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

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.