BECK BLACK – Single & Video Review: “Puppet Show”

Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Beck Black is a veritable dynamo, possessing immense quantities of imagination and creativity, with a colorful persona to match. She’s been releasing music since 2014 (including a terrific album Hollywood Blvd in 2021), both as a solo artist and as a band under the Beck Black moniker, with the help of drummer Adam Alt and guitarist Mo Matatquin. Her music spans across multiple genres ranging from alternative, rock’n’roll and punk to country and pop, and everything in between. Listening to her music catalog, I’m struck by the fact that no two songs of hers sound alike (I adore her 2019 country song “Don’t Call Me Darlin'”). In addition, with her love of make-up and dressing up, she’s continually changing her style, such that she looks vastly different from one photo to the next, and I love it!

Beck has recorded songs with Ringo Starr (“Who’s Gonna Save Rock & Roll” in 2020) and Tony Valentine of The Standells (“Another Dimension” and “You’re Never Gonna Stop Me!” in 2021), and is also is part of the duo JYNX, with two songs licensed to the Netflix film Dumplin. She and her band have played some of L.A.’s most iconic venues like the Troubadour, The Echo, Whisky a Go Go, The Viper Room, and The Satellite. Besides making music, she has appeared on TV, films and many online shows including S.W.A.T., Grey’s Anatomy, and Ruth & Lori.

Photo, makeup and styling by Robert Hayman Flores

I first learned about Beck last month when I heard her marvelous cover of David Bowie’s song “Aladdin Sane”, which she recorded for the album Forget That I’m 50, a magnificent cover of Bowie’s entire album Aladdin Sane, produced by Julian Shah-Tayler. Now she’s back with a delicious new single “Puppet Show“, accompanied by a delightful video. Written and produced by Beck, the song is originally from the album Hollywood Blvd, but has now been released as a single. Beck sang vocals and played keyboards, Mo Matatquin played guitar and Adam Alt played drums. The track was mastered by Magic Garden Mastering.

It’s a lively banger, with an emphatic foot-stomping groove overlain with swirling cinematic synths, intricate edgy guitars and thunderous percussion. The infectious synth-driven melody reminds me a bit of the great 1982 song “Wishing” by A Flock of Seagulls. Beck’s vibrant lilting vocals are wonderful as she sings the lyrics that seem to be telling us that life is like a puppet show, with some people trying to control or influence our thoughts and actions, but we can choose to cast off those strings and life on our own terms: “Telegram the words to me, a puppet sings. People pulling at your strings and other things. Dancing with a back and forth motion, to and fro. Wearing shiny, sequin clothing a puppet show. Chances are interesting a puppet dreams. Reality is what you make it wearing strings.“

The brilliant video for the song, created and produced by Beck, co-directed with Justin L. Smith, and filmed by Eli Wallace Johansson, is utterly charming. It features Beck as a human marionette, along with a marionette miniature of her, created by Rasputin Marionettes. Both Beck and her marionette doppelgänger are dressed in matching hot pink sequined dresses and wigs. Beck is shown singing the song and playing her keytar in a vast outdoor field while the marionette acts out the lyrics. Eventually freed from their strings, they both jump into a lake, where they savor their newfound independence “Swimming in a deep blue ocea, ebb and flow. Life can be your pearly oyster, a puppet show.”