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?
Aaron: It’s hard to say if it’s a departure per say because I think its recording and release history (recorded before Abbey Road, released after it) can make it somewhat difficult to contextualize. Cutting Yellow Submarine out of the mix, if we look at the troika of The White Album, Let It Be, and Abbey Road in order of recording, then I think a sort of late-career organic development can be detected. On The White Album, the band was somewhat in disarray (or in a shambles, depending on who’s doing the telling), often working semi-independently and bringing new ideas to their mates almost as they would to a backup band. A lot of the “back to the roots” vibe that Let It Be was going for seems present in flashes on The White Album: whether the hokey revisionist rock of “Back in the USSR,” the bluesy wails of “Yer Blues,” or event Ringo’s countrified twang on “Don’t Pass Me By.” Of course The White Album had its experimental bits, its way-way-back throwbacks, and its fragments. All of that stuff seems to represent the various members of the band working out where they want to go as musicians – sometimes all together, sometimes with one other Beatle, sometimes practically alone.
By the time of Abbey Road, even though there were still problems, and individual personalities and egos seem pretty obviously to have been pulling feverishly at the seams, there’s a sense that the combination of “back to basics” and experimentation have gelled fairly well and the band is firing pretty much on all cylinders. In that context, Let It Be can almost be seen as a transition album on at least a couple fronts: the band is working out how to blend the roots with the new, and they’re also transitioning back into being a band again – a whole that is somewhat greater than the sum of its parts, as it were. That they failed so miserably on the latter point is the famous story of the band’s recording, but it may also have been the sort of necessary letting off steam (or puncturing of ego) that allowed the band to go into the studio and record Abbey Road with all the vigor that they seem to have brought to it.
I think that’s an interesting way (but not the only way, of course) to approach Let It Be. Whereas it often seems like a kind of coda after the brilliance of Abbey Road, it’s actually more of a precursor. In which case, “I’ve Got a Feeling” hints at Abbey Road’s excellent side two rather than recalling it (in fact, I guess we could say it does both, which is one of the interesting things about Let It Be – it’s the album that simultaneously came before and came after Abbey Road).
I guess I haven’t really answered your question in regard to that song in specific, but I’m going to throw it back to you for that. I will say for now that I really do enjoy Let It Be, and I think “I’ve Got a Feeling” is one of its stronger songs. How do you feel about it generally and does anything I’ve said here make sense (and does it really make any difference in how we think about the song/album)?
Lew: Sure – I think you’re right on the money. I was thinking in writing my intro that the story of making this album might be less important to mention in detail than it was for the others, because the sessions are so notorious. While that’s partly true, it probably would have been worthwhile to point out the chronology of the recording as prior to Abbey Road. You’re absolutely right to say that “I’ve Got a Feeling” is a foreshadowing of “You Never Give Me Your Money,” rather than a look back. I can see Let It Be as a transition to Abbey Road, but I do have some reservations about Abbey Road. In some ways, Let It Be strikes me as more of a band effort than Abbey Road, although the facts might say otherwise. I’ll always get a kick out of hearing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” or “Octopus’s Garden,” for example, but it’s more the kick of hearing a musician you admire unwinding and doing something goofy once they’ve already made a case for their talent with more serious writing. And, to go back to something I said in the intro, for me, “I’ve Got a Feeling” marries fragmentary ideas together with less visible glue, so to speak, when compared to side two of Abbey Road. I should qualify that I have very positive feelings about side two of Abbey Road, both as a piece of music and something that I’ve been hearing for most of my life. But, there’s a critical side of me that can’t help questioning the approach that went into writing the second side of the album – there’s something about it that feels more like collage than composition. How does “Polythene Pam” relate to “Golden Slumbers?” That’s probably not meant to be clear, and the fragments themselves have a lot to recommend them, but is there really a compositional relationship there? I’m not sure. It’s very ambitious, and I love it for that, but I’m not 100% sure that the execution matches the goal. However, “I’ve Got a Feeling” does seem to present a complete synthesis of ideas – it’s not hard to find a commonality between “I’ve Got a Feeling” and “Everybody Had a Hard Year,” lyrically or musically. Maybe it succeeds, partially because it’s less ambitious?
Aaron: You might be right about it being less ambitious – it’s certainly less obvious. I know that when I first came across Let It Be – which was probably the last of the late Beatles’ albums that I got into – I had no idea that “I’ve Got a Feeling” had actually begun life as two songs. I just took it as a particularly ingenious work by Lennon and McCartney. Perhaps listening to Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road so much in my youth had prepared me to hear a song like “I’ve Got a Feeling” and just take it as one more fusion of L&M’s songwriting talents. I’m not sure I can say that it works better for me than side two of Abbey Road – perhaps you’d like to say a bit more about the “compositional relationship” between those different songs, because they’ve always worked for me as an average listener.
But getting back to “I’ve Got a Feeling,” I think one of the reasons it works so well (and perhaps better than the AR suite, at least in miniature) is that the two sets of lyrics play off each other so well. First, you get Paul singing about the present (“I’ve got a feeling, a feeling I can’t hide . . .”) and the future (“I’d hate to miss the train . . . I won’t be late again”). It’s a very joyous, forward looking lyric. And while it reflects on the past (“All these years I’ve been wandering around . . .”), it’s not about the past. So the lyrics are really constructed around this moment of change – this is happening now, and I’m really excited about where it’s going! Then John’s lyric comes along and it’s about the past. He’s singing about the previous year, the good and bad times (“everybody had a hard year” but also “everybody had a good time”), and it’s more reflective. The wow moment for me is that a lot of songs would set the tone with John’s lyrics and then build up to Paul’s (think back to a song like “Got to Get You into My Life,” which, while only Paul is singing, does something along those lines: he’s alone, he doesn’t know what’s going on, then WOW! there she is!). But in introducing the reflective bits of John second (which maybe makes more musical sense as well?), the song seems to be saying that Paul’s “feeling” is so uncontainable that he doesn’t have time to give us the back-story. Then, once he’s had his exclamatory moment, John can come along and sort of fill in the details about what the past year has been like . . . in other words, he describes the feelings and situations that have led up to Paul’s moment. Does that make sense? It’s like the two parts are in dialogue, but in reverse order, which works really well to deepen the feeling of both – Paul’s bit becomes more exciting by hearing John’s bit afterwards, whereas John’s bit seems more than just humdrum because we know (chronologically speaking) where it’s headed.
Second, and more briefly, the lyrics play off each well in that they both seem such clear distillations of the attitudes (or publically perceived attitudes) of McCartney and Lennon. It really sounds like the two guys are giving their own individual, and distinct, takes on the same series of events.
Lew: I don’t want to get too far into criticizing side two of Abbey Road – that would be crazy, considering that I really love what they did with it. I guess it’s hard to state an opinion like this without seeming overly critical or dismissive, and I don’t mean that, but I do think that there are instances where the fragmentary approach that they took to writing the various sections shows through. There are also instances where it works fantastically, but I think there’s a certain slapdash quality to it at points. It’s great, but I’m not sure that I’d call it a tight composition.
On the subject at hand, that's a great way to look at the relationship between the two sections of “I've Got a Feeling.” I think that, subconsciously, that's the way I've always interpreted it, although I don't think I ever verbalized it to myself. But yes – it is absolutely that apparent timeline of events and feelings that makes the song work so well, for me. I’d also agree that the two sections seem to say something about the respective personalities of the authors. That said, there’s an interesting role reversal in the way the vocal parts are laid out, too. I think it’s a general given that between Lennon and McCartney, John was the hard rocking screamer, and Paul is a little calmer, and cleaner in his vocal delivery. While that may bear out as true overall, there are exceptions to the rule, and “I’ve Got a Feeling” is definitely one of them. For a good part of the song, Paul sounds like he’s pushing his voice as far as he can, while John’s vocal is relaxed and almost sing-song, which fits very well into juxtaposing the sense of excitement in the first section and the introspection of the second.
Aaron: Hey, I wonder if that unexpected vocal dynamic on the part of the two of them is part of an overall late-career pattern. With Paul you’ve got things like “Helter Skelter” and “Oh! Darling,” two songs where he also does some mad belting. Whereas John’s been mellowing out for a while with “Julia” or “Because.” Not that either of them had completely redefined themselves. But they both were very interested throughout their careers not only in pushing themselves musically, but also in subverting their public personas, about which both of them were very self-conscious. In any case, the approaches work really well together here. Sometimes Paul’s “I can scream like a rock star” treatment can come across as a bit boyish and forced, but here, tethered to John, it just seems exuberant and celebratory. Whereas John’s mellow delivery can come across as tired, but here it seems more . . . I don’t know . . . wise. Like you with Abbey Road, I don’t mean to diss those other performances. I just want to point out that in “I’ve Got a Feeling,” they really seemed to deliver something that’s very Lennon/McCartney, but something that also works in new ways, and without as much of the fuss and bother that their dual compositions had around the time of Sgt. Pepper’s (which, also great). The more I listen to it, the more I realize what a wonderful late example the song is of how well those two guys could work together, even under the acrimonious conditions of the Let It Be sessions.
Lew: I agree with quite a few things you’re saying, not least of which your observation about the way the vocal dynamic between John and Paul was changing toward the end of the Beatles. You definitely see both of them looking to break out of what was perceived as the norm for them in the earlier days of the band. While I’m definitely not one to diss Paul, I do think that “bucking the trend,” as it were, sounds a lot more contrived on his part than John’s, who seemed to be more naturally fusing a lazier delivery with his existing style. Maybe it goes without saying that it’s generally going to be more difficult to incorporate a subtler approach to singing than it is to decide one day that you’re going to start screaming in one song per album, since one approach requires a fairly measured aesthetic and the other just turns everything up to “10” and goes for it (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Of course, Paul pulls it off, contrived or not, because he has a voice that can do that stuff, and most people don’t.
In any case, I think one of things that we keep coming back to is that it’s pretty amazing that, while the tension in the band was at an unprecedented high, they were still syncing up so well when it came to making music. It’s even more impressive that they created something as celebratory as “I’ve Got A Feeling” through all that tension.
Aaron: In I guess what will be my last little defense of Paul in this series (not that he needs it!), I’d have to say that I think he pulls of the shouty stuff swimmingly (gulp . . . swimmingly?)! And while he certainly went for it a lot more frequently later in the band’s career, there are examples of it on earlier tracks. He gets pretty exuberant on songs like “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and “She’s a Woman,” is probably one of my favorite performances on any of their earlier stuff. None of that stuff goes for it like John was doing back then, but I guess one could argue that there’s something like a natural development in the changing nature of Paul’s singing style. Having said all that, I’d agree with you for sure that John was attempting something more significant in those later years in trying to vary his delivery from song to song and within any given song to better suit the mood or feel he was going for.
I guess it’s pretty clear, though, that we both agree that with “I’ve Got a Feeling,” the two of them managed – yet again – to marry their songwriting, musicality, and singing styles into a seamless blend that’s just as thrilling here as it was back in the early days, even as it’s also something very different. I guess sometimes, in the face of all the personalities, the acrimony, the historical legacy, etc., that these guys were professional musicians who happened to be damned good at what they were doing.
Lew: Yeah, exactly – it’s no accident that Lennon and McCartney are two of the most celebrated songwriters of the 20th Century, and while “I’ve Got a Feeling” probably isn’t their most widely acclaimed collaboration, it certainly measures up, both in terms of The Beatles’ legacy and on its own terms as an exciting piece of rock songwriting.
I think I’ll leave it there, and in doing so, conclude our discussions dedicated to a particular song or album. Next up, we’ll be writing one last entry on The Beatles, in an effort to put a cap on the entire process and check in on where we’re at in relation to the band as compared to where we started.
Coming next: We offer up some final thoughts on The Beatles and announce our next project!
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