Is the Beatles 1962-66 (the 'red' alb) the only record of theirs that you need?

this is getting more ans than my last thread (on spontaneous music ensemble just in case you're asking).

The 'Red' is better. good tunes with none of the crappy experiments (who wnats to listen to string arrangements: eleanor rigby I always skip).

I want to scream!!!!!

no not anti-geir: I like melody and no melodies too.

The White Album is brilliant.

well most of it. when I taped my copy off the record library I cut off six tracks.

What about Abbey Road and Revolver????

(my six-year-old bro pushed me to list my three fave beatles songs and this is what i came up with. he sadly shook his head at me and asked, "what about 'ticket to ride,' yancey?")

Seriously, all of them. A Hard Day's Night is the most consistent, but their first five are all great "album-albums." And pick up Live at the Star Club while you're at it.

(Cross-post thought: and I agree that "Come On Come On" is great too!)

that's right bro!

Haven't we had this out before, that the Beatles (and esp. 'competitive' Paul) were trying to rip off the Who rather than the Velvets on 'Helter Skelter' (which I'm afraid I love, even now, still - "I've got blisters on my fingers" works for me!

Gd thread.

1) Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds
2) Within You, Without You
3) Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite
4) A Day in the Life

well after no one replying to my spontaneous music ensemble thread I thought I'd get this in instead.

I was joking abt helter skelter. I've no idea as I've hardly have heard any who (I got their live at leeds LP but I've only heard it once).

"Rubber Soul" and "Abbey Road" make great album albums.

I should stay out of this and all related threads, as I'm one of the dying breed on ILX that likes the Beatles, still.

I agree with this in the sense that I think it's completely wrong.

Oh no way, RockSci. It's a very considered opinion. I own all their albums, plus the Anthologies, etc. etc. I'm think my posts probably come off canonically rockist at times, but this is one case where I break from it. Again, 1) it's very Lennon dominated (whom I prefer - see I'm a rockist!), 2) the lyrics are very self-aware, clever ("If I were you /I'd realize that I / Love you more /Than any other guy"; "oh dear what can I do / baby's in black and I'm feeling blue"; all of "I'm a Loser").

"I'll Follow the Sun" just kills me with the "oh well the time has come / and so my love I must go" middle eight part or whatever it's called. "Eight Days A Week" might be my favorite early pop hit of theirs, plus more lyrical fun - "eight days a week". The covers are great: "Mr Moonlight"?! Where in the heck did they find that song? Two Carl Perkins tunes? See, they were totally on top of their game, becoming aware of themselves and their ability, having new experiences; and they made a half brilliant, introspective record, and half rollicking fun.

Plus "What You're Doing" invents The Byrds!

Ringo's hanging from the chandelier and he's got a little song he'd like to sing!

their entire career would have been better as a four-song EP. and i *still* wouldn't listen to it.

Per Custos's question: One is the only Beatles album you need in your car

"You've Got the Hide Your Love Away" is a GREAT song.

I credit all their records, although I've never been able to sustain much enthusiasm for anything post-Magical Mystery Tour.

or just replace it with the Doodles Weaver version, which is completely and utterly CLASSIC

Point by point, then. I prefer pre-psych Beatles to post-psych, but Revolver is still their best, as perfect as any album I've ever heard. The idea that Beatles For Sale, their worst studio album, is all you need is laughable beyond laughter; "Mr. Moonlight" is the worst thing they ever recorded, the covers sound tired generally, the whole thing feels exhausted, which continues into Help! (see title track), and then Rubber Soul figures out what to do with that exhaustion. I don't know how much the Beatles took from Velvets but I know the Stones did--Jagger once told an interviewer that "Stray Cat Blues" was a straight VU rip. I like "Eleanor Rigby" fine but I have a hard time liking it anywhere but after "Taxman" and before "I'm Only Sleeping." Dave Q's non-Beatles Beatles pantheon, I kiss you.

Who else here is an eternal sucker for "Hello Goodbye"?

(y'know what i like about this thread? there is nothing even vaguely approaching a consensus).

I genuinely envy Matos his earnestness--I just need to listen to Revolver again (strong memories of loving "And Your Bird Can Sing" coming to the fore) to come to the same conclusions, I bet.

I guess I should probably have recommended Past Masters because where else can you find "We Can Work It Out" (yum), etc.?

I guess listening to the Beatles records as I am now--and Matos is right, Revolver is incredible--reminds me of a few things. That it isn't "just music" than I'm listening to, ever, since something about the band's elephant status gets in the way--no matter how much I admire and enjoy the music, there is a part of my brain for which it remains...anaesthetic.

It's 2 AM and I hope that makes some sense because I'll be sleeping when/if anyone chooses to respond to it.

Time for bed.

My earnestness, as you kindly referred to it, is a little bewildering to some people, for whom classic rock is the Enemy even when they like some or much of it. (Or more accurately, classic rock thinking, not quite the same as rockism but in the same ballpark.) My critical training (which means something very different than what I was going to call it, "musical training," before I realized that folx like Dan and Jody Beth would probably and rightfully object to the phrase) is odd because the great crux of anti-'60s thought, postpunk/indie and/or punk-as-ideology, mostly passed me by: to grossly oversimplify how it worked, I started w/the Rolling Stone canon and then got into hip-hop, dance music, and pop. I never quite had the "yes, yes, people have been talking about them for fucking ever and GOD am I sick of hearing about it" thing illustrated for me until I was in my early 20s and working in restaurants w/surly cooks. (I, too, was a surly cook, a job I really miss sometimes.) Obviously that's not quite the position you're staking here, but it's a prevalent attitude that comes into how we address the Beatles these days, especially on places like this board. And I don't know, there's probably something wrong with me on that level--I still get excited about the Beatles or Hendrix or whatever institutions I care enough about, in part maybe because it's amazing to me that artistically they haven't shrunk but grown, with "influence" having fuckall to do with it. Maybe that's because I didn't really start hearing them a lot till I was 12 and got into them in a big way. I don't think I'm hearing status, I think I'm hearing music. Maybe I'm kidding myself, but if I am, I prefer it, because I'm enjoying myself a lot more this way.

I wonder whether the time has now come to write about the Beatles on CoM.

Anthology 1 - Well, my favourite bit here is the Morecambe and Wise Show guest appearance. Interesting historically but you could hardly ever replay it for pleasure (5)
Anthology 2 - please can we get rid of the filler backing tracks and put on "Carnival Of Light" please? Otherwise, pretty damn faultless; the multiple takes of "Strawberry Fields" are particularly spellbinding (9)
Anthology 3 - "What's The New Mary Jane" if that's the sort of thing you dig; Macca does "Come And Get It"; Harrison does "Guitar Gently Weeps" solo and medievally (with an ear cocked to Richard Thompson?) and it destroys me. Therefore (9).

Oh, and don't forget Live At The Hollywood Bowl, a number one album in '77, appropriately; the screams become feedback and drown the band out/turn them into the Jesus & Mary Chain (9).

stuff like yesterday makes me ask the following q: Paul McC= why?!

they couldn't do strings from what I've heard so far.

I think "Tomorrow Never Knows" is overrated.

I hope not ameteurist.

its not a 10 tho'. this 'ambition' that is often talked abt is there but the execution is poor at times.

My fave compilation is my old greatest hits LP Hey Jude. Except the back looks different.

I listened to Eleanor Rigby on earphones the other day for the first time in ages and I was pretty amazed at how violin-y the violins sound. String arrangements are usually sucked dry on rock records, but you can really hear the scraping.

I couldn't understand what he was on abt but I'll listen to it again tonight.

Dadaismus I wasn't totally serious but I can't empathise.

dadaismus- that's the first thing i thought when I heard 'love me do' but i heard it on TV and avoided buying this stuff for years. but once i saw the double LP for 2 quid at a bargain sale I really had to check it out (this was abt 6 months ago though I only heard it a few times since then).

its not puerile. in fact its quite powerful.

I'm with Matos, in that I never really got the "they've been talked to death" until I was well into my 20s -- actually, I don't think I heard that until I read ILM. Funny too, because they were really the first band I fell completely in love with.

When I become old and senile, I'm going to be the guy who accuses all the houligans who dare to say they hate the Beatles, or say they're overrated, of being no-good whipper-snappers who need a good kick in the pants.

I'd miss "Only a Northern Song" considerably more (although a better version of that one is on "Anthology" anyway)

Except for A Hard Day's Night, none of their albums are especially consistent and I agree with Matos that the covers on For Sale are pretty yuck (except for "Words of Love"). But the best tracks on that album ("Every Little Thing," "Eight Days a Week," "No Reply," "What You're Doing") destroy anything on Revolver (which is still a good record).

There are new versions of this and its blue twin coming out supposedly. Can’t make head or tail of quite why though.

yeah it's a weird one, they are also expanding them both with more tracks, presumably to just make them more comprehensive 'best ofs' (which is fine I guess; I'm not buying it, might use it as a good streaming playlist though).

This is also where Now and Then (the final threetles recording) is winding up, which is odd since it certainly did not exist in any form in the timeframe of the titles of these comps.

Now and Then allegedly finally being announced this week, and released early November. Or announced next week. Or the following.

word on hoffman forums from an insider is that there are going to be like a trillion different variations of these as well, presumably to maximise profit. dumb, but unsurprising.

A different cover variant for every NBA team.

You don't need to buy ANY of their albums. Just tape about five hours of a typical "oldies" radio station. You're bound to hear pretty much every song they ever did!

I'm sorry I missed quality posting like this.

Now and Then officially announced tomorrow morning US time, release on the 3rd.

Red and Blue reissue the week after I believe with added tracks including Now and Then for some dumb reason.

