Beatles News
Ringo Starr posted a video update on his social media pages in which he unveiled new details about two recording projects on which he’s been working.
Last year, the former Beatles drummer announced during a Zoom Q&A with multiple media outlets that he was working on a country music EP with producer T Bone Burnett, and also was collaborating with producer and songwriter Linda Perry on another EP.
At the start of the update clip, the former Beatles drummer reported, “I’m still in the studio, and you know what’s happening? I was gonna do a … country EP, but as things are unfolding, it’s probably going to be like a real CD, 10 tracks. Can you believe it? I haven’t done one of them in a long time. So that’s getting made ready.”
He then shared some info about his collaborative EP with Perry, which is a four-track collection titled Crooked Boy.
“She wrote the songs for me. She produced them. She’s a beauty, so musical,” Starr said. “She has a great vibe. Peace and love, Linda.”
The video also displayed the Crooked Boy EP’s packaging, revealing that the songs are titled “Gonna Need Someone,” “Crooked Boy,” “February Sky,” and “Adeline.” In addition, Strokes guitarist Nick Valensi played on all four tracks, while Perry contributed guitar and backing vocals to some of the tunes.Crooked Boy will be the latest in a series of EPs that Starr began releasing in 2021. Ringo had recorded a couple of songs written by Perry for his previous EPs Change the World (2021) and EP3 (2022). His most recent EP, Rewind Forward, arrived in October 2023. The drummer’s last full-length album, What’s My Name, came out in 2019.
Source: Matt Friedlander/americansongwriter.com
Grammy-winner Jeff Tyzik’s new arrangements, transcribed and arranged from the original master recordings at Abbey Road, interface with candid photos of the band, taken from the archives of the official fan magazine, “The Beatles Book Monthly,” for “a magical musical and visual journey.”
“Twenty-five of The Beatles’ best-known songs (“Here Comes the Sun,” “Hey Jude,” “All You Need Is Love,” etc.) in orchestra-augmented arrangements while avoiding the tribute-band route,” cites the online note from Schirmer Theatrical, LLC, and Greenberg Artists. “The Beatles were ostensibly four guys singing about girls, and what we wanted to do in this project was to authentically and creatively embody the music.”
"The production comes with all orchestral arrangements, six musicians, and two technical crew members (video and sound),” informs the note.
Revolution is a stunning multimedia experience featuring new symphonic arrangements transcribed from the original master recordings at Abbey Road. Accompanied by hundreds of rare and unseen photos along with stunning video and animation,
ISO’s stage crew and lighting and sound team also earn special applause for synchronizing everything on stage.
A special note informs: "All music under license from Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Harrisongs LTD. All photos under license from The Beatles Book Photo Library. The show is not endorsed by or connected to Apple Corps or The Beatles.
"A portion of the proceeds from productions of “Revolution: The Music of The Beatles, A Symphonic Experience” are donated to the Penny Lane Development Trust (PLDT), a charitable community center located in Liverpool, UK, that provides an engaging environment where people can expand and explore their interests."
The Beatles were part of a larger consciousness in the 1960s. Indiana was part of the scene when “the Fab Four” came to Indianapolis on September 3, 1964, to perform at the Indiana State Fair Coliseum. ‘Every seat filled’ cites reports of the 5:00 p.m. show. But by 9:00 p.m., the crowd was so large that they performed on a much larger temporary stage erected on the dirt track in front of the grandstand.
Source: Rita Kohn/nuvo.net
The Beach Boys' Mike Love decided to pay tribute to The Beatles' George Harrison through song. Love explained why he respected the "My Sweet Lord" singer.
Some of the best Beatles tribute songs came from unexpected places. The Beach Boys’ Mike Love decided to pay tribute to The Beatles’ George Harrison through song. Love explained why he had had so much respect for the “Got My Mind Set on You” singer. He also compared the way audiences reacted to his band and The Beatles during the 1960s.
During a 2023 interview with Forbes, Love said his song “Pisces Brothers” is a tribute to George. Love felt that the two of them were “pieces brothers” because of their shared astrological sign. Love released the tune in honor of what would have been George’s 71st birthday in 2014. The Beach Boy revealed that “Pisces Brothers” is one of Love’s favorite tunes to perform and one of his favorite tunes in general.
