We're in a painfully fashionable L.A. photo studio called Quixote - all minimalist white and steel and baffling paintings. Beautiful people scuttle around. It being California, there's a bowl of beans to eat - raw, green beans. And fruit.
A man in a black polo neck walks through - wide-eyed, boyish, mousy-blond hair, unshaven but boyish. He doesn't so much walk as lope, in a way tall people do, though he's only about five foot six. He's looking for his lip balm.
"Hello," he says, in deep drawl - too deep for his size, about right for his walk. But it's not my turn yet. Beck needs the lip balm for a photo-shoot for a French magazine. The cover no doubt; Beck generally gets covers of magazines these days. There's a pretty, hippyish girl in jeans and an old purple top helping him with his outfits. She's Leigh, Beck's girlfriend since way before he was getting on the covers of magazines. The old green Volvo outside is hers.
The reason Beck gets on the covers of magazines - apart from the fact that he's a pretty cool guy - is that he is perhaps the most interesting, original thing going on in popular music right now. Odelay, his last album - an extraordinary hybrid of hip-hop, delta blues, folk, gangsta rap, country, you name it (even Schubert gets a look in) - was top of most people's lists when it came out a couple of years ago. In fact, when there's a list around Beck usually gets to the top of it. He's Rolling Stone magazine's Best Male Performer, Melody Maker's Best Solo Artist, Mojo's best something else and Select's Most Important Person In The World. There's a Grammy for this and a Brit for that.
But it's not just the critics who adore Beck. He's a musician's musician too - and a fairly diverse bunch have come out in praise: Bob Dylan said he had a great future, Johnny Cash that he had "that mountain music in his blood". Then there are Noel Gallagher, Bono, Damon Albarn, John Squire, Cypress Hill and Snoop Dogg. No doubt if Schubert were still around, he would have been a fan too.
"I just do my thing, and if people are into it, then they are, you know. There's a lot of work put into it, so if people appreciate it, I feel satisfied." Beck speaks slowly and deliberately, like he's just woken up. He says "you know" a lot and pauses between sentences.
The French photo-shoot is over and we've moved into a small room. He sits diagonally on a sofa, slightly awkward - but he seems comfortable in his awkwardness if that's possible. His staring, startled blue eyes focus somewhere in the distance over my head. And he has a different outfit to when I saw him 10 minutes earlier: a scruffy camouflage T-shirt this time and black trousers that appear to have been cut up and sewn back together. "It's just a form of expression," he explains, "I don't think it's that serious."
Beck doesn't care for interviews much. "Oh, they're all right. They're usually the same questions, so it's a challenge to explore saying the same things in different ways. I'm not the type of guy who sits down and goes off on my take on the universe, so it's something I've had to become used to doing. I used to try to deflect things in interviews, and be evasive, but then again it's probably more interesting to hear your honest opinion on how you think the whole puzzle fits together."
In Odelay, you can hear a lot of Beck's 28-year past: dad a bluegrass violinist, mum an actress who'd hung out with Andy Warhol and was heavily into the L.A. glam punk scene. He was the only white kid in a Latino neighbourhood of L.A., but he also had spells with his Presbyterian preacher grandfather in Kansas. He went busking in New York, came back and made Loser, a hip-hop blues song with a sing-along chorus that everybody wanted to sing along to. "Soy un perdidor/ I'm a loser baby/ So why don't you kill me?"
Beck was snapped up by Geffen. The resulting album, Mellow Gold, didn't quite live up to Loser's promise. He did a couple of small label albums, and then made Odelay, which seemed to embrace the US's entire musical heritage - from Mississippi John Hurt to Cypress Hill, from Dylan to Nirvana via Prince. He puts it better: "It's like accidental chemistry - sneaking into the lab and mixing a bunch of chemicals together and seeing if you can create an explosion."
On stage he's a fanatical minister with a very enthusiastic congregation. He's like Elvis and James Brown and Prince all at once. It's a dazzling party, that explosion he was talking about.
