Midnite Vultures

Recorded over almost a year at Soft Studios and PCP Labs, it was produced by Beck with the Dust Brothers, Tony Hoffer and Mickey Petralia. Johnny Marr played guitar on Milk & Honey and Beth Orton sang on Beautiful Way. It reached number 34 in the United States and 19 in the United Kingdom, and holds a Metacritic score of 83. The closing track, Debra, runs 13:46 with a hidden track. It began as a double album, and more than 25 nearly finished songs were left behind. Beck and his producers studied contemporary hip-hop and R&B, R. Kelly in particular, and a core group gathered at his Pasadena home in July 1998 around Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Roger Joseph Manning Jr., Mickey Petralia and Tony Hoffer. Beck asked for an up-tempo record that would be fun to play night after night. Working titles included Zatyricon and a line from Milk & Honey.

Influences and release

Several songs grew from other songs. Get Real Paid has a sequencer motif like Kraftwerk's Home Computer, a synth breakdown in Milk & Honey echoes Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's The Message, Beautiful Way came from listening to the Velvet Underground's Countess from Hong Kong, and Debra was inspired by Prince's Adore and David Bowie's Win.

Beck headlined the first Coachella festival on 9 October 1999 and played about 80 shows between January and September 2000, the last tour with DJ Swamp in his band. The first 500,000 copies came in a digipak, and a 30-second piece of Beautiful Way was bundled with Windows ME as a demo for Windows Media Player 7. The record sold 743,000 copies in the United States by July 2008, was nominated for Album of the Year at the 2001 Grammys, and was ranked 307 on NME's list of the 500 greatest albums in 2013. Q put it 50th on a 2006 list of the worst albums ever.