Photo by Drew Brown

Between his Record Club covers project and his increasingly impressive production work for famous friends, Beck has recently put in studio time with what seems like everybody recently: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Wilco, Feist, Jamie Lidell, Thurston Moore, Tortoise, Bat for Lashes, St. Vincent, Liars, Devendra Banhart, MGMT, Tobacco, and Stephen Malkmus. These creative partnerships have helped to revitalize the alt-rock originator, who just turned 40 last month.

He's also contributed songs to several recent soundtracks, including Twilight: Eclipse, "True Blood", and Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, which found him writing garage rock songs for the lead character's fictional band, Sex Bob-Omb. He's a busy guy. And, during a recent phone interview, he jumped from project to project and thought to thought in a casually random way that shouldn't be surprising considering his penchant for genre-hopping.

Beck talks in a spacey California drawl. He takes long pauses in between sentences; over a windy phone line, it was tough to tell whether he had completed a thought or was taking a break only to get deeper into it. In the following interview, he touched on all the topics above and hinted at new Beck material that may come out sooner than you'd expect:

Pitchfork: Considering the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack-- where you're writing songs for a made-up band-- and your recent work with Charlotte Gainsbourg, and all the Record Club collaborations, it seems like you're really enjoying writing and playing with other people right now as opposed to working on your own stuff.

Beck Hansen: Maybe it's more interesting for me to work with other people right now, just to change things up a little bit. Since Charlotte called me a few years ago I've been calling other people and asking if they needed help with their records. I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself. Also, I haven't had a record deal in over two years, so maybe that's why you're seeing more of these collaborations.

Working with Charlotte, there are things I can write for her that wouldn't work if I sang them. So it opens up other ways of making music. At this point, I know what works and what doesn't for me; I know my own limitations. And if somebody says, "I need songs for a cartoon garage band-- they look like this and they should sound like this," it gives you a direction. I like having that kind of assignment.

But I'm always working on my own music, too. I've been working on a record for a few years; I recorded it in the fall of 2008.

Pitchfork: How far along are you on that album?

BH: I've worked on it a little bit here or there but it's the kind of thing where I turn around and two years have gone by and it starts to get less relevant to what's happening at large. At this point, five other bands may have done something that felt really exciting and new two years ago. Like, the title of the record was going to be Rococo and now Arcade Fire have a song called "Rococo". But I'm sure the music is going to come out. I'm not sure if I'm going to put out 12"s or put the songs on my website. I just have to get them done. I'm going to try and finish them this summer. It's just a matter of the songs being good enough and not embarrassing. [laughs]