Singer/rapper/producer Gonzales (aka Jason Beck). (Ramon Palacios Pelletier/Arts & Crafts)

Jason Beck’s actions over the last decade do not suggest a conventional bid for musical fame. It has felt more like a quest for infamy, one that has spanned several countries and involved a large cast of co-conspirators, many of whom would soon be stars in their own right. With the arrival of his new album, Soft Power, the Paris-based expat from Toronto has come to an appropriately strange juncture. In his native land, he is still largely unknown — except, perhaps, to those who have read the album sleeves of their beloved Feist discs. But in Europe, where he’s better known as Gonzales, Beck is a respected and highly prolific producer and musician.

Audiences in France have grown accustomed to Gonzales’s prankish humour: in concert, he is apt to cover Phil Collins and Philip Bailey’s Easy Lover or perform in white gloves with his hands projected on a screen above the stage. But even there, fans aren’t sure how to take his provocations.

“I have a real constituency of people here in France, and a good half of them probably remember me from the old days, when it was a constant barrage of lies and insincerity,” Beck says, laughing.

He’s more sincere at the moment. At the time of our interview, Beck was in the middle of five nights of shows in Paris to promote Soft Power. (The digital version of the album is already available online; the CD will be in Canadian record stores on June 3.) While some old fans have been thrown for a loop by the disc’s smooth, relatively straight-up sounds, those just discovering Beck's music aren’t on predictable ground, either.

“I’m on this quite huge label in France for the first time, and there’s a whole other world of people who are hearing the songs on the radio and seeing the clip on TV,” he says. “So, they come to the show expecting some new pop sensation, and they realize it’s this hairy, 35-year-old man who’s got a whole heavy history of f---ing with people’s perceptions.”

That history stretches back to the mid-1990s, when the McGill University music grad caused a stir as the frontman of a pop-funk band called Son. In 1996, Warner Music Canada released Son’s debut album, the cheekily titled Thriller. But Beck’s relationship with the label soured over his eagerness to move in a less rocking, more groove-based direction. Together with Merrill Nisker – a former folkie also destined for greater (and dirtier) things – Beck vented some of his frustration by playing in a noisy side project with the automatically risqué name of The Shit. Beck also began to make music with Leslie Feist, then a newcomer from Calgary.

At the end of the decade, Beck and Nisker escaped the then-moribund Toronto scene and relocated to Berlin, Germany. There, Nisker transformed herself into a potty-mouthed rapper named Peaches, soon to become a fave of both fashionistas and Johnny Knoxville, star of MTV's popular series Jackass. Also fancying himself an MC, Beck became Chili Gonzales and proclaimed himself to be the “the only one-eyed Jewish rapper in Berlin” (despite having two eyes). He then staged a press conference in which he announced he’d be running for the position of “President of the Berlin Underground.” As he told the Toronto Sun at the time, “I’m trying to convince all the musicians to be entertainers, to act like wrestlers and get their fingernails dirty.”

Gonzales' new album, Soft Power. (Ramon Palacios Pelletier/Arts & Crafts)

On his first three albums as Gonzales, Beck reveled in the oddball tendencies that were becoming rife on Wolfstein (1998), his second and final disc for Warner. You’d find him crooning or rapping over everything from jazzy funk to pretty pop to muscular electro. Alternately combative and playful, his lyrics were full of self-deprecating humour; the 2002 single Take Me to Broadway had him rapping, “I love the crowd/I hate the crowd /I constantly constipate the crowd.”

His efforts were rewarded with club play and the opportunity to remix and remodel songs by Daft Punk and Björk. He also shifted his home base to Paris, where he served as writer, musician and producer on albums by French stars like Jane Birkin and Philippe Katerine, as well as on the two discs that would make an international sensation out of his pal Feist: Let It Die (2003) and The Reminder (2007). Beck had his first big solo success with Solo Piano (2004), a beguiling and uncharacteristically mellow set reminiscent of Erik Satie and Keith Jarrett.

Soft Power represents yet another shift in strategy. Though there are a few Solo Piano-like pieces and a gloriously symphonic disco track titled Let’s Ride, most of the new songs evoke the smoothness of '70s pop, especially the Todd Rundgren-like ballads Slow Down and Map of the World. One major challenge for Beck was deciding which songs worked best for him specifically.

“I had to ask, ‘Which of these, with their combination of lyrics and harmony, are truly expressions that only I can pull off?’ I ended up with six,” he said. “There was a bunch I’d recorded with vocals that didn’t make the cut. I thought, ‘If Feist sung this, it would be way better, so it shouldn’t really be on my album.’ Hopefully, all of the ones that I sang on the album, you really can’t imagine someone else doing it better.”

“The idea was to find my voice in the most literal sense,” he adds. “I was afraid of doing an album with a bunch of guests, as so many people could’ve expected. I didn’t want to open up my Rolodex and get everyone to sing for me. I thought, ‘No, I want to put myself in more of a danger zone.’”

He says stepping behind a microphone again was “the dumbest-slash-riskiest thing I could do.” Trying to make a go of it without relying on his more famous friends is equally gutsy. That said, Feist, Jarvis Cocker, Princess Superstar and many others appear on a remix of Let’s Ride available on Gonzales’s MySpace page. Beck doesn’t mind seeing his name paired with Feist’s; he’s not megalomaniacal when it comes to taking credit.

“I’m very detached from everything that’s happened to Feist, in the sense it’s happening to her, and I don’t think I over- or underestimate my part in it,” he says. “It’s never been an ambition of mine to be a producer, so in a way, I can stay fairly detached, because I don’t really produce that much music, really. I did a bunch of French stuff, and for a while, it was really interesting to work with new people, but I more or less still just work with my friends, as I always have.”

Most recently, Beck can be heard on Jim, an exhilarating new album by techno boffin turned soul shouter Jamie Lidell, a pal from his Berlin days. Beck is co-writing some songs with Montreal dance producer Tiga and collaborating with songwriter Howie Beck. He also continues to work with Peaches and Feist. Beck says that the latter’s commercial breakthrough is something that his crew of friends had always imagined would happen.

“We all knew it would take some time because none of us really fits into a pigeonhole,” he says. “Everyone has a desire to do something original. A lot of people ask, ‘Wow, were you surprised by the success of Feist, the breakout star of your crew?’ But we’re just surprised it didn’t happen to all of us already.” He laughs. “The fact that it’s only her is the big surprise.”

Soft Power will be released in Canada on June 3. Gonzales plays Montreal on May 8 and Toronto on May 9.

Jason Anderson is a Toronto-based writer.