New track lists

1962-1966
1. Love Me Do
2. Please Please Me
3. I Saw Her Standing There
4. Twist and Shout
5. From Me to You
6. She Loves You
7. I Want to Hold Your Hand
8. This Boy
9. All My Loving
10. Roll Over Beethoven
11. You Really Got a Hold on Me
12. Can't Buy Me Love
13. You Can't Do That
14. A Hard Day's Night
15. And I Love Her
16. Eight Days a Week
17. I Feel Fine
18. Ticket to Ride
19. Yesterday

1. Help!
2. You've Got to Hide Your Love Away
3. We Can Work It Out
4. Day Tripper
5. Drive My Car
6. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
7. Nowhere Man
8. Michelle
9. In My Life
10. If I Needed Someone
11. Girl
12. Paperback Writer
13. Eleanor Rigby
14. Yellow Submarine
15. Taxman
16. Got to Get You into My Life
17. I'm Only Sleeping
18. Here, There and Everywhere
19. Tomorrow Never Knows

1967-1970
1. Strawberry Fields Forever
2. Penny Lane
3. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
4. With a Little Help From My Friends
5. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds
6. Within You, Without You
7. A Day in the Life
8. All You Need Is Love
9. I Am the Walrus
10. Hello, Goodbye
11. The Fool on the Hill
12. Magical Mystery Tour
13. Lady Madonna
14. Hey Jude
15. Revolution

1. Back in the U.S.S.R.
2. Dear Prudence
3. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
4. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
5. Glass Onion
6. Blackbird
7. Hey Bulldog
8. Get Back
9. Don't Let Me Down
10. The Ballad of John and Yoko
11. Old Brown Shoe
12. Here Comes the Sun
13. Come Together
14. Something
15. Octopus's Garden
16. Oh! Darling
17. I Want You (She's So Heavy)
18. Let It Be
19. Across the Universe
20. I Me Mine
21. The Long and Winding Road
22. Now and Then

Some awkward choices, they clearly tried to put in more George songs but the additions weren't necessarily his best, and there are some covers don't really belong there even though they're really good. (The one Motown cover I would have added is "Money," easily the one they did that substantially improves on the original, and that's not included.) "Hey Bulldog" is a baffling addition - if you REALLY needed to added an exclusive track from the Yellow Submarine soundtrack, George's "It's All Too Much" would be the one, and strangely that's passed over for other, lesser George songs.

But the two additional songs from Please Please Me are perfect, they were always major omissions. Revolver was egregious underrepresented, so those additions are all welcome. Same with "The White Album." If they're going to add "Now and Then" as bait, might as well add "Free As a Bird" and "Real Love" - anyone who really wants any of the 'reunion' tracks should be rewarded with all three in one place.

Still no « rain »…

Gotta keep that sweetass Past Masters gravy train rollin'...

Assuming they did want to honor some of the old A/B magic by now including..."This Boy" and "You Can't Do That". (I like the latter, but still would trade it for any of the other Lennon Hard Days trax...or "Things We Said Today".)

It's funny how they can expand these like they're doing and <still> miss several radio staples and lesser chart hits & flips. "Matchbox" was a US Top 20 Hit!

Not one of my favorites, but "Birthday" is kind of a massive hit in its own way. I would've added the Abbey Road medley but obviously that would probably take away a lot of sales from the already-heavily-represented album.

It’s always a bit of a mind blower to me that You Won’t See Me is overlooked with these things.

I do recall I’m Only Sleeping coming very high in the official ILX Beatles tracks poll many years ago. Like, in the Top 5 or something.

Disagree with birdistheword about it being a quirky selection, particularly on George. Taxman and Within You Without You feel like obvious picks: I'm not the biggest fan of the former but when I think about omissions from original it's his most famous one; the latter his greatest achievement. If I Needed Someone more of an arguable pick but I love it.

If I were swapping out Roll Over Beethoven for another cover, for balance (and personal taste) I'd probably go for a non-rocker, a girl group cover like Please Mr Postman or Baby It's You. But that's a minor thing.

Hey Bulldog is a riot: I think there's a widely held feeling that it was tucked away on YS so a perfect chance to shine here. I think It's All Too Much wears its deep cut clothes well - leave it where it is.

xp "i'm only sleeping" was top 10 in the poll here yeah, so was "hey bulldog". both are great

some of these additions make perfect sense but others are pretty odd. like, where is "rain"? "getting better" and "good day sunshine" are weird omissions in terms of being ubiquitous from radio play? surely there are better harrison tracks to add than "taxman" and "within you without you", what about "i want to tell you" and "long long long"? why "glass onion" of all things, why not "helter skelter" or "julia"?

"Hey Bulldog" is a baffling addition

huh? this is one of the very best beatles songs.

Yes, it's miles better than "Oh Darling", for instance.

I'd missed that Oh! Darling was in there. Now that is a baffling inclusion.

"Hell Bulldog" has one of my favorite Beatles piano licks.

Very thought-provoking title/opening post! Would be interesting if that user could post again now to show whether their thoughts have changed :)

who is this for? can't people just make their own playlists? haven't people been doing their own CDR mixes since the 90s? couldn't the brand benefit from a bit of a breather for a while or does it require a constant stream of (mostly recycled) content to survive?

some of the selections feel more like "this is important to the narrative" or "this facet of their style needs representation" than "these are the best songs we could fit onto 4 CDs" which is fine I guess but on that note they should have one or both of "happiness" or "money" since almost everything else is just a verse/chorus or verse/bridge situation

I guess they want to be faithful to the original comps for some reason (which fall off rapidly around disc 3 or so afair) but I also would have thought helter skelter's reputation has grown well beyond those of many of the original inclusions and that song strikes me as the most glaring omission here

the one "new" song thing feels like such old school greatest hits marketing but I guess most of the people still buying this shit are the same people that trick worked on back in the day?

Agree it's of little interest. I think some are excited by new mixes of Rubber Soul songs but yeah, if you're not a completist it's all a bit pointless.

i could understand putting out new greatest hits comps just for the sake of it but even where they've ended up with it feels a bit odd idk

i figure full-on rubber soul super deluxe will be coming before far too long with the new mixes anyway?

ilxors in questioning who'd be interested in endlessly recycling Beatles content shocker

sure but there are causes for concern with some of the frantic ~legacy building~ going in recent years especially - paul and ringo have basically embalmed themselves already

it feels like they want to wrap the whole thing up and put it on a pedestal so that everyone worship it in the approved way - just at the point that new generations are finally starting to say interesting things about the beatles which trouble many aspects of the beatle party line. the whole thing feels a little reactionary

unnecessary snark aside i'm just saying there's always been and apparently always will be a market for repackaging Beatles content and as long as there's money to be made there'll be people doing that

if boomers have so much money to spare how come they aren't paying my rent

They're collecting it.

Actually if there's a non-weedy stereo mix of Revolution I'm very into that. As something to stream, that is.

... "Octopus's Garden"?

https://www.thebeatles.com/announcement

5: Revolution (2023 Mix)

😀

I wish these were just new compilations, rather than masquerading as Red and Blue. Those compilations are fine for what they are - a snapshot at what a Beatles best-of was expected to look like in 1973. The names and artworks needn't be revived.

Now and Then not as a CD single? Boo

It's been a long time since I heard the tape my parents used to put on at dinnertime, but I am pretty sure the blue one has the significantly better "Let it Be" guitar solo

I also think “hey bulldog” is one of the best Beatles songs.

It has always irked me that magical mystery tour/yellow submarine were not a proper album, and were there feeling like leftovers.

If you pair both, get rid of the instrumentals and add strawberry fields/penny lane you get one of the best Beatles records and imho a more complete sonic concept than Sgt Pepper’s

the single mix? that's the worse solo IMO (xpost)

Moka OTM

Oh forgot strawberry fields and penny lane are on magical mystery tour… wait were those always there or were they added in the reissues?

they've always been there on the LP

British EP is side one of the US LP (albeit sequenced differently). LP side two is the SFF/Penny Lane and All You Need Is Love/Rich Man singles + Hello Goodbye

Always thought of them as a standalone single with no proper album release. Idk why I forgot about them in there but this makes the case of MMT > Sgt stronger

Oh I love the “baby you’re a rich man” groove too, sad to see it missing but I guess it’s not one of their highlights.

they should try putting a fucking beatles for sale song on red if they’re gonna add anything. still a perfect comp whatever

yeah srsly -- "Baby's in Black" and "No Reply" should've made it.

It's been a long time since I heard the tape my parents used to put on at dinnertime, but I am pretty sure the blue one has the significantly better "Let it Be" guitar solo

― Breakfast at Tiffani Amber Thiessen's (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, 26 October 2023 14:29 (forty-five minutes ago)

The blue has the leslie organ-fed solo, which is nice but watery; the LIB album has the stinging rocky solo which I think is much preferable.

Anyhoo back to “hey bulldog” I don’t see why it shouldn’t be included, the yellow submarine ost is def worth a mention in the Beatles story and that song is the def highlight in there. Lennon’s performance is great I love love that sort of blues snarl when he sings the chorus.

Despite having a lot of Beatles cds, I went a long time before I heard Hey Bulldog. Probably heard their version for the first time when the albums were reissued last. I saw Ween around 2006 and they covered it. I thought it was an awesome new Ween song.

absolutely agree that Hey Bulldog is one of the best unheralded Beatles tracks (like And Your Bird Can Sing)

they should try putting a fucking beatles for sale song on red if they’re gonna add anything. still a perfect comp whatever

― ivy., Thursday, October 26, 2023 9:09 AM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah srsly -- "Baby's in Black" and "No Reply" should've made it.

― hat trick of trashiness (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, October 26, 2023 9:15 AM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Adding to the absurdity is that in expanding the 62 minute original Red album to two full-length CDs, they have almost 100 minutes to play with, and they still can't fit in these 2 minute songs.

why "glass onion" of all things

probably the movie, sadly

The Walrus Was Benoit

one of the best unheralded Beatles tracks (like And Your Bird Can Sing)

who are the losers who aren't heralding And Your Bird Can Sing???

why "glass onion" of all things

probably the movie, sadly

Plus it's awesome ... and, to Left's point, it more or less sums up the Beatles' mordant self-hagiography

Despite having a lot of Beatles cds, I went a long time before I heard Hey Bulldog. Probably heard their version for the first time when the albums were reissued last. I saw Ween around 2006 and they covered it. I thought it was an awesome new Ween song.

Crucial twitter thread about the new track:

Absolutely cannot wait to hear this song which Paul McCartney said George Harrison refused to keep working on because it was "fucking rubbish".

— Marc Moss-Jones (@kip_saunders) October 26, 2023

pic.twitter.com/A8HNmW1fbe

— Marc Moss-Jones (@kip_saunders) October 26, 2023

harrison basically said he wasn't that into it, but he was also a grumpy fuck through that entire period and largely only did anthology because he lost so much money in the handmade films disaster, so I don't really care what his opinion of shit was.

he deliberately fucked things up like edited 'you know my name' on anthology and torpedoed releasing the full helter skelter...just dumb shit. I like him but he was a curmudgeon

he was usually right tho

damn that twitter thread is probably the most annoying thing i've ever seen on the internet

he was exactly wrong w/r/t his anthology decisions.

Wait people don’t like “and your bird can sing”? I think it was the first Beatles song I heard that made me interested in exploring their music.

he was exactly wrong w/r/t his anthology decisions.

