Going back to work with the Dust Brothers for "Guero" ensured he would end up with an album very different from "Sea Change." (Typically, Beck has already begun recording his next release, which is another collaboration with Godrich.) Instead of showing up at the studio with a list of songs, Beck came each day with a sense of a sound he was seeking and then set out to find the right beat. "D.J.'s or hip-hop producers will have tons of beats, a kick from here and two snares from there," he explains. "It's put into a MPC-2000" -- a sampling drum machine -- "and it becomes an abstract hybrid. We'd go through those and find a beat. I'll think, I want . . . something greasy and choppy, or like old soul but really modern." The three would build the song up, layer by layer. (They share the writing credits.)

"John's and my forte is finding a one- or two-bar groove off someone's record and repeating it over and over," says Simpson, whose duo produced the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique" as well as tracks by Coolio, Korn and other rappers and rock bands. "Working with rappers, that was enough to get a song started: we left it up to a vocalist to define a verse and chorus. The thing that was so beautiful with Beck is he brought all these musical dimensions. They matriculated and became real songs." As King says: "He'll take something that most other artists wouldn't know what to do with but which we think sounds really cool. He's so talented and open-minded, he could just run with anything we gave him."

For the new album, the Dust Brothers retrieved a song they had started for "Midnite Vultures" but never completed. "It was a masterpiece of sound, confusing and all over the place," King says. "Beck really liked the chorus, and we planned on finishing it, but he said, 'This is what I like,' so we stripped away everything but the keyboard, and a bass that we eventually replaced. I pulled up a new beat, and something was happening that was infectious, and we felt we could listen to it all day. Beck began jamming acoustic guitar over it. That became 'Girl.' " A sunny California-style pop song, "Girl" sounds nothing like the mass of sound -- King calls it "a headache song" -- that generated it. Indeed, the end result was so pleasant that Beck kept darkening the lyrics, until it is now seemingly narrated by a serial killer of women. "I saw her with her black tongue tied round the roses," Beck sings affably, in that voice that manages to be both generic and instantly recognizable. "Walking crooked down the beach she spits on the sand where their bones are bleaching." (Beck insists that it is "supposed to be a romantic song with all this rough imagery, like Bukowski.")

Far removed from the singer-songwriter cliché of composing on a guitar late at night in a hotel room, the beat-driven way of songwriting might seem impersonal, but that's misleading. What it really resembles is a painterly process. Francis Bacon, for example, would make marks on a canvas until, discerning something that intrigued him, he began to build up an image; the technique provided him with the gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism inside a figurative format.

Starting with a beat and laying down tracks allows Beck to project a comparable feeling of spontaneity. The title song on his new album evokes the neighborhood he grew up in, which was largely Central American. "In the park there were these strange characters with crosses carved on their foreheads," he says. "Some of them had been in death squads, and now they were immigrants. I tried to write about it for years, but it didn't want to fit without sounding heavy. And it came out finally on this album in this fun song, 'Guero."' Textured with horn honks, snippets of inane conversation and mariachi band riffs, the song was produced collectively in the studio, but it expresses Beck's vision. Beck's sensibility is composed of shards and polarities: notwithstanding his definite left-wing leanings, he has never possessed the single-mindedness to pen a protest song. "I remember trying to write that kind of song, but there were so many different factors and ambivalences," he says. "There are so many good things in the bad things and bad things in the good. The songs are fragmented, because you look at things from different angles to get 360 degrees. Maybe the message is more complicated and skewed."

Like his wife and his father, Beck is a Scientologist. "It's been useful," he says. "My dad's been doing it since before I was born." In the Church of Scientology, members seeking what the church calls "higher levels of spiritual awareness and ability" are "audited" by a counselor and also by a device called an "e-meter," which measures their physiological reactions. When reminded that the Church of Scientology provokes continuing controversy -- as much for its tight control over adherents as for its core program -- Beck fixes his huge blue eyes in an unwavering gaze and challenges the church's critics. "Any kind of intolerance I have a distaste for," he says, especially when the intolerance is directed at "something that helps teach kids how to read, addicts to get off drugs and convicts to start a new life." He continues: "I've always appreciated other cultures and other ideas. Even music I didn't particularly enjoy. I always thought there was something interesting there, something to learn. I was such a lover of old blues music and scratchy old 78's, and I would hear new R&B and it sounded so glossy. But then the more I listened to it, the more I appreciated it." With the conversation drifting far from the topic, he is asked how Scientology helps him. "It's a personal thing," he says. "I'm a musician. I'm not, like, a personality. I've never really pretended to perform that kind of function."

Although Beck's wide acquaintance includes many of the artists, poets and skateboarders he met growing up on the alternative-culture margins of L.A. and New York, his core group is a more affluent, insider crowd, many of them rising young actors. Like Marissa, her twin brother, Giovanni Ribisi, is an actor and a Scientologist. The actor-director Adam Goldberg appeared with Giovanni in Steven Spielberg's movie "Saving Private Ryan," then directed him in a small film, "I Love Your Work." Goldberg also acted with Marissa in "Dazed and Confused." In turn, Goldberg's girlfriend, Christina Ricci, starred with Giovanni in "I Love Your Work." It's an overdetermined group.