Marking his first solo release since 2008's Best Alternative Music Album-nominated Modern Guilt, sonically omnivorous songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Beck returned to the spotlight in 2014 with his universally acclaimed ninth studio album, Morning Phase.
For Beck, the process of writing and recording the material that eventually became Morning Phase stretched out over the course of nearly a decade, beginning in 2005 when he travelled to Nashville with the intention of recording an album that, at the time, never materialized.
With the release of Modern Guilt satisfying the terms of his longstanding contract with Interscope Records and freeing Beck from further commitments to the label, he returned to the material from the Nashville sessions and went back into the studio at Jack White's Third Man Records in 2012, where he cut the tracks that would become "Blackbird Chain," Country Down," and "Waking Light."
Beck went back into the studio again in early 2013, this time in his hometown of Los Angeles, where he completed tracking a large portion of the remaining songs for Morning Phase in just three days.
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With a returning cast of supporting musicians from Beck's Best Alternative Music Album-nominated 2002 record Sea Change, Morning Phase became a sonic companion to the earlier release, and a spiritual successor to both Sea Change and 1994's One Foot In The Grave.
Shortly before the release of first radio single "Blue Moon" in January 2014, Stereogum ranked Morning Phase at No. 2 on its list of the "100 Most Anticipated Albums Of 2014." The album debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and reached Top 10 status in eight countries.
Morning Phase earned Beck the GRAMMYs for Best Rock Album and Album Of The Year at the 57th GRAMMY Awards, while the numerous mixing and master engineers who worked on the album tracks in various studios around the country between 2005 and 2014 jointly earned the GRAMMY for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.
