Savvy heart

No matter how many times you’ve seen Beck in concert, you need a moment of adjustment whenever the pop auteur steps into the spotlight. You just don’t expect to be excited and touched by someone who looks like a naive 16-year-old.

The veteran Los Angeles singer-songwriter is actually twice that age, but he conveys such a sweet, Bambi-like innocence that even a novice grifter would size him up as the ideal mark.

Beck’s blank expression was perfect in the ‘90s when it italicized the irony and wit in his music so well that you wondered if it wasn’t just a put-on. But that boyish look seemed almost incongruous when he opened his concert Monday at the Universal Amphitheatre with “Guess I’m Doing Fine,” a song from his marvelous new album, “Sea Change.”

Beck has always been a gifted, folk-oriented songwriter, but his musical instincts have been so adventurous that he spent much of the ‘90s trying to wrap his tunes around hip-hop energy, something he did brilliantly in 1996’s “Odelay” album.

In “Sea Change,” he cuts out the middleman, so to speak, and operates in a straightforward singer-songwriter context, expressing romantic heartbreak with the eloquence and craft of Hank Williams, the greatest of country songwriters.

Backed only by his acoustic guitar during the opening segment of the night, Beck sang “Doing Fine” with a soulfulness and character that suggested a lifetime of seasoning and experience. It’s a tone richer and deeper than we’ve heard from him before.

Because everyone knows how it feels, and because it lends itself so easily to melodrama, heartache is one of pop’s most valuable and dangerous themes. But Beck expresses melancholy vividly in “Doing Fine” (one line goes, “Yellow roses in the graveyard/Got no time to watch them grow”) without slipping into self-pity or cliches. Like the album, the song is a graceful testimony to the resilience of the human spirit.

After that intimate moment, many in the audience might have been pulling for Beck to play the entire album acoustically. But the songs gained dimension a few numbers later when the Oklahoma City band the Flaming Lips and a guest keyboardist joined Beck midway through “The Golden Age.”

Even though “Sea Change” is an album-of-the-year contender, Beck is too restless an artist -- and too savvy an entertainer -- to include more than six songs from it in his concert. During the rest of the 100-minute set, he led a voyage through the many sides of his musical personality, all of them smart and stylish.

He was the foot-stomping, harmonica-blowing blues man on “One Foot in the Grave,” the hip-hop enthusiast on “Where It’s At,” the funk-minded partygoer on some “Midnite Vultures” tunes. He took us to Brazil on the lilting “Tropicalia” and into a rowdy Memphis honky-tonk for “Lord Only Knows.”

Changing styles is a real high-wire act for a performer, because the audience’s confidence can get shaken any time a new direction starts feeling inauthentic. Remember how many people wrote off Neil Young (prematurely, it turned out) in the ‘80s when he made uninspired moves into rockabilly and techno?

But Beck has been unerringly authentic and absorbing in everything he has tried -- even his James Brown dance steps Monday. Like Young, Beck represents the purity of the creative impulse, fearless enough to move at his own pace and selfish enough to refuse to consider the alternative.

Beck is on such a roll these days that he made an inspired choice in inviting the Flaming Lips along on this tour as the opening act and his own backing band. The Lips are a wildly imaginative and, often, simply wild outfit whose leader, Wayne Coyne, seems to have declared war on everything conventional in pop music.

During its own set, the Lips were joined by some two dozen people dressed in fuzzy animal costumes dancing and waving spotlights at the audience and looking like New Year’s Eve revelers. Coyne and his bandmates sometimes walk too far out on the plank for mainstream tastes, but they are striking indeed at times, especially in “Do You Realize??,” which may just be the best feel-good song about death ever written. It’s such a gorgeous, melodic number that Beck even reprised it in his set. This guy’s no rube.