In case you haven’t noticed, October’s turned into soundtrack month over here; this wasn’t really on purpose, but far be it for me to turn my back on a good theme. Beck is someone else I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to lately; really I’d lost sight of him around the time of Midnite Vultures, and didn’t bother coming back for Mutations or Guero. If more of this sort of material was waiting for me, however, then missing out on Beck’s later career will have been a mistake; this cover of a 1980 Korgis song, produced with the help of wunderkind Jon Brion (whose most recent claims to fame include helming Kanye West’s latest and walking the plank off Fiona Apple’s latest) doesn’t sound like the Beck I recall, save perhaps for the particularly downbeat Beck of “Nobody’s Fault But My Own.” Brion’s involvement may be the reason why; Beck’s main contribution was his evocative vocal performance.

Neatly bookending the film, “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometimes” is a rain-soaked treatise on change. In a sense, it’s fitting that Jim Carrey’s character tosses a tape of the song out his car window in a fit of frustration at the beginning of the film (technically after the prologue, of course; damned non-linear timelines), and only reappears at the very end; the song is a very simple one, but it’s almost as though Carrey’s character isn’t ready to accept its message just yet, that we have to coax him through the two hours of the film before he sees the light. But aside from whatever significance the song may have to the film’s plot, it’s also a heartbreakingly beautiful song. For a film that could so easily fall into the hipster arthouse trap of putting together a buzzworthy soundtrack full of indie luminaries and old pop classics—I’m looking at you, Garden State—Eternal Sunshine is amazingly well scored. There are few recognizable “songs,” and the one we notice—Beck’s contribution—fits the material so well, somehow weightier than the haphazard selections of other films, that it ceases to exist solely as music. It becomes inextricable from scenes of the film: the shattered cassette tape on the storm-soaked road; the beach house our protagonists explore one night; the final loop of the two playing on a snow-covered beach on Long Island.