Minus

Beck wrote “Minus” alone, one of only a handful of songs on Odelay with no other credited writer. The album leaned hard on the Dust Brothers’ sample collages, but this track came together apart from those sessions, with Brian Paulson producing and Mario Caldato Jr., the Beastie Boys’ longtime engineer, mixing it. Today marks 30 years since Odelay’s release on June 18, 1996, the record that turned Beck from a one-hit novelty act into one of the decade’s most unpredictable songwriters.

The song existed long before the album did. Beck played “Minus” live as early as June 27, 1994, more than a year before recording the version that made the record, reworking the lyrics on stage as he went. Early reviews of Odelay even listed it under a different name, “Minus (Karaoke Bloodperm),” a title that vanished by the time the album reached shelves. Joey Waronker plays drums, percussion, and chimes on the finished track.

Live, “Minus” turned rougher than the record. Beck’s band leaned into the song’s punk edges onstage through the Odelay and Midnite Vultures eras, with a drum solo bridge becoming a regular highlight. By the time Beck largely retired the song from rotation, it had been played live close to 200 times across two decades, unusual mileage for a track that was never released as a single.

Odelay won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album in 1997, with “Where It’s At” picking up Best Male Rock Vocal Performance the same night. The record went platinum within seven months and double platinum by 1998, numbers nobody expected from the artist who’d scored a novelty hit with “Loser” four years earlier. “Minus” never got a video or a single release, but thirty years on it’s still the moment on Odelay where the whole project threatens to fall apart into noise, then doesn’t.