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm)

https://i.imgur.com/eDufnye.gif

Wait people don’t like “and your bird can sing”? I think it was the first Beatles song I heard that made me interested in exploring their music.

― ✖✖✖ (Moka)

One of my favorite bridges and one of my favorite Harrisolos.

Going just by the demo I’d understand why Harrison would have thought it sounded like crap and not worth the time to salvage it.

I believe he wasn’t speaking ill of the songwriting itself but of the rough quality of the recording.

I don't think there's any suggestion that people don't like And Your Bird Can Sing (except for Giles Martin and the Continuity Beatles apparently not liking it more than Oh! Darling)

One of my favorite bridges and one of my favorite Harrisolos.

― hat trick of trashiness (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

YES!

I think there may be some personal investment for Paul in the song that George didn’t share, as it’s said that John’s last words with Paul by phone were reportedly “Think about me every now and then, old friend.”

"Don't think about pissy George"

lol

"and your bird can sing" is my favorite beatles song

yeah I wasn't implying that people don't like And Your Bird Can Sing. I just mean it doesn't get the attention I think it should given it's one of the best things they ever recorded.

the demo of now and then is definitely in rougher shape than Real Love and Free as a Bird, but I'm still pretty excited to hear what they were able to do with it now. I have no problem with McCartney basically using a cleaned up sample to construct a new song around it and that MAL demixing tech sounds pretty amazing. Purists might balk but I don't care.

i'm not expecting to be utterly blown away but if it's as good as the other two tracks I'll be happy. Those two songs have turned out to be major earworms for me; I don't think of them are core Beatles tracks, but I like them and they circle around my head an awful lot.

Circling back, it's sort of insane to me that "Tomorrow Never Knows" wasn't on Red's tracklist from the get-go

"Real Love" is a Good Song, "Free as a Bird" not so much.

Great video though

I guess it would have spoiled the vibe of the red album as the one your Daily Express reading uncle liked.

yeah, to be sure, it would feel way more of a place opening up the refigured Blue

I mean, if it were up to me I'd have Revolution 9 on blue as well.

Beatles compilations are weird, it feels like watching a CNN documentary or something. I just never listened to anything other than the albums + past masters

and anthologies, don’t know the bbc sessions well

The only Beatles albums you need are Ballads and A Collection of Beatles Oldies.

Forgot Hey Jude

And the Christmas records set

Has this being linked to https://people.com/the-beatles-announce-new-song-now-and-then-8382741

red and blue is how i got into the beatles, via cassettes in my family's ford taurus during road trips

i was 7, maybe 8

Mostly excited for the remixed Red album based on this: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/beatles-now-and-then-1234862777/

I have a longtime interest in the crazy world that is the Beatles' compilation discography.

They've almost never got it right, ever. '1' and Love are the two most obvious (conceptual) successes imo. They fucked up the roll-out of Anthology royally. But I love Real Love and even Free as a Bird, esp if paired with the videos.

I'm not sure what to make of more remixes tbh. I think my tolerance ran out after Abbey Road (I did hear Revolver and enjoyed Taxman but couldn't get too excited otherwise, especially given how terrible the She Said She Said mix was).

they were pretty good with Tony Sheridan but after that I kind of check out

I enjoyed You'll Be Mine and Cayenne but lost interest for years until they released Plastic Beetle and Peter Blake 2000. Although I did love the movie medley.

red and blue is how i got into the beatles, via cassettes in my family's ford taurus during road trips

― is he disgruntled adrian? (voodoo chili),

^^ This. These albums were public library staples.

I love that the RS article is so badly written that it implies the new track uses a vocal isolated by a microphone in a flower pot.

sure but there are causes for concern with some of the frantic ~legacy building~ going in recent years especially - paul and ringo have basically embalmed themselves already

it feels like they want to wrap the whole thing up and put it on a pedestal so that everyone worship it in the approved way - just at the point that new generations are finally starting to say interesting things about the beatles which trouble many aspects of the beatle party line. the whole thing feels a little reactionary

I mean I know it's all for holiday shopping purpose maximization, but I like to think the Beatles camp purposely waited until after the Stones album dropped in a, "no, fuck you, WE are getting the last word".

i like "oldies station Beatles".
when i hear that stuff on the radio it makes me think of the old display case at The Colony on 50th and Broadway with all the vtg Beatlemania merch next to bobblehead dolls of The Three Stooges.

John actually had a low opinion of "And Your Bird Can Sing" ("another of my throwaways ... fancy paper around an empty box") but I love it. (Elvis Costello's a fan - it was one of a handful of covers he did on his glorious 'The Return Of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook' tour.)

He didn't have a really high opinion of "Hey Bulldog" either, believing it was "a good sounding record that means nothing" and recalling his embarrassment that the first time Yoko ever saw him at work was recording that song. I think it's fine, a fun number that would wipe the floor with any kids' song of that era (and there's even a modern day children's animation video that covers it), but to me, it sounds really slight and inconsequential next to their best-known hits.

i can kinda get lennon not caring for "and your bird can sing" because what really makes it is the guitar line, which mccartney and harrison apparently wrote together

One thing I love about "Hey Bulldog" is the early 2000s clip where they realised the "Lady Madonna" promo was actually from footage of recording this song and recut it to match.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4vbJQ-MrKo
I can't think of any earlier clip of them actually making a song (aside from "All You Need Is Love", kinda).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdrb1vFTtJI

actually that's later

I mean, I wouldn't have Your Bird Can Sing either. If I had to rank Revolver it would be in the lower half. Fortunately I don't have to.

I still cannot get over the stupidity of the new Blue Album and how they've bound themselves to the same opening tracks as 50 years ago so they can't just shuffle most of those White Album cuts onto CD1 and evened out the track counts on both discs. No one in 2023 should be expected to care. Besides which, Beatles Oldies is in many ways the more important compilation anyway but it hasn't been seen since 1987.

Lennon said all kinds of dumb shit about his beatles work in that Wenner interview, I take it with a grain of salt.

the running order of the blue album on CD is one of the reasons why this entire release got delayed by several months, apparently. when they added tracks they didn't do it in a chronological way (which is how the LP is sequenced), but then changed their mind and went back to get the CDs fixed before they were produced. it was too late and too expensive to redo the LPs.

I'd like to hear this kind of sonic clean-up on the Beatles' contemporaries whose records weren't that well recorded in the first place - the Stones, the Kinks, even someone like the Pretty Things.

woah woah woah no way dogg

I have to say I’ve always found the album design for red/blue very lazy and hastily put together and wished they had re-designed it for this reissue.

Also not having all the songs in chronological order as the first time around irks the hell out of me.

they are chronological on the CDs I believe, that's part of why the whole thing got delayed.

I liked the red and blue covers - it does put the Get Back cover to good use instead of letting it go to waste.

Peter Jackson's documentary up of the making of Now and Then:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APJAQoSCwuA

the quality of the isolated vocal is pretty amazing. I'm quite sure I'll love the finished product here, I'm very easy to please with Beatles material.

obv a missed opportunity to apply this same treatment to Free as a Bird and Real Love, though I understand why they didn't (not wanting to detract from the attention this song warrants). There are murmurs that Anthology is being looked at again so maybe as part of that. I suspect that by the time that gets finished, McCartney and Ringo may not be around anymore though

I get it, but still kinda lol at that NASA control center looking ass setup.

And talking about their bleeding edge machine-learning technology while showing what look like FabFilter EQ plugins

The Anthology footage there looks really clean, wonder if he's been working on a reissue of that? Didn't he hint at something in the works when Get Back came out?

Tho, to be fair, that gigantic screen with the waveform is kind of what I picture whenever I see a H0ffman forum type rushing to post the DR scores for the new Styx live album.

I heard Pete Best is supposedly being involved in the similarly supposed revamped Anthology project. I really hope so.

Yes, he gave some footage of them in leathers to Peter Jackson for the Now and Then video. Earliest known of the band.

https://www.thebeatles.com/read-what-peter-jackson-says-about-making-beatles-last-music-video

The Anthology footage there looks really clean, wonder if he's been working on a reissue of that? Didn't he hint at something in the works when Get Back came out?

that was the music video for Now and Then, which he directed.

As Jordan says, great advert for FabFilter Pro-Q, I guess they didn't want to show the GUI for Jackson's stem software. It sounds like the track doesn't have that slappy Jeff Lynne drum sound, thank god.

yeah Lynne hasn't been involved in it at all beyond whatever he may have helped do in the 94 sessions, which I suspect was not much during the tracking stage.

For this he receives the 'Additional producer' tag.

It's hard to say for sure, but when they played George's acoustic guitar track, it sounded like it could've had Lynne's usual sound for acoustic guitar (which he loved to pile on to a lot of his productions) - basically thin out any lower frequencies, maybe add a lot of compression, etc. Just listen to his stuff with Tom Petty, he produced some stuff with him where it was mostly just a strumming acoustic guitar. I'll guess we'll know when they release the single, but regardless, when they played John's isolated vocal, that was really fucking cool.

There's gonna be so much of this kind of thing in the future, Halfway's comment upthread I think is pretty prescient.

Especially now that the cleaning-up end of things has finally been almost completely solved, in my work every day I use two simple 'Waves' Plugins ($29 apiece) that do really quite remarkable things with noise/reverb reduction

Idk exactly what Jackson's software is, that he's clutching so tightly, but it's reasonable to assume that they've gone much further down the route of managing to correctly separate instruments with a complex set of shared frequencies.

But the next thing coming down the wire is the ability to recreate/simulate lost (or never properly captured) frequencies, it's already here in the form of a couple of things that came out this year, and they're pretty decent but still limited.

When they have that licked in a few years, however, it'll be game on and the record companies will jump on this as the latest way to make us buy the same music. We'll all be given the opportunity to listen to Robert Johnson in crystal clear Dolby Atmos and the Hoffman forums will implode.

that recent Coltrane / Dolphy album that came out this year, Evenings at the Village Gate...that's the sort of thing I would love to hear this technology applied to. not that that album didn't sound good given it's source, but image being able to really separate those instruments and balance them out with a proper mix. There are loads of live and archive recordings like this that would really benefit.

Jackson has said he wants to do the Beatles Hamburg tapes as well.

It also extends into TV/Film/Radio archives too, spoken word is much easier to work on, in this way, than music.

