Listening to The Beatles: 1964

The reissue of The Beatles catalog in remastered CD sets has presented the blogosphere with a unique opportunity to write new reviews of the band’s original slate of releases. This site’s posts on The Beatles are not written from an audiophile standpoint but rather relating a more personal experience of listening to their music in rough chronology.

Year One was all about The Beatles’ raw charisma and rush towards Beatlemania at home and abroad. Year Two, then, finds John Lennon and Paul McCartney coming into their own as songwriters and the band as a whole trying to avoid fatigue. Just weeks after arriving home from their triumphant visit to America, The Beatles were occupied with filming their own feature, A Hard Day’s Night, as well as writing songs and recording songs to perform in the film. Yet they still managed to release a single that March, Can’t Buy Me Love b/w You Can’t Do That, which perfectly conjures the effortless energy the band could create at this stage of their career.

Listening to The Beatles: 1962-1963

The reissue of The Beatles catalog in remastered CD sets has presented the blogosphere with a unique opportunity to write new reviews of the band’s original slate of releases. This site’s posts on The Beatles are not written from an audiophile standpoint but rather relating a more personal experience of listening to their music in rough chronology.

My good buddy Stillman once hit on a profound truth: the story of The Beatles represents the ultimate coming-of-age tale, a bildungsroman that would be the Platonic ideal of the form – except that it actually did happen less than fifty years ago. The story is obviously enhanced by the lasting music, but there’s symbiosis in that the story itself makes the music more lasting, more associative with similar touchstones in our own lives.