Beck had originally attempted to record “Debra” with the Dust Brothers for Odelay, but was either not happy with the recording, or felt it didn’t fit on the album, or both. (“I thought it was too jokey,” Beck once admitted.) But the song was a natural for the stage: “What happened is we started playing it live and it became the centerpiece of the whole set. It was the song that people would react to more than the songs that they’d heard on the radio. So we kept playing it and playing it.” It took on a life of its own, and the energy that was breathed into the song was clearly noted. “I think its life began as being tongue-in-cheek and silly, but somewhere along the way, like the way we performed it every night, it acquired some other dimensions,” Beck explained.

The album version does not compare to the excitement of live versions, which could and would go off on tangents on Beck and the band’s whims. To many fans, having an “final” performance set on record is in a way a let down. Nonetheless, “Debra” still shows off many of those new dimensions, as well as some of Beck’s greatests talents, including his “seventeen-octave vocal range,” his humor, his natural ability with melody, his ease at absorbing influences. The song, as often thought, isn’t a mockery either, but a tongue-in-cheek ode to the R&B phenomenon. Maybe it was borne as a bit of a joke, but it ended up more a tribute. Beck is a big fan of R. Kelly and the sexual R&B rappers. “It’s fascinating to me, these guys singing R&B with a very sweet, smooth groove, but they’re singing about how they want to get some girl’s panties off and do them real good. Very explicit, but very sensitive at the same time. It’s a really weird juxtaposition,” Beck says. Musical juxtaposition is basically Beck’s main theme in almost everything he does, so now it seems almost natural for him to dabble in this genre.

“Debra” has grown a lot over the years. One constant (besides the lyrics) is the skanky bass riff, which was lifted from a Ramsey Lewis track called “My Love For You” on his album Funky Serenity. On record, Justin Meldal-Johnsen plays the lick on his upright. Other influences are numerous. I have a feeling that David Bowie’s own Vultures-soul record, Young Americans, was a big influence on the sound here, especially the song “Win.” Beck has mentioned numerous times R. Kelly’s song, “I Like The Crotch On You” being an inspiration, and lo and behold, one of the first lines of the song is “I wanna get with you.” In the last few years, the “Lovely lady / Girl you drive me crazy” coda was lifted in from Kool Keith’s “Lovely Lady.” Beck of course uses these as launching points for his own tale of seduction.

“Debra” is featured in the film Baby Driver, as the characters of Baby and Debora discuss the surprisingly low number of songs about people named Debra/Debora. The other song mentioned is “Debora” by T.Rex.