The Hamburg tapes would be perfect, I forgot about those - I honestly think one of the great live albums in rock could've been had if that recording was better. The main problem is the vocals are almost impossible to hear. It's going to be tougher because you're dealing with more instruments across a wider range in a room with even worse acoustics, but given how well the Lennon cassette demo worked out, I'm sure a massive improvement can be made.

re: the pete best tape, it's rumored to be this which has been out for a while now; but Jackson did say it hadn't been seen...so I don't know

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Lwh6BJGyw

Where exactly can we hear this at 2pm GMT? All the streaming services?

yep

https://open.spotify.com/track/4vziJcnB2Qyi9o4nIRUeN7?si=e8e07619efb74908

Definitely better than the Anthology songs, imo.

well, that's about as good as it could have been given the source. surprised to a degree how little mccartney actually sings on it. they really went with a full lennon vocal through the whole song.

Yeah, I was surprised by that as well.

McCartney's slide part is...okay? Shows how singular George's playing was.

It’s interesting as an artefact, and the heavily melancholic mood of the original song is developed well whilst avoiding going completely over the top.

Not sure about the strings though tbh.

My third listen now. This is gorgeous.

I like the strings.

george's slide parts were generally higher on the neck.

Regarding strings, I was wondering what is meant when it says that Giles Martin provided a string arrangement like George Martin did previously. Does he really create and write it himself? Is he really that musically accomplished? Or does he subcontract it to a specialist to do it, approve it, and then manage the process of how it's recorded?

string arrangement is really great, imo. feels a bit more like a john solo song than a beatles song, tho i could see it slotting onto disc 2 of the white album

Better than “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love”, but that isn’t saying too much

better than love me do

the new Love Me Do remix is actual shit

ben foster is also credited for the string arrangement alongside martin & mccartney. they did a decent job at coming up with a george martin-esque string part

i don't think it's as good as "real love" or "free as a bird" (both of which are just fine) but it does feel about as good as it could have been? i agree it feels more like a solo lennon song but that comes back to the tune itself, it's just a mode of his that was far more common in his solo career.

Spotify chose to play Au Contraire by They Might Be Giants immediately afterward and I wished Paul & Ringo had dropped a cover version of it as an unhyped b-side

new stereo "love me do" is silly, it's just ended up hollow

I have had it up to here with Beatles remasters

i liked the previous new stereo mixes generally - the abbey road one is the definitive version imo and the rest are all at least major improvements over the original stereo mixes, but this "love me do" just feels like they're showing off the tech (which is genuinely impressive) now

It's fine, I don't hate it. I've made imaginary post-Beatles LPs and it will be a nice thing to include on the final one.

Spotify (which I don't really use) next played me "All You Need Is Love?", then "I Want To Hold Your Hand" then Dolly Parton's "Islands In The Stream" before I turned it off.

there's a little run on the strings that really recalls that bit in Carry that Weight just before it reprises You Never Give Me Your Money...probably the most 'beatle-esque' part of the song

lol my algorithms cued the Blue Nile and T.I. after this lol -- I've been seen.

I wasn’t sure if ‘Love Me Do’ had really lost its original energy in the new mix or if it was a lingering mood from ‘Now and Then’ affecting me.

as a lennon solo song it's one of the better ones (because it has a good melody and a sincere sentiment, precious things from him in the 70s) as a beatles song it's probably middle of the pack which is pretty good going (after one listen, maybe it will grow or wear on me later)

how come paul's bass and vocal are mixed so modestly here? is that an overcorrection in response to (past or anticipated) criticism or something?

I loved the Sgt Pepper remix, disiked most of the White Album one (how dare they fuck up Long Long Long/remove 'pleh'/other stupid things), thought Abbey Road was alright, ignored Let It Be/ATMP and liked maybe 20% of the Revolver one (which really bottoms out on the awful She Said She Said).

love me do sounds especially dopey after this track I wish they'd cleaned up "in spite of all the danger" for the b-side instead

xps Love Me Do is completely energy-sapped here yes

Had this been completed in the 90s, this would have been on Anthology 3, right?

so if Paul is playing the slide part, what is george contributing? I thought it sounded like in the 12 minute film that Paul was saying that he was trying to channel george via the slide, and so he is…but what is george from 1994 doing?

can they make the early albums sound fuller and richer without losing any of the energy? is that possible, on a technologically or musically?

also why are the mono mixes so damn obscure they still sound way better than giles' dicking around

xps

scratch "on a.."

Just acoustic guitar I believe

I now wait patiently for the music video tomorrow. FAAB and Real Love probably work best with their videos, so...

love me do remix sounds great to me though I prefer the mono; but given that they did this from a needledrop I'm really impressed.

(this is the ringo version of the song, which may be why some people feel it lacks energy ... the andy white version has tambourine in it and is a little more jaunty)

Spotify gave me "Please Please Me", "Live Forever" (lol), "All of The Day and All of The Night", "Vicious" (Lou Reed), and "Down On The Corner" afterwards before I peaced out.

I get it, I'm boring!

New song is nice. Kind of clear there wasn't much to work with. Will sound wonderful at CVS in two years.

It's decent, in a way kinda modest, given all the directions they could have gone in.

I feel like should have been sparer in the first verse and had more development in the second, the way the strings hang along the piano for the first, but they wait till the solo.

Without going Hoffman, the mix choices are curious to me, like they kept it quite dark overall because there's not much high end in Lennon's vocals.

but what is george from 1994 doing?

This post gives the same kind of slight jolt as in the promo film where Paul says it took almost a quarter of a century to wait until the right moment to tackle ‘Now and Then’ again.

it's okay; i'll probably never listen to it again

Had this been completed in the 90s, this would have been on Anthology 3, right?

Yes, it was planned to lead off the album like the other two new songs led off the earlier records.

I don't like it, but it sadly captures everything that I don't like about the reunion while paradoxically how much I wanted them to happen despite a sober critical realization of what it would produce.

When Dave Kehr originally reviewed the Let It Be film, he said it was "a domestic squabble that somehow touches history," and I think that nails something about these reunions. In some weird way, it's like trying to patch up a relationship or a marriage that ended for good reason, and yet you more than welcome the possibility of reconciliation even though things have clearly changed too much. (Maybe it's more fitting when you think of it from the view of children wanting their divorced parents to make up, but I think it kind of works from an ex-partner perspective.)

I love the Beatles, they're likely my very favorite band along with the Velvet Underground - my adulation is really focused on their work, and that plays out in these recordings. I've always had mixed feelings about their solo careers, which produced a substantial amount that I love, but also far more that I dislike or find extremely frustrating. I miss hearing how their talents work together and how they play off each other - there's no better example of chemistry and how four guys produce music that's so much greater than the sum of their recorded contributions. So on the reunion, it's wonderful to finally hear George playing his solos again (the best thing about these reunions) in the context of John's song or Paul's musical contributions, and to hear Paul arrange parts around something John wrote, and to hear all their voices together...all the stuff that happened decades earlier that you never thought would happen again. But it's also not nearly as good, and there's always going to be that sad paradox - on the one hand, it's great they're reconciled, it's great seeing them physically together and hearing them together, but it's just kidding yourself that they're just going to make music on the level of Abbey Road.

And there's no getting around the fact that John is long gone and this is straining to make something happen that isn't 100% really happening. And when I say "straining," I don't mean just the effort of making these recordings work - if you're a huge Beatles fan, yeah, you absolutely wish the band could be somehow reunited with John when he's been dead for so long. "Real Love" works the best - at minimum, I could see that being a good cover of a John song. (Like going to a good reunion show where the band plays one of their member's solo hits and it actually sounds really good.) But "Free As a Bird" feels too much like a patched up work meant to fill out something incomplete, and this new one feels too much like a solo John number that's been dressed up to be a Beatles number.

The chorus of the new one drives everything home - I would really, really love to hear a chorus to a brand-new song made out of John and Paul singing harmony again. I guess technically this is it, bu it sounds like a sonic mess, where John's vocal sounds garbled and Paul lays a vocal over it, clearly sounding much, much older. In the '90s, it was close enough to remind you of how they sounded together in the '60s, especially with George singing too. But now it just sounds sad, a clear reminder that those days are loooong gone and ain't happening again. Processing the shit out of everything with AI fairy dust can only do so much.

f you're a huge Beatles fan, yeah, you absolutely wish the band could be somehow reunited with John when he's been dead for so long.

I'm not being cynical or trying to take the wind outta your sails but no

I'm sticking with my Purple Chick rips, so done with this nonsense

A cynical, though probably not entirely incorrect, take I've seen from a few people is that this is a way for the "see, AI is good actually? let's embrace it" narrative to be pushed through. Which has some chilling implications and dampens my enthusiasm slightly.

I'm not being cynical or trying to take the wind outta your sails but no

Well, I meant like wishing nuclear weapons would all magically disappear in an instant - of course you want that to happen, but no one in their right mind spends their days yearning for it as if it could happen.

wasn't the AI there to hone in on the existing vocal? It didn't create a new one.

xp and reunited as in having four lifelong friends being together again, not in the sense that "oh boy! now we're going to hear REAL music again!"

and correct about the AI

Yeah, I personally don't think this is a bad example of AI's potential use, I just think the layperson will just hear the "AI" part and make assumptions. I've already read a lot of incorrect things about this song being "completely AI" on social media.

I like the "Walrus" redux thing the string section does in the last ten seconds, I wish they'd used that motif in other parts of the song.

Anyway, it's okay. Of all three of the songs, Real Lover is a keeper, it's wonderful IMO.

*Love

yeah that was due to mccartney not talking clearly earlier this summer. AI tech was only used to understand the difference between Lennon's vocal and the piano on the demo. that's it. That's a perfectly legitimate use of this technology.

yeah a PR failure

mad how Paul was quick to clarify what he meant at the time and yet this still goes on

Dropping my son off at school this morning I heard the announcer say, "later today we get a new Beatles song, made with AI". Which isn't technically incorrect, but can leave a very different impression as to how it was used.

xp He'd probably get in trouble, but as a joke, I wish Paul played that angle up.

Remember what George Harrison did to Phil Collins? Collins asked to hear his bongo part from All Things Must Pass, so as a joke Harrison got someone to record a really shitty bongo track and sent that - for a while Collins thought it was real and was extremely humiliated until Harrison told him after Collins apologized for it.

The chorus of the new one drives everything home - I would really, really love to hear a chorus to a brand-new song made out of John and Paul singing harmony again. I guess technically this is it, bu it sounds like a sonic mess, where John's vocal sounds garbled and Paul lays a vocal over it, clearly sounding much, much older.

Very much this. I'm honestly kind of shocked how messy the chorus sounds. I was mostly enjoying the song until the first chorus, but that really took me out of it. I even tried to imagine it was intentional, like they were trying to make it sound like a pub singalong or something, but that didn't help.

