Love - The Beatles

To true music fans there can hardly be a more controversial album than the remix of The Beatles' unofficial greatest-hits catalogue into the 2006 album, Love. Remixed by George Martin, the Beatles' former arrangement manager, and his son Giles Martin, the album was created for a Cirque du Soleil show in Vegas. The father-son team digitally mastered the original tracks to stitch together a rich musical tapestry. The end result of their hard work is an hour and eighteen minutes of pure joy, distilled down and processed into pure Soma.

Yeah, its kind of like tearing apart da Vinci's notebooks in order to make the world's best paper-airplane.

Okay, now you're with me.

I love this album, and the reason I love it is because I don't love The Beatles. Don't get me wrong, I like them and I've never heard a song of theirs that I disliked, but I have no infatuation for the mop-headed early songs or the virulent late catalogue. It's all great stuff, but I don't ever actually want to listen to it, and until I first heard Love I didn't understand why. Now I do.

My parents grew up in the era of The Beatles, but neither were actually music-lovers, and as such I grew up in a house mostly devoid of music, with the exception of the ever-present background noise of our television. By the time I actually came into my own, I was listening to music that was either inspired by The Beatles, or, more likely, inspired by music which was itself inspired by The Beatles. Elliot Smith, The White Stripes, even Ben Folds, all owe something to the boys from Liverpool.

Which brings me back to the matter at hand. Love is not so much a Beatles album as it is an album inspired by The Beatles. When the Martins "modernized" The Beatles' music, they were adding into it a series of rhythms and progressions that have, at their root, the same music they are effecting. It's difficult to describe because this is either an act of full-circle completionism, or simple incest, depending on how one looks at it.

While The Beatles' enduring influence allows for this modernization to be completed farily easily, since it is really just a matter of turning it all back in on itself, there is still a question of ethics for the purist. None of the sound effects heard in Love come from outside of The Beatles' catalogue. Every sound, including the wailing organ solo halfway through the trip, comes either from the songs themselves or from the extensive unpublished catalogue of cutting-room-floor scraps. But it is not the music as Lennon intended, and this raises a question. Since all of the techniques are just evolutionarily removed from the original music, are the tracks actually improved by this tampering? Would an Orangutan be made better by cross-breeding with a human?

I say yes, and I say it for everyone who thinks The Beatles are cool, but couldn't care less about actually owning any of their songs.

Love is all I need to get into The Beatles. (1) It isn't the same music and that's the point. If I am going to care about the original catalogue, I need to have it prepared for me, translated out of Middle English into something that I can understand and relate to. I don't feel bad about it; I'm not dissing the great all-fathers. I just don't like it. It's old. It sounds like shag carpet and lava lamps. When I listen to Abby Road I can feel the callouses on my feet toughen and I crave sandalwood. It's old, and I don't like things that are old.

But Love is new, wonderful, and exciting. And it's all I need. At least, from The Beatles.

(1) See what I did there?

Bill Callahan at Bottom Lounge, 6/19/2009

Photo by Kirstie Shanley

This show happened awhile ago, but it’s worth talking about, so now that I’ve got this blog up I’m going to talk about it. Bill Callahan is an indie singer-songwriter, and in my view is one of the most underrated musicians of his generation. Callahan writes songs that are simple but intelligent, and often incredibly moving, both lyrically and musically, and it’s all carried by his voice; his sing-speak style baritone is the anchor of his music.

Callahan recorded for many years under the alias Smog, dropping that name in favor of his own in 2007. He began his career making experimental lo-fi; his first full length, 1990’s Sewn to the Sky, and other early recordings are dissonant, staticky, and abrasive. His music has changed greatly since then; his later recordings are of higher sound quality, and are more melodically and harmonically developed than his early experiments. And while his lyrics have always been complex and important to his music, they’ve become progressively less cryptic as the years have gone on.

I saw him at the Bottom Lounge, a venue I feel like is suited more to a metal show, but the sound in the room is pretty good, and I was near the front, so I can’t complain. He was backed by a fantastic band, consisting of a cellist, violinist, drummer, and electric guitarist; Callahan sang, and on most songs played electric guitar as well. Predictably, he played tracks primarily from his latest LP, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. There were certainly some Smog songs mixed in (“Bathysphere” and “Let Me See the Colts” were highlights, as was his classic “Cold Blooded Old Times”), and while I would have liked to have heard a bit more from his Smog catalog, it’s hard to nitpick because Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle is such a good album, and he and his band played such fantastic versions of its songs, particularly the brooding “All Thoughts Are Prey to Some Beast,” perhaps the hardest-rocking moment of the night. Callahan is not necessarily known for being a hard rocker, but make no mistake: this band was kicking ass and taking names. Callahan’s songs, without losing their subtlety and precision, were given a harder edge than they possess on record; there was a certain underlying drive beneath it all. And this, I think, is what made the show so exciting; a performance consisting entirely of Callahan’s songs played exactly as they were played on record would have made for a very good concert, but this band pushed a little further. Hell yeah, Bill.