I’ve recently been on a Beatles kick.
These things go in cycles for me; I’ll listen to the Beatles hardcore (or Lennon solo, or McCartney solo, or Harrison solo, or even Starr solo) for a month, and then I’ll not touch the Beatles for six months or so.
Recently, the cycle kicked in. I can’t say exactly when it started, and I’m not sure when it will end, but it’s where I am now. I think it started about two weeks ago; I became very enamoured of a little known McCartney B-side, “I Love This House,” which he recorded with David Gilmour in the mid-80s and then didn’t release until Flaming Pie in 1997. (There’s something… fun about listening to mid-80s McCartney and hearing Gilmour’s very distinctive guitar work. You hear it a lot on Flowers in the Dirt. It’s enough to make one wonder what a Beatles/Pink Floyd album would have sounded like…) And then I found The Lost Lennon Tapes. And then, and then…
Well, it could be that my mind instinctively knows that Saturday, May 8th, marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Let It Be. (Which is something that Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 gets wrong; there’s a scene that shows Jim Lovell’s daughter holding the record, a full month before its release.) And while many people think of Let It Be as a lesser album, largely because of the circumstances under which it was recorded or the circumstances under which it was released, I have always loved Let It Be, from start to finish, and I especially love Harrison’s guitar solo on the album version of “Let It Be,” of which I have waxed philosophic in the past.
Or it could be that I pulled off my “To Be Read” pile recently Jonathan Gould’s Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America, a compulsively (and easily) readable biography of the band.
In any case, that’s my musical mood of late. It will pass, as all things must pass, but until it does, it’s a nice place to be.
And, for purely amusing reasons, Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back in Anger” meets the Beatles’ “Let It Be” in a nicely done mash:
Remember, all you need is love. :party: