked at “Dead Melodies,” “Lost Cause” and now “Country Down” all around the same time, I'm realizing how many songs Beck has that are so very simple and straightforward, yet at the same time, really pretty. Sometimes the strength of Beck's songs are in the unique arrangements or strange turns they may take. But with songs like “Country Down,” they get their strength from within, from not having drastic changes, from simply being.
On stage this year, Beck did not take “Country Down” anywhere particularly noteworthy, which fits the song: he just lets it be. If you know the album version, you know the live one, and the band just confidently rolled through its two sections. At the beginning of the tour, Beck struggled with the words a little. And at the end of the first live version, Beck announced that they had “played that a little too fast.” (The tempo did not sound any different to me, though.) By the end of the tour, Beck would sometimes add an extended harmonica solo at the beginning of the song, and his harmonica break in the middle of the song was always a highlight.
The band was quite solid on this one, the guitars weaving together, Smokey's slide guitar the star. Roger played wonderfully subtle keyboards, which I did not really notice until the show he missed in San Francisco, and (I think) Jason moved over on this song and his keyboard skills, though effective, ended up highlighting Roger's. Beck explained in an interview once that some bands/musicians have a tough time playing slow songs; this band, who recorded Sea Change and Morning Phase, has no such trouble.
“Country Down” did not lull me quite the way I wrote about “Lost Cause,” even though creatively, they were similar re-creations of their respective albums. Both are great songs, but I guess because “Country” is younger, it still has that new car smell to it which kept it more intriguing and fresh. Beck has mentioned that sometimes new stuff takes awhile to settle in with audiences, and I for one hope “Country Down” gets the time to get to the point where it bores me like “Lost Cause” does. Highlight: