Beck: Culture Vulture.

Sea Change is in stores now.

Beck Hansen is a romantic and believes in foreverness. He likes courtship and in many ways prefers the old traditional ways of approaching a relationship to today's 'anything is possible so let's just go with what we make up now' idealism. In his words, it's almost like you have 2000 channels but you don't watch any of them. You just go click, click, click.

His recent record with relationships would have you thinking anything but that. In the three years since his funky-but-dull Midnite Vultures he's ended a long-term relationship with clothing designer Leigh Limon and had brief flings with Hollywood starlets Winona Ryder and Gina Gershon.

This has a lot to do with why his brilliant new album, Sea Change, easily the best of his mostly illustrious career, is such a, well, sea change. Gone is all that tacky brass, earnest '70s funk disconess and Prince-influenced butt swaggering that marked 1999's Midnight Vultures as his least enduring record. In its place is a deeply personal record, filled with songs of heartache; a melancholy baby that musically delves deep into the heart of American country, folk-blues and the wistful pathos of English folk that the songs of Nick Drake so personified.

"I think everybody needs a little pathos," he said recently. "You just have to watch that the pathos doesn't turn into bathos."

You won't party to Sea Change but you will embrace Sea Change, because it's about the real stuff. The stuff that counts. Those affairs of the heart and how we all cut up deep inside and try living with the resulting mess.

"I'm not a big subscriber to jumping in and out of relationships," Beck says. "I think it's fascinating. I don't really go on that scene much, but I was in a bar with this photographer I worked with, watching people hooking up, doing the whole thing like buzz, buzz, buzz. Like, wow, you know, the meat market thing? Crazy. I never did that."

Yet he almost has, recently. That though, is a normal reaction to the end of a long-term relationship. Go out and get shagged a few times even though rebounding more often than not ends badly. Either that or bury yourself in a well-chosen tomb and entertain nobody but yourself until the self-pity and pain wears off. This ability to draw upon the many different sides of personality that make up the individual is what makes the greats great and Beck one of them.

"People ask me how I reconcile these different sides, but how do we reconcile ourselves with ourselves?," he said. "It's just that some people choose to show the world certain things. I know some musicians whose music is incredibly morose and heavy, and they're just the most fun, light-hearted people. I see amazing contradictions in other artists and I'm always amazed those aspects of their personality don't surface in the music. I choose to let it all out and don't make any excuses.”

"It's funny, when I played this record for my brother he thought it sounded like the stuff I was doing 10 years ago, before Loser and all that. I started out more in that singer-songwriter confessional mode. The stuff I was doing was very personal and kind of emotional. I just ended up with my first couple of records letting that stuff go and exploring and trying different musical guises. I don't know. Ten years slips away from you and then you realize you haven't pursued certain things."

And he denies he set out to craft such a personal collection of songs.

"I think art has always been spiritual to me. Not to sound airy-fairy or anything, but to me that's the closest I get to expressing day-to-day diurnal existence - expressing something that's close to who I am. The art helps you transform what's ordinary into the whole alchemist idea - the possibility. Otherwise we're just siting here in Hollywood with the cars going by. And that's not any fun, just sitting waiting for something to happen."

"There are times I'd like to have lived," he says, "but I love being here right now. It's pretty amazing if you think about tens of thousands of years ago, just somebody turning a stone gristmill, and the quiet. There was no music even a couple of hundred years ago, just all this accretion of no-activity and silence. No wonder there were so many wars. That was like a party. 'Let's get a bunch of armour and go kill some people, yeah!' They were just bored out of their minds.”

"I like activity. I can't really watch TV. I can't get into it at all, but I like activity. I like doing it, being part of it, not just intaking it. I hate that attention spans are so short these days. I think losing interest is one of the saddest by-products of our time - people who aren't interested in anything." They certainly wouldn't get on with his family.”