The tricky thing about music criticism is separating a song/album/symphony from your personal feelings. It becomes especially complicated if the piece being analyzed is a few years old—you've had opportunities aplenty to build up a bank of emotions which now associate with the sounds storming your eardrums. There are first kisses, introspective midnight drives, jags alone in your room, great parties and good people, all closely associated with a song over the years. It gets a tad difficult to criticize a work from any kind of objective standpoint.

Take “The Golden Age,” the leading track from Beck's 2002 album Sea Change. When I hear it, even eight years later, I'm immediately transported back to the city of Bolzano, Italy where I lived for six months during my tenure as a Mormon missionary. Unfortunately, secular jams were forbidden to those of us on the Lord's Errand. The only music we were allowed to listen to were hymns and, once a week, opera or classical for a few hours. But a friend of mine from Houston kept tape recording new music for me, despite my half-hearted protests that perhaps maybe he kind of shouldn't do that. In early November of 2002, he sent me the new Beck album, with instructions that I should stay home that day and listen to it immediately.

Normally, I would have complied with my religious superiors and shoved the tape into a drawer, where it could less tempt me into rocking out. But it was a harsh wintertime just beneath the Austrian border; I was twenty years old and homesick; I was about to spend my first holiday season away from home on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, with a bunch of goons in neckties who were barely old enough to vote in America and yet felt weirdly comfortable with bothering strangers at their homes and telling them how wrongly they were living their lives. Needless to say, it was a depressing time in my life and “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” was just not going to cut it for me. Having obsessively listened to Odelay and Midnite Vultures in my youth, I figured that this new effort would at least distract me from my malaise, if not cheer me up outright.

When I had last heard from Beck, he was the embodiment of late 90's hipster irony, a chameleon of sound with an ear for sampling and an uncanny ability to sing songs like “Truck Driving Neighbors Downstairs” and “Debra” with a totally straight face. Yet, upon hearing “The Golden Age” I immediately felt a melancholic sincerity, oozing out of the tinny speakers of my contraband headphones, which I had previously never heard in the canon of Mr. Hansen. It didn't exactly cure me of my Mormon Missionary Blues. Still, despite the despondency that permeated the record, I found a haunting comfort in its simplicity and vastness, especially in “The Golden Age”. The bright ring of the guitar, the lethargic glockenspiel and the mournful howl of the pedal steel, like a coyote at a blue moon, are enough to catch the attention, even without the context of Beck's more “complex” works. But the vocals—both Beck's stoic, echoing lead and the reverberated wail of the backing singers—are what makes the song truly memorable, conveying a stark vulnerability previously unknown to listeners. For almost the entirety of his pre-Sea Change career, Beck had been in some ways armored by his ironic detachment and his genre exercises. We trusted Beck when he was making hipster rap songs for suburban white kids, and when he decided to make a funk record, perhaps because we got the sense that he was largely playacting. We stood by him through all the saxophone solos, his insane flirtation with falsetto, his schizophrenic sampling, and his collaboration with the Enchanting Wizard of Rhythm. Sea Change might be the album where Beck started trusting us. Obviously, very few artists are one hundred percent present in their work. The art acts as a scrim—it allows the audience to see some things clearly, but is not totally transparent. “The Golden Age” is significant as a Track One because it heralds the tearing down of that scrim. Sea Change is the occasion upon which Beck decided to stand as nakedly as one can before his audience. Even if he went back to his old, detached tricks on later albums like Guero and, to a lesser extent, Modern Guilt, there will always be that moment in Beck's discography when he composed with no guile, no device.

Overall, “The Golden Age” instills a feeling comparable to the final moments in The Grapes of Wrath, when Rose of Sharon nurses a man dying of starvation with the milk once meant for her stillborn baby. As if to say, “Yeah, this is sad, but we're gonna suck it up. We'll hate driving through this desert for how empty and lonely it is, but we won't just pull the car over and languish here.” Even though I knew I would be a stranger in a stranger land, keeping the company of kids I generally disliked as I annoyed the Italians for another year and half, my initial listen to Sea Change somehow made me feel realistically better about the whole affair. It would still be a while before I could see my family and friends, listen to a record on proper speakers, eat a Double Whopper or kiss a girl. But it no longer felt like an eternity before me. Though I was depressed and lonely then, I would not always be depressed and lonely. I had been trying to instill a similar feeling into the people I encountered in Italy, only it was the love of Jesus that was supposed to make them see that light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps I am a wicked, slothful and frivolous man for saying it, but suddenly, I had a much more concrete example of that comforting glow, in a new album from the man who once inspired a generation to “get crazy with the Cheez-Whiz,” then I had in the quotations of a long-dead carpenter-turned-Rabbi. I rewound the tape and listened to that first track probably six or seven more times. Then I wrote a letter to my friend and asked “What the hell happened to Beck? This is his by far his best record.”

On the one hand, my emotional association with “The Golden Age” should automatically disqualify me from talking about it on any critical level. As critics, we strive toward objectivity; we aim to denote a track's good and bad qualities based on an intimate, textbook knowledge of good songwriting and arrangement, and not some intangible sense of wistful hope that I experienced in a dirty Italian apartment when I was a homesick monk. But, on the other hand, fuck that cock shit. If a work of art is not making me feel something; if I can just walk away from a song or an album and honestly say that I have no emotional attachment to the work, then is the work worth any sort of analysis? Absolutely not. The purpose of art is not appreciation by critics, who drone on unnecessarily about chord progressions and harmonic structures until they take the joy out of music. Go to a conservatory for that bullshit. The purpose of art is stir up feeling in the listener, to get a base, emotional reaction out of them, and, if it is truly great, it will still electrify the audience even after 1,000 listens. Almost a decade later, “The Golden Age” still makes my skin tingle, still rattles my bones. Really, could you ask for more than that out of your musical intake?