The other grandfather - the one who isn't a Presbyterian preacher - was Al Hansen, an avant-garde artist of the Fluxus anti-movement in the 1960s, and Beck's music has often been compared with his work. "I remember him at the dining-room table with piles of crap and newspaper ads, cigarette butts, and he was glueing them on to boards and spray-painting them colours, and making these incredible collages." Which is pretty much what Beck does with sounds.
Or did, until now. Now, he's gone back to basics: watercolour landscapes, or still lifes. The new album, Mutations, will disappoint those expecting a follow-up to Odelay. It's a simple, personal, country record, unremarkable even, with none of the wizardry of the Dust Brothers or the hint of a hip-hop beat. One song, Tropicalia is pure Brazilian bossa nova but that's as exciting as it gets. It is more about song-writing than song construction, a step back to before Odelay, to his small label release, One Foot In The Grave, I suggest.
"I don't really think of it as a step back, it's just a sort of step aside. Everyone and their mother is using a drum loop and samples and integrating dance culture into pop music and I just, you know, I've become wary of becoming a formula."
The songs have been around for a while, some were recorded for Odelay, but just didn't fit. "I think I got to a point where a certain amount of songs had marinated enough to where they had some flavour and they all worked together. I didn't want to nineties-ify them, I wanted a certain basic-ness. I think there's an innocence to it, it's something I felt I needed. Also I've always wanted to make a record that was quieter, a record that my girlfriend would listen to."
A nice record, with quiet songs for his girlfriend? What's going on? This doesn't sound like the world's coolest man. Don't worry though, he's already working on what he calls a "party record". And he's going to dumb down it seems, or go primitive at least.
"I think it might be liberating for music to become a little duller. We feel a lot of pressures in the 1990s to be meaningful, and insightful. Part of me wants to scream. I want to embrace a certain stupidity - not really stupidity, more an enjoyment of being alive in the most basic sense, trying to reach the state where you realise you've taking certain things for granted and you're actually glad to be here - through all the muck and tediousness and let-downs, decrepitude and exhaustion. You can be as philosophical, illuminating or poignant as you want, but there's nothing like those songs that make you want to get up and move yourself around." All quite philosophical, illuminating and poignant if you ask me.
Beck seems to have survived the celebrity thing quite well. The same things make him happy ("seeing a movie with a friend") and angry ("judgmental attitudes, closed minds - you can't get much worse than that"). Things take a little longer to do when everyone thinks they know you; "It's like living in a village - you have to stop and have a five-minute conversation with everybody you run into."
His humour seems very dry and a bit wacky - as you'd expect it to be - and sometimes it's not clear whether he's being deadly serious or he's taking the mick. "Irony is a part of life, it's a modern vessel of expression, but it's not a be-all and end-all. It's easy to hide behind, and it has become symptomatic of a time, at least in America, where people are afraid to stand up and take a chance, do something foolish, say what they feel." So maybe he isn't ironic. Or maybe he is doubly ironic.
Back to the safety of music then, and I tell him about the gloom in pop music in Britain - the charts full of 12-year-olds or 40-something comeback people, learned articles sounding the death of rock. Beck is more optimistic. "We're always coming to the end of something. And we can look forward to the beginning of something else. I don't know if rock music is dead per se, though good songs may be scarce. I've kept myself away from anything that could be considered rock for a number of years." So what's he in to listening to now? "I tend to listen to the radio a lot, I like stumbling into things. I'm a fan of all music where the person believes in what they're doing. What I don't care for is the sort of tepid, mediocre stuff that's tasteful but takes no risk, stuff that you could call `product'. Tastelessness, though, I find fascinating." The phone rings, Beck answers. "Hello? I dunno . . . this is a studio . . . we're doing an interview . . . OK." Wrong number. Somebody, somewhere picked up the phone and accidentally got to speak with one of the most interesting people around today.