Lyrics:

The Song:

"Gamma Ray" is the second track on Modern Guilt. It is a catchy song built on electro skittery beat, and is surprisingly minimal. The song has a very traditional arrangement (intro riff/verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus/outro riff). It is basically just Beck's guitar over DangerMouse's beats (with a little piano/keyboards for flavor, I think mainly in the bridge). To that end, Beck commented once that "Gamma Ray" was one of the best representations of the work DangerMouse and he had done together. ("It's not quite James Bond, probably more Our Man Flint, or Danger Diabolique. That was the second song we did.")

In light of this minimalism and normalcy, the song certainly sounds and feels much more complex and interesting. Part of that is how Beck affects a stutter while singing, which kinda fits with the beat. Beck explains, "On 'Gamma Ray,' I added some fake stuttering; I was trying to sound as bad as I could, for a laugh. I like pop songs where everything's unexpected, otherwise things get too heavy-handed and meaningful."

Lyrically, Beck made a point once to clarify that he improvised most of the lyrics:

A lot of the other songs had things going on lyrically that were a little more hefty, had a little more weight to them. [On "Gamma Ray"] I kept trying to do that, but it just didn't work. I ended up just improvising the lyrics actually. I thought it should feel like those Chuck Berry songs where he's just singing about a car and it feels like he's making up the lyrics on the spot. It's just sort of nonsense, but it has the right feeling. That's what I ended up going with on this song. It was meant to be kind of a song about a car and a girl and not really much else.

Well, that doesn't mean the song defies looking at. Beck begins with a fairly typical (for him) verse. He often explores landscapes of icecaps melting, cars going nowhere, a somewhat distraught vision of the world.

Beck then pulls into the chorus, where he sings of a girl, who somehow remains unaffected (bored) among the wild craziness (hurricanes and burning houses). Beck's sung of this unaffectedness before (i.e., "The New Pollution"). He does not impress much here, however, more simply depicting a character than any expression or indication of emotion.

Further the choruses end with heatwaves and backwaters calling to the girl. This reminds of lots of songs in Beck's past, such as "Beautiful Way where someone again is calling the girl's name (it's driving her insane). There's also hurricanes and other wildness going on in "Beautiful Way," and it definitely feels like the lyrics of the two songs are somewhat associated. (Probably not consciously.) Beck also referred to this mysterious calling more indirectly in "Jack-ass" when he wrote of "strange invitations."

The next verse describes the girl some more, in considerably oblique language. In contrast to the first chorus, which is sung to the girl, the second is switched to be more personal--he sings about his reaction to her. To this end, Beck uses some blues language such as "smokestack lightning." Similarly, Terraplanes are an old type of car, and the reference can similarly be traced back to Robert Johnson (see here). Robert Johnson was using it as a euphemism (as usual), but it doesn't appear that Beck is. Also, from what I can tell, Chevrolet didn't make Terraplanes!

Anyway, the song ended up becoming fairly successful for Beck, as one of the singles from Modern Guilt.

Live:

Played live 39 times:
Earliest known live version: June 9, 2008
Latest known live version: March 26, 2009

"Gamma Ray" as one of the singles from Modern Guilt was played at all of the shows. (The only shows we don't have it listed for from 2008/2009 are shows with no setlist reports.)

On stage, the song is much more a band performance, though it is arranged and sounds very similar to the record. They add some nice vocal harmonies, which are buried pretty deep on the recording. Beck still does the stuttering thing though! Listening to a bunch of these, it feels like a song that sometimes struggles to find it's momentum on stage, but then sometimes the band click very well and the song works great (i.e., August 31, 2008).

There was one different arrangement of the song, on KCRW in November, 2008. This was an acoustic version, as Beck and Jessica Dobson played acoustic guitars and sang together, while Bram Inscore added bass. It's much mellower, prettier.

Notes:

• So initial reports of Modern Guilt included a song called "Beggar's Shoes." Some of the lyric snippets reported make clear that song became "Gamma Ray." However, there are no mentions of beggar's shoes in the song, so I assume Beck kept fiddling with the lyrics some. This amazing song however does mention 'beggar's shoes.'