I think there should be a distinction between created by AI and enhanced/cleaned with AI, but people will just drop it because it’s a buzzword and will make people talk about that aspect of the song.

The song itself is ok.

stem extraction technology has existed for a while too i don't know why this is suddenly such a big deal

well duh i guess if you just say "AI" in a headline now it's clicks probably

I must say I like the concept a lot. The idea of John’s young voice being then and Paul’s old voice being now, like conversation thru a time machine. It’s simple but sort of beautiful.

FWIW, the best thing I can say about the chorus is that the sonic mess emphasizes the sense of loss in that lyric - "I want you to return to me." They couldn't be more distant - one's dead, and the vocal tracks themselves are decades apart.

I have had it up to here with Beatles remasters

a very tender sendoff to their career and friendship. Musically I want to like it more than I do but it’s great for what it is.

exciting to hear them get back to basics with this one: just 4 guys in 4 different rooms in different cities across different decades and some guys are dead and one is part computer, playing rock music

for serious though i'm also in the camp of liking this quite a bit until those chorus vocals come in. not surprised that paul is down in the mix, he sounds really rough in that register with the voice he has now

So far it's my favorite Traveling Willburys song

No, that was "Real Love."

Lol, OEO and AtG.

After 27 years Real Love is finally secured as the best of the three.

these three post Lennon death songs are dirges, so swept up in longing and loss, and yet so much of the band's music had a spring in its step, so it'd be nice if one of these songs had more of that quality…and with the two 95/96 songs, the signature element beyond John's ghostly demo vocal is George's playing…his solo on "Real Love" is fantastic, and redolent of who he had become by 1995, whereas Paul and Ringo are trying to sound as much like their 60s selves as they can…

yeah, they could've given this an 'Obaladee' skaffle beat and perked it up a bit

(think I just coined a word ^^^^)

nd with the two 95/96 songs, the signature element beyond John's ghostly demo vocal is George's playing…his solo on "Real Love" is fantastic, and redolent of who he had become by 1995,

yeah, it's a terse, stringent thing -- I love it.

Man I would love to hear those two 95 singles stripped of the Lynne frosting. Even, if possible, dig the Lennon vocals out of those tapes more cleanly, using the new tech, and remix the whole.

exciting to hear them get back to basics with this one: just 4 guys in 4 different rooms in different cities across different decades and some guys are dead and one is part computer, playing rock music

― waste of compute (One Eye Open)

Lol

Even, if possible, dig the Lennon vocals out of those tapes more cleanly, using the new tech, and remix the whole.

This is pretty much what the 2015 1+ mixes were. I'm not sure I can imagine them being usefully cleaned up further imo, they were risking the endearing drowsiness a bit as is (the piano intro to the 2015 Real Love in particular finds it gone completely).

This isn't even as close to as good as Handle With Care

I didn't realise the 1995 singles were remixed for 1+ - will check them out! Didn't find a lot to enjoy for Now and Then, the verse melody is pretty good, but the temptation to put Every Beatle Thing on Every Part of the Track was clearly too great.

the remixes on 1+ are awful, they mysteriously used different vocal and guitar tracks; the vocal track is alright but it's a noticeably worse guitar take. no idea what the thinking was there.

I didn't realise the 1995 singles were remixed for 1+ - will check them out! Didn't find a lot to enjoy for Now and Then, the verse melody is pretty good, but the temptation to put Every Beatle Thing on Every Part of the Track was clearly too great.

really? I mean IMO it could have gone way further. I think it's pretty restrained, particularly compared to Free as a Bird (I'm going to note that I like both Bird and Real Love a lot). It really does sound more like a solo Lennon recording with the others helping out sparingly, to me anyway. They could have recorded a lengthier, more beatle-y coda but didn't.

omg - or even a 'When We Was Fab' "indian' style string section coda at the end.

yeah. I mean I partly wish they had done that (ala Free as a Bird, where the coda is one of the best parts) but also, I'm kind of glad they didn't.

the thing about the AI-proof-of-concept possibility is that's it's utter nonsense to say the vocal couldn't have been teased away from the piano using just good old pre-AI EQ. I've seen mastering engineers make audible thuds just go away, and they're still technically there on the track, you just can't hear them anymore. Using AI here really is a "why don't we do this instead of the way we already had" thing imo.

it's just some kind of mastering software gussied up by calling it AI

I don't know. Taking away an isolated thud vs. a constant musical instrument in a totally different operation. When you do that kind of thing solely with EQ you get that weird underwater effect (like Lennon's vocals on the 1995 songs).

yeah, yr right I'm sure. idk the whole ONLY NOW WAS THIS POSSIBLE framing feels like sales which is so dumb. they do not actually need to sell this thing, it will sell itself

Joan otm

I think this is just OK. And I agree with whoever said upthread that it sounds a lot more like a mid-70s solo Lennon track than a Beatles track - a sort of b grade Number Nine Dream.

These methods are far more than just EQ. They're pulling out components which completely overlap in the frequency domain, using correlation with other frequency bands. EQ, no matter how great, can only boost or minimise frequency bands as a whole. This software is separating just the components which belong to the voice, or the piano, or whatever is being isolated.

Not that you need paul & ringo (or their endorsement) to do it, but my bet is cutting up the lads' dialogue from Hard Day's Night and autotuning that into a novel song would be more satisfying.

e.g.
Grandfather (He's so Clean)
I'm a Mocker

exciting to hear them get back to basics with this one: just 4 guys in 4 different rooms in different cities across different decades and some guys are dead and one is part computer, playing rock music

― waste of compute (One Eye Open)

underrated post

hi dere ilm! the love me do is the slower version with ringo on drums if that's why it's sounding...slower.

akm already said that, don't mind me!

Please everybody, if we haven't done what we could have done, we've tried

i think that stereo treatment of Love Me Do is amazing, really jazzed to hear a real stereo mix of She Loves You now.

Yeah, the guitar is clearer! This site says George played his Duo Jet on that first session with Ringo on drums (Gibson Jumbo acoustic on the later version), but it does not sound like an electric guitar to me.

http://www.beatlesebooks.com/love-me-do

what is this shit?

production on this makes it sound like a recent macca album - which no shade on macca but if what you want is the impeccable sound of post rubber soul beatles, why on earth would you listen to this?

not a great song, yet one for the name a demo/acoustic/live version that is superior to the studio version thread

Having posted the spotify link yesterday, I guess Alba is saving his final views for the video.

I am still digesting

think this is a one-time listen to me. birdistheword's review kinda sums it up.

these AI isolated vocals will age like Star Wars Special Edition CGI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opxhh9Oh3rg

video is by far the weirdest thing about this whole endeavour

If they can fake, like, Hank Williams singing Fuck Tha Police or whatever, why couldn’t they process Paul’s vocal to make him sound like his 28-yr-old self? Hearing 80-yr-old Paul singing alongside much younger John is super jarring.

Song is ok. I can think of 30 ways it could have been better, but they sure could have fucked it up a lot more. Fits fine on an imaginary “disappointing long-awaited Beatles reunion album” comp. I especially don’t like how heavy they made the chorus feel, like it didn’t need to be produced as an epic; it’s not an epic song.

the musical style transfer ai tech is not really that great, as all the goofy ai covers on youtube demonstrate. i don't think it's really at the level where they'd be ready to use it for something like this

C/D: Microsoft Songsmith

i think de-aging paul's vocal would have been a bad idea. in fact I'm sure they had vocals from 95 they could have used and decided to go with new ones for a specific reason: that it better fits with the now and then theme.

that video: doesn't start promising at all (ghost john on a beach??? no) but I like the hello goodbye footage mingled in with the newer stuff. Pete Best footage was exactly what was expected which is disappointing since that's not 'never before seen footage' but jackson did stablize it

Certainly the Beatle Cloning technology has reached new heights going by the 2 Pauls and the 2 Ringos. A frankly excessive number of Beatles, we can only hope this tech won't be used for evil.

the age discrepancy in the vocals is the only part of this that isn't kitsch

I found I liked the song better despite the pure cheese of the video - reminded me that the Fabs were funny guys after all, and that goes a long way to redeeming the "late period plodder" vibe of the track. And as pathetic as it is, I still feel some weird connection to them as people, like they were great friends from college, or family I've not seen in forever.

kinda shocked at how ugly and clunky the video is, doesnt look any better than when they did that stuff in Forrest Gump

thought the video was kinda sweet... then @1:47 oh ffs

lol yeah same, so thankful to peter jackson for giving us that unforgettable image of beloved human rock band "the beatles"

Couldn't they have gotten Ringo and Paul in the same room to shoot their scenes in this...

yeah that's one of the worst parts of it. I'm sure there was budget for that, yeesh.

The Ringo and Paul pretending to sing in the same room bit is supremely ugly. Are they trying to play up the compositeness of the song? Or make it seem more huff-and-puff than it sounds?

i have no idea what jackson was thinking with that; well I think he was trying to match the kind of goofy hello goodbye stuff (which I do like...why does mingling that footage in with the current stuff look more realistic than composing these two guys together when they shot in the same month? I just read Paul's bit was filmed on an ipad. c'mon).

good god that video is godawful. Jackson did such great work on the documentary stuff so far, this is shockingly bad.

hobbit syndrome

Unfortunately the video reminds me of well done YTPs

Feel like they could have put these Hello Goodbye outtakes to better use. Jackson in maudlin mode is the worst.

Holy shit that video is the stuff of nightmares. A.i really still mostly sucks.

What surprises me is that the video got through like this when I think it probably needed to be signed off by Paul, Ringo, Sean/Yoko, Olivia/Dhani and probably various execs.

I guess the time fuckery is of a piece with the mix of current/70s/90s/60s recordings in the song but they pulled it off slightly more gracefully in the audio

I just realised they didn't use the original bridge and I can't decide if that was the right move - ultimately the song is more melancholy and nostalgic than desperate and yearning as a result

Holy shit that video is the stuff of nightmares. A.i really still mostly sucks.

I don't think this has anything at all to do with AI? It's just really cheaply and shoddily done

I mean Forest Gump looked better and it came out thirty years ago

that fucking lennon scene though

Certainly the Beatle Cloning technology has reached new heights going by the 2 Pauls and the 2 Ringos. A frankly excessive number of Beatles, we can only hope this tech won't be used for evil.

An excessive number of Beatles IS evil.

It had me until John starts excessively hamming it up in front of the orchestra players… c’mon

Is this the bit we're talking about?

https://i.imgur.com/tpIQO72.png

If so, I found it enjoyably goofy. Apart from when 1968 George kept nearly hitting 2003 Ringo in the chest with his guitar.

woulda been a better video if he had impaled Ringo, tbh. c'mon Peter, bring back some of that early career zany gore energy.

