Lyrics:

The Song:

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in early 2005, Beck was asked what the first song he ever wrote was. This was his answer:

I used to have a tape recorder, with one of those cheap RadioShack plastic microphones. I used a calculator that had little melodies -- like the bastard cousin of "Frere Jacques" -- when you hit the buttons. My brother was the drummer, he played pencils on a cassette-tape box, and I wrote a song called "Bells Are Ringing." We'd seen this Kraftwerk video with all these little instruments, so that's what we were aspiring to do.

The phrase shows up in "Beautiful Way" thirty years later!