Rock star Beck will publish his next album with McSweeney’s. The 108-page package will feature booklets, lyrics, sheet music (sample page embedded above) and covers for 20 different songs–but the reader must play the music themselves. Check it out:
Beck’s latest album comes in an almost-forgotten form—twenty songs existing only as individual pieces of sheet music, never before released or recorded. Complete with full-color, heyday-of- home-play-inspired art for each song and a lavishly produced hardcover carrying case (and, when necessary, ukelele notation), the Song Reader is an experiment in what an album can be at the end of 2012 … The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d expect from their author, but if you want to hear “Do We? We Do,” or “Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard,” bringing them to life depends on you.
Will you play Beck Hansen’s Song Reader? The collection comes out December 2012. The publisher will also feature its favorite covers of the songs on its website.