Stratosphere

The melancholic "Stratosphere" is about Beck's close childhood friend who he lost to heroin around 2000. The young Beck Hansen looked up to him, and when he overdosed in a motel room, the singer was mortified. Beck explained to English newspaper The Sun: "It's about needing to escape and the lyrics are talking about heroin and that mind state of somebody wanting to numb out and go somewhere else. It's a theme throughout the record and I was thinking about hyperspace and space travel. We live in a time when it feels like the walls are closing in and there is anxiety and uncertainty."

So why did it take Beck 20 years to write a song about the tragedy? "I think at the time, I don't know if I would have been able to articulate how I was feeling or how would I even approach it in a song," he mused to The Independent. "In this case, it just came out of nowhere and even I was wondering and questioning what the song was about. You're trying to imagine where that person is and how they got to that place."

This is the only song on Hyperspace that Beck wrote and produced on his own. Most of the other tracks are collaborations with Pharrell Williams.