“It’s a poem that I put to music,” Love explained. And I love doing it every night. It just takes me back to those times, you know. There’s very few songs touch me as emotionally as that, although the ‘Warmth of the Sun’ is one.” For context, “The Warmth of the Sun” is the song Love wrote with Brian Wilson about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
John Lennon said a song from The Beatles' 'The White Album' has some social commentary. It’s not one of the more popular songs on the record.
John Lennon said a song from The Beatles’ The White Album has some social commentary. It’s also supposed to be a joke. Is it a funny joke? Well, that’s a dicey question to look at all these years later.
The book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono features an interview from 1980. In it, John was asked about “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.”
“Oh, that was written about a guy in Maharishi’s meditation camp who took a short break to go shoot a few poor tigers, and then came back to commune with God,” John recalled.
“There used to be a character called Jungle Jim and I combined him with Buffalo Bill. It’s a sort of teenage social-comment song and a bit of a joke. Yoko’s on that one, I believe, singing along.”
If nothing else, “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” paved the way for future musical collaborations between John and Yoko.
‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’ isn’t as beloved as another ‘White Album’ song
It’s obvious from listening to “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” that it’s supposed to be a joke. The cadence of the song is comic. However, is it really all that funny? Is the punchline — the death of a tiger — really that good? I suppose that all comes down to one’s feelings about animal rights.
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
John Lennon's approach to a Beatles song makes it feel like it's from Narnia. The tune was a hit twice.
C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books and The Beatles’ songs are two of post-war England’s most valuable cultural exports. Paul McCartney said one of The Beatles’ songs is about a place that John Lennon felt was similar to Narnia. John did an incredible job of translating his feelings into music.
In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul discussed Strawberry Field, the orphanage that inspired The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” “I’ve seen Strawberry Fields described as a dull, grimy place next door to him that John imagined to be a beautiful place, but in the summer it wasn’t dull and grimy at all: it was a secret garden,” Paul recalled.
“John’s memory of it wasn’t to do with the fact that it was a Salvation Army home; that was up at the house,” he added. “There was a wall you could bunk over and it was a rather wild garden, it wasn’t manicured at all, so it was easy to hide in. The bit he went into was a secret garden like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and he thought of it like that, it was a little hideaway for him where he could maybe have a smoke, live in his dreams a little, so it was a get-away. It was an escape for John.”
John did an excellent job of capturing his escapes into his own little Narnia in “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The Beatles dabbled in Indian classical music, ska, pop, rock, blues, R&B, and baroque music. However, “Strawberry Fields Forever” feels more fantastical than anything else they released. Its psychedelic soundscape feels like it’s from another universe.
Today, it’s well-known that Strawberry Field was an orphanage. Back in the 1960s, fans might have had the impression that it was another world like Narnia, Oz, or Wonderland. Certainly, the song itself would not have dissuaded them from that notion.
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles refused to meet with someone who publicly insulted them. After a bit of pressure, though, Paul McCartney met with their critic.
In 1965, Paul McCartney was the only member of The Beatles to meet with esteemed playwright and composer Noel Coward. At this point, the band had grown used to politely greeting complete strangers, even when they were tired or irritable. They refused to meet with Coward, though. Here’s why McCartney was the only one to speak to Coward.
The Beatles were the biggest band in the world by the mid-1960s, but even they had their detractors. One of their critics was Coward, who described them as “totally devoid of talent. There is a great deal of noise. In my day, the young were taught to be seen but not heard” (per the Daily Mail).
Coward’s friend was a journalist for the Daily Mail and published his remarks. One year later, Coward saw The Beatles perform in Rome and described the concert as “just one long ear-splitting din.” Still, he felt he should congratulate the band after the concert. He met them at their hotel, where their manager, Brian Epstein, informed him that the band didn’t want to speak to him. They’d read his comments about them.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
The celebration is finally here — 60 years of Beatlemania! Or, more precisely, six decades since The Beatles conquered America, arriving on February 7, 1964, appearing to tremendous success on The Ed Sullivan Show two days later and being a part of our lives ever since.
