I’ve recently been on a Beatles kick.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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>. I think<\/i> it started about two weeks ago; I became very<\/i> 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<\/i> in 1997. (There’s something… fun<\/i> about listening to mid-80s McCartney and hearing Gilmour’s very distinctive guitar work. You hear it a lot on Flowers in the Dirt<\/i>. 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<\/i><\/a>. And then, and then…<\/p>\n Well, it could be that my mind instinctively knows that Saturday, May 8th, marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Let It Be<\/i>. (Which is something that Ron Howard’s Apollo 13<\/i> 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<\/i> 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<\/i> loved Let It Be<\/i>, 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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<\/i>, a compulsively (and easily) readable biography of the band.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n And, for purely amusing reasons, Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back in Anger” meets the Beatles’ “Let It Be” in a nicely done mash:<\/p>\n