Anyway, should have given it to Swedemason instead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4EcRPlaXoQ

I didn't mind the four of them being together like that; but it breaks the spell if you have to extend your disbelief to random cello players going home and saying, "Hey, ghost John Lennon and young Paul McCartney were goofing around as we recorded today..."

Can't wait for the 2031 remaster/re-release of this tune & video

There’s no art direction on that video at all. I would have gone black and white and sprinkle animation referencing different eras with footage like what they did on the Lennon and Cheap Trick version of I’m Losing You which feels infinitely cooler and better looking wouldn’t be as uncanny valley. This feels like it was conceived and wrapped in a couple of weeks.

I have few complaints about the concept, I don't mind the idea of young John and George interacting with the others, it's just the execution is absolutely awful.

I just watched the video but only had time to get through about 1:45min of it.

From what I saw it was fine, not sure why everyone was telling me how goofy it is. Actually really tasteful and touching. I was like - "OK I've seen enough, I've got the gist"

Nothing cartoony and wacky and hilarious and embarrassing and "cringe" and jarring and baffling about it at all.

Lol, 1:45 is right before it gets goofy...

(i think that was the joke)

look I don't have the time to go any further, I'm very busy

haha, well played

Paul deep in thought at 2:49, remembering the way he used to mug to camera

Like the string players blankly staring at the goofy Lennon conducting

They can do what they want, it was goofy but fine. But it stands in stark contrast to the absolutely beautiful and moving “Here Comes the Sun” video they released a few years ago.

Ah forgot about that one! Yeah that was the sort of video I was expecting. This one is trying too hard and doing very little.

Video and song are both enjoyable.

Fuck it, I'm gonna go listen to Revolver.

The Microsoft PowerPoint transitions near the end of the video were glorious.

Was hoping for some Lucas diagonal screen wipes or Spielbergian lens flare, but alas.

i liked this more the second time I watched it. it's lighthearted and dumb, who cares.

thought the video was kinda sweet... then @1:47 oh ffs

LOL, yes. Before that, I was wondering - "did he composite Ringo into that shot of Paul?" (The lighting looks off.) Then when we get to that, it's like JFC....

I'm not watching that again. Once was more than enough. Easily the worst thing about this whole endeavor, and it sums up everything I don't like about Peter Jackson - a guy who's great at coming up with new VFX tools but is completely bereft of either the aesthetic taste or sound judgment needed to use them.

The problem I had with the video is that the short film shown in advance of the song being released was quite sensitively done. In contrast, the song video through in footage for far and wide without discrimination in a blatant nostalgia fest. I think there was an opportunity to so something reflecting the "now and then" - maybe just contrasting the 1995 and 2023 sessions - with maybe a subtle reference to John in 1979.

And I don't know why they kept repeating the same clip of George smiling from the 1995 sessions. Was he scowling throughout the rest of the reported 14 hours filmed and there was no other footage?

Was he scowling throughout the rest of the reported 14 hours filmed and there was no other footage?

But it stands in stark contrast to the absolutely beautiful and moving “Here Comes the Sun” video they released a few years ago.

― Sam Weller, Friday, November 3, 2023 3:23 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is such a good & funny comparison. the "Sun" video is a perfect example of how less is more with an institution like the beatles, where the audience is inevitably going to be bringing a gigantic amount of memories, emotions and deep connections to the song, the band, the history, etc, and all thats needed is to create a space for the viewer to access that stuff and it can be a profound experience. whereas the "now & then" video does the exact opposite and seems to be in a frantic panic to be constantly reminding us that the Beatles were four fab lads who started in the cavern club then the world caught beatlemania and they wore sgt pepper suits and did let it be and oh yeah one of them died no wait two of them died and also yellow submarine was good and they had beards at one point etc etc. and its just like, dude, i'm choosing to watch the video, please trust me that i remember who the beatles are and why this is important ffs

Maybe it was made for the UK market, where people are more likely to need reminding than in the US.

I wonder how George would respond once told that "Here Comes the Sun" is the most streamed Beatles song.

NARRATOR: Paul McCartney, when told, had no comment other than "We always knew George had it in him

Forgot George said this when the Anthology stuff was rolled out:

“I hope someone does this to all my crap demos after I’m dead – turn them into hit songs.”

Even the "Free as a Bird" music video repurposed old Beatles clips to better use than this new video.

Think Glass Onion is easily my favorite of these recent remix videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBQIAWh3YBs

BTW, that shot of Paul/Ringo singing reminded me of this hilarious spot during the Classic Albums series for Motorhead's "Ace of Spades" and Eddie Clarke phases in to play (We Are) The Roadcrew" with the rest of the band.

I think it helps to remember that Peter Jackson has pretty much zero aesthetic sensibility (and has been wise enough to surround himself with folks who do for some of his big projects). Whereas LOTR shows the team busting their asses to bring the tech to support the production designers' vision, Hobbit shows what happens when the tech itself is the focus and Jackson exerts more control, so it looks like video game cutscenes. Get Back allowed him to flex his editing and narrative skills with the aesthetics taken care of by Lindsay-Hogg and crew. When he's in charge of the lot, you get stuff like this video.

I think a good contrast is that last Rolling Stones video for “angry” where it goes through different eras and it’s very effective at it - speaking exclusively about the billboards.

that glass onion video above was cool, for some reason I'd never bothered watching it.

Andrew Hickey's perceptive take on Now and Then:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/92258652?utm_campaign=postshare_fan

That was great, thanks.

I don't agree with him on the demo:

And, frankly, he was right. Lennon's original demo is a meandering, borderline-unlistenable, mess

I really like the demo (and the Free as A Bird and Real Love ones), though missed any unexpected reference to Turnham Green. I haven't found the relevant section, but I may have been hearing that as 'wander in eternity' !

For example, in the section that becomes in the final track the middle eight, Lennon sings (starting 2:13 in the demo) "Tow (sic) and then I miss you/Oh, now and then I wan te dow de Turnham Green/I know return to me" as near as I can phonetically transcribe it

Lennon and McCartney's collaboration was often in the form of editing each other's work, and sometimes extensively rewriting it (as when McCartney turned Lennon's sad acoustic dirge about being unloved and uncared for as a child into "Yellow Submarine") and what both men missed in their solo work was the ability of the other to find the core good idea among their bad ones and to polish it up for them and turn it into something workable. Both released plenty of fatuous solo work that could have been turned into classics with just a little bit of help from the other (as well as both releasing plenty of actual classics in their solo work).

It seems like a lot the examples of McCartney's solo work with the most critical cachet are tracks that sound kind of half finished - Maybe I'm Amazed, Ram, McCartney II, is this because people hear them as demos for Beatles songs that never were? Though I suppose the white album, Let It Be and at least the medley section of Abbey Road have a kind of unfinished, directionless quality to them as well. Even before they split up it feels like they'd reached the limits of what they could think of to do.

i don't get the idea that ram sounds half-finished - the arrangements are lush, rich and elaborate, and george martin does orchestral arrangements on a few tracks! it's basically paul continuing from where abbey road left off and deciding to make his own smile.

mccartney i & ii sure do sound half-finished but neither's really that good overall. mccartney ii is fascinating and endearing but only half of it is really that compelling, though the good ideas he had were really good and i would have loved for him to do a whole album of "coming up"s or a whole album of ymo/kraftwerk-esque synth pieces. it's just a weird grab bag of ideas as-is though.

man, I wished he'd kept going in THIS direction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5GVEfxZFbg

xp and ram is easily one of the most beatles-esque of all their solo albums yeah

"secret friend" is the best and a whole album in the vein of it and "all you horse riders / blue sway" would have been wonderful

secret friend is one of the best post-beatle things and the first mccartney track to break through the (not entirely false but woefully reductive) stereotypes about his solo work for me

and while I agree with a lot of hickey's points but the notion that lennon in the late 70s was more or less over the beatles is a total misreading and a disappointing concession to official mythology from someone who is usually better than that - if anything it was mccartney who was closer to acceptance over the end of the band at that time (in spite of his claims to the contrary in the last few decades)

I don't know about "over" the Beatles, but he seems to have the most balanced perspective by December 1980...

I liked the piece. I shared it with a few friends.

*seems to have had

yeah he was good at bluffing

esp in interviews he knew were for posterity

Ultimately, I don't care. To divine intentions is a mug's game, especially with four guys who knew they'd created the 20th century's most persistent, annoying mythos.

It’s okay, but I still prefer this Last Song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch_Fb0AnzC0

the Firemen albums are McCartney going further in the direction of Secret Friend, to varying degrees of success (I think the third one is the only one that is completely successful)

Wow, nice article (Hickey on Patreon), thanks for sharing! Didn't expect Rutles and Asimov references, and it's particularly illuminating for him to point out Lennon's last words spoken in person to McCartney ("think about me every now and then, old friend") - so the title "Now and Then" has multiple meanings...

In 1981, a few months after Lennon’s death, McCartney invited Carl Perkins to collaborate on ‘Get It’, a song from his 1982 album, Tug of War. While working in the studio, Perkins showed McCartney a new song, ‘My Old Friend’, which contained the words: “Think about me every now and then, old friend”. Touched by the familiar lyrics, the former Beatle left the room in tears.

In a 1996 interview with Goldmine magazine, Perkins revealed an ensuing conversation between himself and Linda McCartney. “Paul was crying, tears were rolling down his pretty cheeks, and Linda said, ‘Carl, thank you so much.’ I said, ‘Linda, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.’ She said, ‘But he’s crying, and he needed to. He hasn’t been able to really break down since that happened to John.’

“And she put her arm around me and said, ‘But how did you know?’ I said, ‘Know what?’ She said, ‘There’s two people in the world that know what John Lennon said to Paul, the last thing he said to him. Me and Paul are the only two that know that, but now there’s three…you know it. I said, ‘Girl, you’re freaking me out!’…She said the last words that John Lennon said to Paul in the hallway of the Dakota building were…he patted him on the shoulder, and said, ‘Think about me every now and then, old friend.’”

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/john-lennon-words-paul-mccartney-carl-perkins/

Love it. I almost didn’t believe, or didn’t want to believe, until the part where he said “Girl, you’re freaking me out!”

Might be time to rewatch this bit of awesomeness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiWAqhkCQZM

Dying at Hickeys line about the new track having “homeopathic amounts of George Harrison”

yeah I knew about that last line from lennon trivia for a while now, that was certainly the driving force behind paul wanting to finish this song off.

and as such, in a way, I kind of wish less of a big deal was made about the whole thing (like, they didn't need to do a video); it's really a personal project.