Were you there? Did you scream when you saw them perform, or cut your hair to resemble their moptops? Maybe you heard the stories from your parents, watched the footage and have certainly heard the music. Whatever it was, you’ve undoubtedly felt the magic generated by the combination of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
Their history is truly amazing and still going strong — from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to last year’s “Now and Then” — but if you had to pick one year that truly captured Beatlemania in all its glory, it would have to be 1964.
In celebration of 60 years of Beatlemania, we’re taking a look back at 10 Fab highlights of 1964.
1. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’/Meet the Beatles
60 years of Beatlemania really kicked off with the fact that The Beatles’ first single in America, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (backed with “I Saw Her Standing There”), reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on February 1, 1964, remaining there for seven weeks. The song that replaced it? The group’s “She Loves You.”
The album in America that the single came from, Meet The Beatles, was released on January 20, 1964 and became the number 1 album on February 15, remaining there for seven weeks until it was replaced by … The Beatles’ Second Album.
Source: Ed Gross/womansworld.com
The Beatles won the Best Music Video award at the 2024 Grammys Sunday night for the track “I’m Only Sleeping” — a song which was first released all the way back in 1966.
The song’s music video beat out other notable nominees such as Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Count Me Out,” as mentioned on the Grammys website.
After many decades, a music video was then directed by artist Em Cooper and launched to The Beatles’ YouTube channel in November 2022. The video, according to The Beatles’ website, took over 1,300 individual oil paintings to create the “visual exploration of the space between dreaming and wakefulness.”
The last time The Beatles won any Grammy award, according to the Grammys website, was for the 1996 event, where they received three awards for various categories.
Despite the win, the living band members will not receive the award. As reported by Forbes, the award will actually go to the directors and producers of the music video because The Beatles, themselves, were not involved with the project.
Source: Paul Hoskin/deseret.com
Misunderstood genius or pretentious charlatan? Revolutionary artist or (frankly terrible) singer? Almost six decades after she became globally (in)famous, it’s still hard to find a cultural figure more polarising than 90-year-old Yoko Ono. Her relationship with John Lennon is cited as the blueprint of the meddling girlfriend, ruining her partner’s (superior) art, her work often derided and used as a punchline: no one really wants to hear themselves described as “a bit of a Yoko”.
But Peter Jackson’s seven-hour Beatles documentary Get Back, released in 2021, started to unpick the myths surrounding Ono and the break-up of the world’s biggest band. Yes, she’s practically omnipresent as The Beatles are at work, but she hardly seems like an obstacle to their creative process; most of the time she’s knitting or reading the newspaper. Now a new exhibition at Tate Modern, the UK’s largest ever showcase of Ono’s work, will further challenge what we think we know about her when it opens this month. It’s all part of an overdue reappraisal, forcing us to ask: how much do we really know about Yoko Ono? And is it time we started taking her work seriously?
Source: Katie Rosseinsky/independent.co.uk
The First Dramatic Minor Chord
The song starts with a slow introduction that doesn’t repeat later in the song. Lennon had picked up this staple from many of his favorite songs from the ’30s and ’40s.
You’ll never know how much I really love you
You’ll never know how much I really care
A Walt Disney Classic
Lennon’s mother Julia would often sing “I’m Wishing” from the 1937 animated film Snow White. Larry Morey and Frank Churchill wrote the song. The opening lines are: Want to know a secret? / Promise not to tell? / We are standing by a wishing well.
In All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Lennon told David Sheff, “My mother was always … a comedienne and a singer. Not professional, but, you know, she used to get up in pubs and things like that. She had a good voice. She could do Kay Starr. She used to do this little tune when I was just a 1- or 2-year-old. … Yeah, she was still living with me then. … The tune was from the Disney movie.”
Listen
Do you want to know a secret
Do you promise not to tell
Whoa, oh, oh
A Marriage Kept from Public Knowledge
As their manager, Brian Epstein was pursuing a recording contract for The Beatles, and Lennon was planning on marrying Cynthia Powell. Epstein urged Lennon to rethink his plans, as he had been selling the group as a quartet of young, lovable, single gentlemen. Lennon agreed to postpone the wedding, and The Beatles signed with EMI’s Parlophone label on February 13, 1962. Lennon and Powell were married on August 23, 1962, at the Mount Pleasant register office in Liverpool. Epstein was the best man.
Source: Jay McDowell/americansongwriter.com
