Category Archives: beatles weekends

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Song of the Day #429: ‘Norwegian Wood’ – The Beatles

norwegianBecause the box set is a little too rich for my blood, I’ve decided to pick up the remastered Beatles CDs a few at a time. So on the day of release I drove over to Best Buy on my lunch break and bought my three favorite Beatles albums: A Hard Day’s Night, Rubber Soul and Revolver.

I listened to Revolver first and I must admit I wasn’t completely blown away. I didn’t have my old CD handy for a side-by-side comparison, but I basically felt like I was listening to the same album I’ve known for two decades. I expected to feel as if I was hearing these albums for the first time. Fortunately, Rubber Soul came closer to giving me that experience and A Hard Day’s Night definitely had the wow factor.

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Song of the Day #423: ‘If I Fell’ – The Beatles

beatlesfellI’m sticking with A Hard Day’s Night for my second tune this Beatles Weekend, highlighting one of my favorite songs on that album, and in the band’s entire catalog — ‘If I Fell.’

This is actually the second time I’ve featured ‘If I Fell’ on this blog. The first was back in April, when I chose Evan Rachel Wood’s version from the film Across the Universe as my 277th Song of the Day. I believe this song joins Ben Folds Five’s ‘Emaline’ (a live version and a cover) as the only songs to appear in two different Song of the Day posts.

I’ll go ahead and link up a third version of the song because I know Amy will if I don’t. 🙂 Here’s American Idol contestant Jason Castro’s version with the added benefit of clips from one of television’s very best shows, Friday Night Lights.

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Song of the Day #422: ‘I Should Have Known Better’ – The Beatles

beat_poolThere’s a pretty clear divide between The Beatles early, poppy stuff and their later more experimental music. Rubber Soul is where that split started to happen, and Revolver saw the transformation completed. Those are two of my favorite Beatles albums (I imagine they’re two of everybody’s). They showed the world that this wasn’t just a pop band but a serious artistic force.

Still, when I rank all of the band’s albums in order, it’s inevitably A Hard Day’s Night — one of those early, uncomplicated albums — that rises to the top. It lacks the ahead-of-its-time production techniques of later albums, the mind-bending lyrics, the complex song construction, but it makes up for all that in unparalleled pop songcraft.

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Song of the Day #416: ‘Her Majesty’ – The Beatles

abbeyroadHaving started these Beatles Weekends with the first song on the band’s first album, I couldn’t resist following it up with the last song on their last album.

Now, as with all things Beatles, this isn’t as simple as it sounds. A strong argument could be made that Let it Be, not Abbey Road, is The Beatles’ final album. It was, in fact, the last album released by the band. However, I prefer to go by the last album The Beatles recorded, and that was quite definitively Abbey Road.

I suppose it’s easy for me to make that distinction, having discovered all of the band’s albums at once years after they were recorded and released. For somebody alive at the time, Let it Be must have felt newer than Abbey Road no matter when it was recorded simply by virtue of its release date. But time irons out those wrinkles.

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Song of the Day #415: ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ – The Beatles

beatles-i-saw-her-standing-thereIt’s amazing how, nearly 40 years after they split, The Beatles remain extraordinarily relevant. Just in the past five years, their music has been showcased in a cult film beloved by teens and adults alike (Across the Universe), provided the inspiration for an elaborate Cirque du Soleil show and its accompanying soundtrack (Love) and served as the basis for a much anticipated Rock Band video game.

And now, as of last week, all of The Beatles’ album have been remastered and re-released for the first time since they showed up on CD 22 years ago. I gobbled those up when they first came out and at the time they sounded great (they were among the only CDs I owned). But when I listen to those CDs now, they stand out as far more muddied and far lower in volume than most of my music.

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