Lyrics:

The Song:

This pretty tune is a direct result of the influence Mississippi John Hurt had on Beck's music. Beck's guitar picking is well done, and sounds much like his favorite bluesman. His bluesy voice on the Don't Get Bent version is also totally Hurt-like. The simple, repetitive patterns of both the music and the lyrics come courtesy of the blues.

The many versions of the song are different, most notably in length (and some incidental lyric changes). Musically, they are basically identical. The Beck, Like the Beer demo has Beck sing a verse, play for awhile before commenting that there's another verse. He then starts the song over again. The track on Golden Feelings is really long, with Beck just quietly playing the song for over a minute before he starts singing. On Western Harvest there's more self-editing involved, and the song begins more or less as his singing does.

The earliest version was discovered after all of these. A copy of Beck's early tape, Don't Get Bent Out Of Shape, began to circulate more widely in about 2001. "Gettin Home" was not on it. But then an actual tape of Bent ended up on Ebay, and a great fan got it. He discovered there was actually a different track order to the tape than we knew before, as well as this third version of "Gettin Home"! It's probably my favorite version of the song, as well. It begins with about a minute of starting and stopping the guitar part. I love how Beck answers himself on the "Who's gonna live here? I don't know."

Considering how much work Beck seems to have put on this song, and how pretty it is, it's amazing it's so obscure.