The Beatles - Some Final Thoughts

Welcome to Track Chatter, where we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we reconsider songs by The Beatles. Can anything new be said about this band or its music? Have a look below and let us know what you think.

Aaron: Well, Lew, we’ve done it. It took longer than I thought it would. Our first post on The Beatles came almost exactly two years ago, and since then we’ve written about sixteen Beatles tracks. Did you think it would take that long?

Lew: I definitely did not expect or plan for it to take this long! There’s a John Lennon quote (which you may know) that goes, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” – seems pretty appropriate here. I have to admit, I’m feeling a little conflicted now that we’re actually finishing it. I was looking forward to moving on to other topics, but I also feel weirdly like I’m going to miss talking about The Beatles. Maybe this is a loaded question, but how do you feel about seeing the end of this project?

Aaron: I’m a bit conflicted as well. When we first started the project, I sort of thought we’d burn through it in a few months, maybe 6 to 8 or so, and I was really excited. And while we were working on those first few entries, I got a real rush going back and listening to those older albums in full – it had been along time since I’d listened to all of Please Please Me or A Hard Day’s Night, for example – and in most cases, I was listening to the mono re-masters. That meant that in addition to hearing a lot of the songs again for the first time, I was hearing them in ways I hadn’t before, which was incredibly exciting. I think that sense of excitement comes out in those early entries in the way we write about something like the sound of Paul’s bass or the harmonies.

But as time passed and “life happened,” I sort of started to feel like perhaps we’d been a bit too ambitious. So I got worried we’d never finish and I found myself sort of wishing we’d started with a smaller project so that the pressure to do it all wouldn’t have seemed so immense.

However, now that it’s coming to an end, I do feel a bit wistful. I’ve so enjoyed the intensity of listening to each of these albums in preparation for each entry that I’ll be sad to see that go. However, I really do feel like my appreciation for The Beatles has not only intensified, but also that it’s a lot more grounded now. In that sense, I’m really excited about the conversations we’ve had.

How about you? Did the project change the way you listen to the band at all?

Track #13: "I've Got a Feeling" Let It Be (1970)

Welcome to Track Chatter, where we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we reconsider songs by The Beatles. Can anything new be said about this band or its music? Have a look below and let us know what you think.

Lew: It’s rare to hear the Beatles’ final album, Let It Be, discussed without an accompanying discussion of the famously difficult sessions that went into recording the album, or the personal conflicts that ensued and ultimately led to the break-up of the band. As a historical component of the Beatles’ eventual dissolution, it makes sense to view the finished album, and the sessions that created it (as detailed in the movie of the same name) as one artifact. That said, it’s unlikely that the album gets a fair shake when situated against the arguments of whether Paul or John was right, or whether Yoko really broke up the band. The truth is that it’s an interesting album on its own merits, and might have indicated a new creative period for the band if they had continued. Paul’s idea of going back to basics had yielded results that weren’t as predictable as one might expect. Rather than an obvious return to the songwriting style of Beatles For Sale or Help!, Let It Be filters a large part of its simplified approach through the more ambitious work of their later output – whether in a literal or reactionary sense – striking a balance between less complex arrangements and charting new territory (“One After 909” notwithstanding) compositionally.

“I’ve Got a Feeling” marries simplicity and complexity as well as any other song on Let It Be. On one hand, the musical structure is fairly basic, and the arrangement is pretty straightforward. At the same time, the song itself is a marriage between two song fragments, written by McCartney and Lennon, respectively. It’s a move that recalls the multi-part suite at the end of Abbey Road, but on a more modest scale, and I would say in a more organic way. I have to admit that it never occurred to me that the two sections of the song originated separately until I did some reading to prepare for discussing it here, which I think speaks to how well McCartney and Lennon were able to work together, even at this late date.

Aaron, there’s a lot worth discussing in “I’ve Got a Feeling,” but I guess I’m interested in starting with how you see it fitting into The Beatles’ work as a whole. Do you think it’s a new approach, or would you say that it fits in somewhere in the songs that precede it?

Track #12: “Something” Abbey Road (1969)

Welcome to Track Chatter, where we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we reconsider songs by The Beatles. Can anything new be said about this band or its music? Have a look below and let us know what you think.