Now and Then '64

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tSefoJDKsU

Now and Then '66

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABa_RH1ygC8

i am in two kinds abt the new track

on the one hand, i wish they would lose their instinct to overdecorate the christmas tree when it comes to this stuff
clean up the tape & let us have that
we dont need new backing vocals & strings & shit

on the other hand, paul & ringo have every right to be full Beatles about it and want to add to it and make it into completed content for the world to enjoy

either way it’s good that this exists as a finished song & it is quite a nice song overall imo

^good post

Dying at Hickeys line about the new track having “homeopathic amounts of George Harrison”

By the way, "Knicker Elastic King" is miles better than any of these reunion Beatles tracks.

(x-post)

As posted on the Hickey thread, I don’t really subscribe to Hickey’s psychoanalytical theory that McCartney crafted ‘Now and Then’ ”…to be the message to himself he wanted to hear”

I suspect Paul’s main aim was give the fans what he thought they most want to see and hear: the sense that it’s a major and significant event, that the Beatles are back together for one last time, and that they always loved each other.

It’s really,really growing on me.

Maudlin, safe, pedestrian, clumsy, inflated, rhythmically-dull as dishwater, tedious, frozen-in-nostalgia, a real bummer, and absolute non-music as well. And no doubt the best they can do at this point (I don't care about Macca's recent solo work). And all of this is beside the point, as stated above. It's a genuine return to 1995 when we all had to pretend to like Free as a Bird for a week, when we could all hear it was a lump of over-produced caked snot with zero joy or adventure or meaning beyond its ominous commercial significance. Credit to them for resurrecting the heady past of 27 years ago, and I hope it does wonders for their grandchildren's' bank balances, or something.

mccartney should take on the rest of the lennon solo catalogue next - I think he really could turn it into better pop music. he could finally add a really scathing verse to how do you sleep (how do you sleep with brian to get your name first on the credits? something along those lines)

By the way, "Knicker Elastic King" is miles better than any of these reunion Beatles tracks.

That's a high bar!

XP In the late 90s a music magazine (forget which) had a feature where famous musicians sent in questions for an interview with Paul, and the question from Marilyn Manson Was "How do you sleep?" - in reply I think Paul just had a story about how in 1971 he was getting great sleep for the first time in his life.

Question would he been better put to Manson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWFehaQEMYI

the '64 Ed Sullivan "Now and Then" cover is awesome

and more enjoyable than the official release, i should add

nooooooo

Have any of the new red album tracks leaked yet? Anyone 'in the know' on this thread who's heard any of it?

So after all this, I finally heard it. At first, I didn't even recognize it as a Beatles song.

lol it is so bad - george harrison otm in 1995

people attribute way too much wisdom to the grumpy beatle

I showed my 17 year old the new video (cringe all around) and a bunch of other Beatle stuff last night and after a while she said “I think probably the quiet one is underrated.”

george was a grump who hated literally everything always & only becamd moreso after the split so this whole “george was otm” amounts to a stopped clock being right twice a day

Did George become the hip choice to be one's 'fave Beatle' overnight after the Scorsese soc? That how it appeared to me

george is the most 90s beatle in many ways

I have zero skin in the fave fabs game - but i think in this specific instance george was indeed OTM that this uninspiring scrap wasn’t worth tarting up into an uninspiring song

George was by all accounts a 100% different dude when not around Paul and John. Billy Preston, Dylan, Tom Petty, etc. all think the guy was a joy to be around.

ask Bernie Krause

xpost like when grouchy teen visits w other families who find them to be a delight lol

lol

Taylor later called Harrison "the very best and my most favorite person" of all the artists with which he had worked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Taylor#

Wait what about Bernie Krause?

Mentioned earlier today.

O RLY? I can’t find it.

ask Bernie Krause

― brimstead, Monday, November 6, 2023 3:37 PM (two hours ago)

Wait what about Bernie Krause?

You're coming on like you're Jimi Hendrix," he responded, his voice rising in pitch and volume. "When Ravi Shankar comes to my house, he's humble.”

I wish George was still around so I could put a lot of his silly music opinions on a shirt and give it to him

Did George become the hip choice to be one's 'fave Beatle' overnight after the Scorsese soc? That how it appeared to me

idk the opposite for me -- the St. George of the Scorsese doc was more unapproachable than the passive aggressive sulker in GB.

Seems to me that the George reclamation project began when he died...the expansion of the Cult of "The Quiet One".

He also had the benefit of a new solo peak between 1987-1990 and shutting up thereafter.

Seems to me that he has always been fairly popular with Beatle fans.

he has long been the 'alternate' choice, it's too bad the bulk of his solo catalog is poor. If he'd lived longer I think he may have continued to do great albums though (his final two + the Wilburys stuff being a real increase in quality). Or he may have just retired completely.

He was always the easy pick for "favorite Beatle" imo. John's too obvious, Paul's too cute, Ringo's the pick if you want to be extra quirky, but George had classic good looks and was quietly funny in the movies and wrote "Here Comes the Sun," and you got to feel like you were very slightly rooting for the underdog by picking him.

I finally saw the video and heard the song yesterday, was happily surprised that it's good.

Later on, listening to Radio 1 and there was an ident plus "the most happening sound right now" and "Now and then" played, and it did not sound out of place. It's a well produced single, whereas "Free as" and "Real Love" were not, even beyond the bad quality vocal.

Basically, the song had hampered the treatment, whereas this time it all works together. And that's all you can hope for, really.

George was always hip but lost a lot of his shine in the 70s due to a succession of mediocre albums and a surfeit of dour misery guts religious proselytising.

Nah actually I just put “Real Love” on (Anthology 2 version) and damn if it’s not core Beatles canon for me now. I teared up a little.

Or he may have just retired completely.

From music, yes - I can easily picture it. I always have the feeling with late period George that he saw his restoration of Friar Park and its gardens as possibly his most important achievement in the unsatisfactory ‘material world’, where all things are innately temporary and subject to change and suffering.

Is anybody else bothered that the Anthology is now older than the history it documented?

Anthology has been written out of history a bit hasn’t it? I mean it was a stodgy meandering old thing anyway.

Good to see that The Compleat Beatles is still knocking around;

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLALI9Wu6Vd6EkjUPV0MM1viAjOrPSifL6&si=immtTVVVmbHtPd1M

An expanded and remastered Anthology is probably the next big Apple project.

The TV series that is – not sure about the records.

In some interviews recently, someone from Apple hinted they were taking a look at Anthology again. It seems inevitable that this will get an update, but I imagine the video restoration would be expensive (but maybe cheaper every year as tech advances). The Anthology albums could have been irrelevant due to the SDEs but they've avoided complete overlap which is kind of annoying in some respects. My gut tells me that within 4 years we'll get reissues of these with Now and Then on the third volume as originally planned and remixed FAAB and Real Love.

oh goodie

Good to see that The Compleat Beatles is still knocking around;

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLALI9Wu6Vd6EkjUPV0MM1viAjOrPSifL6&si=immtTVVVmbHtPd1M🕸

Hmm, some of them work at least.

the Incompleat Beatles

incompleatles

^^^ let's start this cover band

i'm out

The Anthology rollout was a mess and Apple need things up their sleeve for the brand so I'm pretty certain 4-5 years will see a 'corrected' Anthology happen yeah.

The original albums are 'dated' in the sense that you can buy any of the core 66-70 albums with fucktons of outtakes included which makes A1, 2 and 3 seem more and more like the cherrypicked contraptions they are rather than any sort of essential overview of their unpolished happenings. So I can't imagine them keeping the original track listings if the albums get revived. Besides which, FaaB and Real Love have lost their context as opening tracks - except Anthology 1 otherwise opens with about ten minutes of tape hiss, which is absurd for a mega-selling album, and requires FaaB and the interview snippets (which get abandoned, along with their radio doc feel, once you can hear properly - again underlining the mess of the project) to fence them in place. Then there's the matter of some people buying these compilations in the years to come expecting fleshed out recordings - nothing on the outer artwork implies these are discarded takes and the like because the back cover track listings are simplified.

can't they just dump a bunch of unreleased and cleaned up bootleg material online? for a fee if they must (surely they have enough money by now the greedy bastards?) unfortunately they seem to be locked into doing "album" rollouts, presumably to keep the brand relevant. it's weird how precious they are about withholding stuff considering some of the mediocre and bad stuff on some official releases

are they doing anything with the christmas fanclub singles? they're a mixed bag but it seems like money left on the table

to defend george for a just a second I would be grumpy and jaded and prematurely fogeyish if I had to put up with john and paul drama for a decade while also becoming a massive celebrity (at least somewhat) against my will when I just wanted to play music with my mates and maybe score a couple of hits

Just remembered that Archeology had some Ollie Halsall performances on it to add to its similarity to the Anthologies.

George the perpetual fifth wheel in the John/Paul relationship.

so not gonna happen

Re: the Anthology albums, I got the impression there haven't been plans to physically reissue them due to potential redundancy. They were remastered around 2009 and 2010 (just like the albums, same mastering team as well), and those were made available to streaming and download services, including lossless formats to vendors who sold them, but they decided not to reissue the CD's themselves with the new mastering. Maybe there was some economic reason, I don't know, but once they started with the album box sets, it didn't seem like something they'd do anymore simply because so much of the same material was included on the box sets. Different mixes or different edits perhaps, but similar enough that it would've seemed too redundant.

there is less overlap than you’d think.

Another factor with the outtakes is that there are no definitive mixes as there are for the released tracks, since they were left aside at the time. I’ve seen a bit of discussion about editing choices and decisions to leave entire elements out, e.g. backing vocals on Strawberry Fields take 1.

i was thinking about that very thing while listening to the white album outtakes on the box set last night. even the most finished of these don't have an ultimate mix; I would be happy if they'd do 'official' mixes of Not Guilty, Leave My Kitten Alone, a full You Know My Name, etc.

If You've Got Troubles sounds like fucking shit on Anthology. It's not their best song but it's pretty good!

oh wait, it's That Means a Lot that sounds like shit. And I guess the mix of Not Guilty on the white album deluxe is about as official as it can get. anyway.

This makes me laugh, a classic of the Macca/Harrison dynamic

https://x.com/beatleboot/status/1721266358581608855?s=46&t=bJOqpCuQneT7ju08y55VSA

I gotta say the red album sounds fucking great

Sounds like Giles struggled a bit with She Loves You, but the rest of the first 10 songs sound amazing (exception being Love Me Do).

