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: