Hey all! Very excited to start this blog as a place to write and get all these thoughts out about music I love and probably films and shows I love as well! Hopefully I’ll touch on stuff you know and love already or lead some to discover stuff they may never have heard/seen!
For this first entry , I’d like to talk about music. I’d like to talk about great music.. I’d like to talk about the Beatles. They are my hands-down favorite musical artists of all time because of their incredible songs, the sheer scope and number of said songs and for their visionary studio usage to shape their compositions into wild, thrill inducing recordings which have lasted the test of time for over 50 years now!
My personal favorite album of theirs is ‘Revolver’. First hearing it on my cassette walkman when I was about 14 (insert audience laughter recording here), I was really blown away by the creativity jump they’d made (again) both in the sounds they’d found and the songs they’d written. Because they displayed so many different styles of music here on these 14 tunes from 1966, their love of records from across the musical board is evident. From the acidic, funky opener, George Harrison’s “Taxman”, to the soulful jazz brass-pop of Paul McCartney’s “Got to Get You Into My Life”. From Ringo’s lead vocal on the classic campfire sing-along “Yellow Submarine” to John Lennon’s thunderous and mesmerizing album closer, “Tomorrow Never Knows”. I always found this track strangely and wonderfully both beautiful and slightly terrifying at the same time. Those bird sounds tho!! (Which are really recordings of Paul laughing and played backward). I always get especially pumped by the backwards guitar solo, and John singing the words repeatedly at the climax- “I’ll play the game existence til the end… of the beginning, of the beginning, of the beginning….” Folks this is about 2 and a half years after “I Want to Hold Your Hand”…! Again, their willingness and ability to change, and to do it so quickly and always so successfully, was nothing short of stunning.
Paul outdid himself on “Eleanor Rigby”, the classic Dickensian and very British sounding tragic play which introduces us and makes us feel for two very lonely characters before having one of them pass away bleakly and leaving the other completely un-heard and un-noticed. Never had the music and lyrics worked quite so well together on a Beatles tune and it still succeeds in bringing a tear and chills to the spine when listening to it. Other favorites like John’s “I’m Only Sleeping” are also sound-experimenters and great melodies. Paul’s sublime, pastoral love song “Here, There and Everywhere” definitely gets a mention as well.
There is of course much more to say and I s’pose I could go on for quite a while longer but you get the picture that I love this album! I would highly recommend it if you’ve never heard it. It was another giant step for the Beatles musically and their next album would be “Sgt. Pepper”… And it was another of the building blocks of sound that drew yours truly to love music and have a burning desire to create it myself!