Odelay
1996 studio album by Beck

Odelay is the fifth studio album by American musician Beck, released on June 18, 1996, by DGC Records. The album featured several successful singles, including "Where It's At", "Devils Haircut", and "The New Pollution", and peaked at number sixteen on the Billboard 200. As of July 2008, the album had sold 2.3 million copies in the United States, making Odelay Beck's most successful album to date. Since its release, the album has been lauded by critics and has appeared in numerous publications' lists of the greatest of the 1990s and of all time.
Recording
Beck approached Odelay with trepidation. "I thought Odelay might be the last time I got a chance to make a record,” he told Rolling Stone in 2008.
The sessions for what would become Odelay originally began as a subdued, acoustic affair. In 1994, Beck started to record tracks for his follow-up to Mellow Gold with Bong Load producers Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf. Together, they recorded the melancholy album-closer "Ramshackle". He would eventually abandon work with Rothrock and Schnapf, opting to work with the Dust Brothers instead.
The public source identifies “Odelay” as 1996 studio album by Beck. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Odelay, studio and album.
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This entry incorporates text from “Odelay” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.