Aaron: As is well known by even most casual Beatles’ fans, Abbey Road is actually the last album the band recorded, although its release was followed by the (mostly) previously recorded Let It Be in 1970. As this project is considering songs from album to album, we’ll stick to release dates rather than recording dates and consider an Abbey Road track first. However, it’s worth mentioning the recording order if only because it was during the recording of Let It Be that the band reached their nadir as a functioning unit and almost broke up on several occasions (potentially denying us Abbey Road). The irony of the situation is that Let It Be was supposed to see the band regrouping after the fractured recording experience of The White Album – a back-to-basics affair via which the lads would recapture the joy of recording and just plain rocking out. As we’ll likely discuss in our entry on Let It Be, that’s not what happened. The sessions were caustic, the production was a shambles, and the music was shelved. Abbey Road instead became the back-to-basics album that the band was after. George Martin, after something of a hiatus during the Let It Be sessions, only agreed to return if he could be in charge, to which the band was happy to acquiesce. And while the entirety of the recording stretched out between January and September of 1969, most of the album was recorded during the month of July, with Martin and longtime engineer Geoff Emerick at the helm and the band mostly working together again like they rarely had in years.

The process proved fruitful and Abbey Road is generally considered one of the band’s best overall albums. It manages to capture the sounds and vibes of the late ‘60s rock scene while remaining undeniably a record by The Beatles. Side One is practically a late-era Beatles’ hit parade with tracks like “Come Together,” “Something,” and “Oh! Darling,” whereas Side Two consists mainly of the famous and famously experimental medley – eight songs spread out over sixteen minutes, all seamlessly interwoven (in part by some of McCartney’s most free-wheeling and . . . imaginative bass playing). And then comes one of rock’s first “hidden tracks,” as “Her Majesty” followed fourteen seconds of silence and was not originally listed on the US or UK albums or album sleeves.

Choosing a track from amongst all this that would qualify as “lesser known” proved pretty much impossible, so we decided to follow that path that we took with Help! and pick what is perhaps the best-known track on the album, and one of the best known from amongst the band’s entire catalogue, George Harrison’s “Something.” It’s the song that Frank Sinatra famously called the “best love song ever written.” In Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald calls it the “acme” of George Harrison’s career as a songwriter and claims of the song, “if McCartney wasn’t jealous, he should have been.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, Lew, so I’ll just toss out a few general questions and you can tackle them (or not) in any way you want. Is “Something” such a great song? It’s the second most recorded Beatles’ song after “Yesterday” – does that tell us anything about its place in the band’s canon (or even in Harrison’s canon)? And, to return to a question we’ve revisited throughout the series, does it hold up?

Quick Take #3: Shabazz Palaces - “A treatease dedicated to The Avian Airess from North East Nubis (1000 questions, 1 answer)” (2011)

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Quick Takes is an occasional column in which we choose any song that we’re currently listening to – old or new, pop or rock, jazz or folk or blues, or anything else under the sun that can be spun. One of us writes up one or two short paragraphs on some of our general thoughts about the track, and our partner takes another couple paragraphs to respond. The rest is up to you, dear reader.

For this entry, we consider a track from Shabazz Palaces album Black Up.

Aaron: While I don’t listen to tons of hip-hop, I do try to keep up with the genre’s more interesting releases, both the commercial and the more experimental stuff. So when Shabazz Palace – an outfit I’d never heard of – started popping up on all the “Best of” lists of 2011, I decided to check out Black Up  late last year. It certainly falls on the experimental end of the spectrum. Disjointed rhythms, odd and spooky production, otherworldly lyrics – it’s the kind of hip-hop album that demands close listening to unpack all its pleasures. And it’s most definitely not a disc one throws on to get the party started (well, I guess it depends on the kind of party).

This track is one of the album’s more accessible. In part because it’s a type of love song and in part because it’s rhythmic cadences are less angular or oddly contrapuntal. The rap pretty much flows straight forward from beginning to end and does so in close unison with the song’s beat. It’s not my favorite song on the album, but it is the first song that grabbed me – perhaps because it is “easier” than a lot of the other tracks. I really like the way the lyrics start out describing what seems essentially to be a crush (“I was hopin’ that maybe / I could be her baby”) and develop into something closer to full-on sexual obsession (“I want to be there / I should be in there”). And as the lyrics take on a different tonal shading, the production slowly builds the ambient background sounds into something more insistent.