She Loves You sounds as though its playing in the next room.

I skipped ahead to AHDN and Ringo's bongos are distracting

Agreed. You Really Got a Hold On Me was a highlight for me.

It’s going to take me a while to get used to some of the Ringo enhanced mixes before I can decide if I prefer them to the originals.

With so many rubber soul tracks will they release a boxset for that one now ?

Actual goosebumps listening to John’s vocals on « twist and shout »!

Had to jump to I Am the Walrus after someone (Sheffield?) warned of the changes in the fade-out. There's maybe a ten second stretch where it's almost unrecognisable as the same song. It's more radical than the version on Love and I'm just confused really.

i think "she loves you" and "love me do" are the worst of the new mixes because everything except the final mono master was lost for those recordings, while the other tracks at least had a bit more to work with

i'm pretty impressed by all the others so far

xp hey guys you could release it in ... mono

it's wild to be able to hear some of the details like the "a hard day's night" bongos

these feel pretty universally superior to the old stereo mixes as i'd have hoped

Spotify's algorithms seem to have decided that two of the 2023 remixes on the Red album are not noticeably different enough from the previous ones to get their own playcount

https://i.imgur.com/VgyhOkE.png

What’s actually gone wrong technically with She Loves You then?

This might be a good time to remind people of the Prof Stoned versions of tracks by the Beatles and others. Here's the Prof Stoned She Loves You, which sounds a lot better to my ears. Available a bonus track on the With the Beatles job:

https://www.transfernow.net/dl/20231110NZfYNor6

Stereo too, I should have added

What’s actually gone wrong technically with She Loves You then?

it's a MAL assisted demix from mono; I haven't listened to this one yet but will later. I thought the Love Me Do demix sounded great. But I generally prefer the monos of those early records.

The new mixes do sound snappy

Looking forward to seeing how all this sounds through speakers but on my earbuds Hey Bulldog might be my favourite new mix. I'll still take the mono Revolution over the new one.

Magical Mystery Tour and Old Brown Shoe sound like the best remixes on the blue album to my ears.

Agreed. You Really Got a Hold On Me was a highlight for me.

Guitar stabs on “Can’t Find Me Love” pretty shockingly harsh

there's some guitar stuff missing from Old Brown Shoe which is kind of weird but the bass sounds great.

_Agreed. You Really Got a Hold On Me was a highlight for me._

Forget who’s mainly singing the harmony vocal on this, is it George or John with himself?

Who confirms that it’s George.

prob only going to listen to the red album but it sounds dope so far

Love how huge If I Needed Someone sounds.

Lots of knowledgeable types saying Fool On The Hill is a fave.

yeah I loved the sick sub bass during the flute solo, really brings the song into the 21st century.

Some of the new mixes sound great but I'm decidedly not a fan of the "unburied" rhythm guitar on "Magical Mystery Tour". Takes me out of the psychedelic moment, maaaan.

And to Alba's comment/link above the Prof. Stoned mixes are often glorious. His "Forever Changes" mix is my go-to.

Fair

This is how the middle bit of #NowAndThen should go. In my humble opinion. pic.twitter.com/jj3h78DG3k

— Duncan Wisbey (@hubabakanda) November 10, 2023

lol

this is really fun to click around in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSgFPUlhc2o

I mean, look I’m crazy I would totally listen to that whole thing with pleasure

would/am

The bass/drum parts are always great on Beatle records. I've plowed through their albums focusing on just that element.

(I've also done that just focusing on George, or just on the harmonies - that's one thing I love about them, each part is so well done, and in a way it has to be when you're building a record from parts that only four people can play on stage - like each person becomes that much more important so they need to step up.)

Also nice touch showing only who's playing in the graphic as well

Lol at that Twitter post. I had a proper (Meehhh-owwww) laugh with that :))

yeah, that was brilliant

really brings out how funky they could be

i think "she loves you" and "love me do" are the worst of the new mixes because everything except the final mono master was lost for those recordings, while the other tracks at least had a bit more to work with

loving the drum-n-bass Rubber Soul. it's so chill! as i get older, paying attention to Paul's bass parts has become one of my favorite Beatle listening activities. i think of it mainly in terms of the post-acid period, but even here he's doing a lot of interesting stuff, always a little more than you might think is there. i think it adds a lot to the energy of the songs, subconsciously.

This is kinda mad but there is a spudload of Beatles Sessions boots on Archive.org right now, which can be downloaded.

https://archive.org/details/beatles_sessions_201912_2

very mad, will download

I hope these are still up next week when I’m back with access to a desktop computer.

is there any way to download that all together rather than file by file?

Yes indeed

When you go to the download options window, when you click on either Flac or MP3 there's a down-pointing arrow icon to the right at the top of the list that says 1593 items

Just heard the “new” part in IAtW.

And now the distracting “unburied” MMT guitar that was recently mentioned. It’s like a YouTube play-along.

This “Lady Madonna” seems to be a step in the right direction though.

I guess it’s from 2015 though.

i can't really hear that MMT guitar but my hearing in my right ear is compromised and I haven't listened to it in airpods yet

I like the mix of Ballad of John and Yoko, for sure. and I've come around on the Walrus mix but I don't think it's better than the Love mix or even the original mixes. I actually first heard that song on 45 with the extra measures in the middle of it and to this day every other version sounds weird to me.

one thing I'll say about this...now and then slots in perfectly well after the long and winding road on this comp, certainly sounds like work by the same band.

would be cool if they sold all the stems for folks to do their own mixes, Todd Rundgren no world order style

The de-mixing software allows them to break down all the component parts pretty impressively – Giles Martin shows how they did it with the Taxman (stereo mix) on YT. So I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.

If I had to guess, the bigger issue is the reverb that was initially put on John and Paul’s vocals. That is not something you can really “de-mix” per se.

the tech is very impressive but it's ultimately going to be more effective when more separation exists to begin with because then the software has to recreate less details. for revolver (and everything from with the beatles onward) they had the original four-track tapes to work with - usually a basic track of guitar/bass/drums, a vocal track, and then two tracks of overdubs, and so separating only guitar/bass/drums is still easier/more effective for the software than separating absolutely everything from the mono mix. if they still had the original two-track tape (with the vocals separate from the backing) for "love me do" and "she loves you" then the software would have to do less work to recreate the detail covered up by the vocal, but all that still exists is the final mono master for those tracks. even "twist and shout" from the same era sounds much better than the "love me do" and "she loves you" stereo mixes, which i'm attributing to them still having the original two-track tapes.

frankly the only great sounding versions of 'she loves you' are the mono ones, the loss of the master tape is fairly insurmountable though they tried. It's alright, but nothing packs the punch of the mono version and as time goes on, the more they try to make stereo versions of it the less impactful the song is. for a song that was synonymous with beatlemania in 64, it's not a song I ever hear in the wild anymore.

I’ve noticed a slight roll off of top end on some mixes - takes the sting out of “Nowhere Man” which needs to sizzle a bit on the guitars. On the other hand “Penny Lane” sits together a little more cohesively. With some weird slurping noises pushed up higher in the mix, but that’s possibly because I haven’t listened with close attention in a long time.

I think Ringo is too prominent in the mix for some of these, but if that’s the price of getting new mixes in 2023 then I can easily accept that.

Well this is one of the things that I like the most with these new mixes : hearing Ringo more/better !
Especially the bass drum.

Singing a song called “Boys,” Ringo!

that drum'n'bass rubber soul is stunning

"in my life" drums = understated ringo perfection

More Macca in the chorus of Norwegian Wood is a lovely thing. Reminds me of the mono version of I'm So Tired.

IATW is huge on big speakers !

Agreed. You Really Got a Hold On Me was a highlight for me.

I liked it at first but then I listened more closely and the hi-hats have been turned into a kind of aural mush. Compare them with the timing of the original mixes (in either mono or stereo), or indeed the Prof Stoned remix, and it's really disappointing. I'm listening on Spotify so I guess compression may have made it worse but they sound fine streaming from the original stereo mix.

I think Giles does his best work with the vocals.

"HwrghI wouldn't dance with another".

there seems to be a hoffman board consensus that there is a mistake in the Nowhere Man mix with the track holding the high hats; it's apparently off by about 20 milliseconds. I can just about hear this but don't feel it's that distracting.

I watched the Disney mini-doc on "Now and Then". It seems unlikely Paul and Ringo were ever in a studio together working on this. It kind of bums me out that the last time the remaining Beatles ever got to work on a Beatles song Ringo just delivered his part by Dropbox...

Maybe there was a standoff over who would fly

"In 2022, Ringo quit the Beatles for three days"

Let the mountain come to Macca.

"In 2022, Ringo quit the Beatles for three days"

hoffman board consensus

Sounds so unlikely, I am almost tempted to look in on the boards and check - but no.

Ha ha

The current punch-up is "Did Paul or Ringo do the drumming on "Old Brown Shoe" ? "

yeah I'm not sure why anyone thinks that's Paul. Even though the primary rhythm is kind of a shuffle, there are too many other sophisticated things happening with the drums in that song for it to be him. Also, doesn't Ringo sing along with George on that? It would be weird for him to have done vocals but no drums.

Paul played drums on … “The Ballad of John and Yoko” and… “Back in the USSR,” is that it?

Or Ken Scott Frankenstein tape take on the latter?

For a long time people thought Paul played drums on Dear Prudence but I think that's been debunked now

Paul also plays drums on Why Don't We Do It In The Road and Martha My Dear, I think.

there seems to be a hoffman board consensus that there is a mistake in the Nowhere Man mix with the track holding the high hats; it's apparently off by about 20 milliseconds.

Paul also did the drum solo on The End, did he not?

Nope, definitely Ringo

Believe he was pulling our leg with that one.

Best drummer in The Beatles after all.

Pete Best, drummer in the Beatles

The Best of the Beatles

if anyone debunked paul playing drums on dear prudence I don't believe it - it sounds way more like his style and if ringo is on it at all it's just for the bit of straight 4/4 at the end (but I don't think he is)

it's a much better performance than the "composite" john/paul/george drum track from USSR which they probably should have rerecorded

regardless best was clearly the worst drummer in the beatles by some distance

Paul also plays drums on Why Don't We Do It In The Road and Martha My Dear, I think.

_Paul also plays drums on Why Don't We Do It In The Road and Martha My Dear, I think._


I’m pretty WDWDIITR was recorded by Paul and Ringo alone (and it’s a poor track afaic).

He’s very fussy about his drums, you know.

They loom large in his legend.