Skip to main content

What if? A Beatles Project

 So here's the game:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but basically by "The White Album," they were really just a brand.  Each member was working on their own songs, sometimes even recording all the parts (I'm looking at you Paul), but often just asking another band member to come in and play the guitar parts (for example).

It made for a less cohesive album than "Abbey Road" or "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," but it still made for a really great album (some people actually think it's the best).  

The problem, as I see it, is that their solo work (post break-up) is just too much of one voice.  So what if the Beatles never broke?  What if they continued to work but in the fashion that produced "The Beatles" aka "The White Album?"

What would that look like?  Below is a table that roughly groups their solo releases by year.  Some years they produced multiple albums, and some years one of them didn't produce any albums.  Your job is to listen to their studio albums and identify what songs you'd include on their What if?  album.  I broke it into 8 volumes.  Some things to keep in mind:

  • Of the 30 tracks on "The White Album," Ringo Starr wrote/sang on 1 and George Harrison wrote/sang on 4.  That means that 25 of the tracks were Lennon/McCartney.  Keep those proportions in mind  when you start to create your Volumes?  
  • I also (on the table) split George Harrison's "All Things Must Pass" into two different volumes since it was a double album.
  • You should aim to create an "album" of 10-12 songs.
  • There are three (?) solo releases that they produced before they broke up including Paul McCartney's first solo release that I am not including on this list.  They hadn't broken up yet, though that may have contributed to their break up.










Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Peregrinating the Albuquerque Bosque

  The Map. Overview: Starting in the San Juans in Colorado, the Rio Grande "is the twenty-second longest river in the world and the fourth or fifth longest in North America" ( Texas State Historical Society ).  While the river is characterized by the area it flows through, the river from Elephant Butte Dam to the south to Cochiti Dam in the north is called the Middle Rio Grande.  And in the middle of the middle Rio Grande is the roughly 20 plus miles that flows through Albuquerque.  From an airplane, the Rio Grande is a brown ribbon bordered a green ribbon.  That green ribbon is the Bosque .  I've always been fascinated really exploring an area, getting a sort of overview of an area then drilling down to really get it.  It's led to me hiking the Sandias from end to end and then hiking outlying trails multiple times, biking all the trails in the Cedro Peak area because someone put them on a map, trying different routes to get to ...

Peregrinating the Albuquerque Bosque-the Autumnal Equinox edition

Overview:   In June, around the Summer Solstice, my wife, my dog, and I set out to hike the Albuquerque Bosque from end to end over two days .  It was well over a hundred degrees and after starting later than expected we didn't make it as far the first day as we hoped.  But we did make it. Now, three months later, around the Autumnal Equinox, we set out to do it again.  Our route was slightly different and, with the weather being a lot more pleasant, broke the day into a thirteen mile day and a five mile day:  eighteen total miles from Valle de Oro National Wildlife Refuge to the Alameda Bridge right on the border between Albuquerque and Corrales. The things we wanted to do differently this time were pretty straightforward:  1) don't get lost at the south terminus and get into the bosque sooner, and 2) walk even more on the westside.  So, the route was a follows:  we'd walk on the east side from Valle de Oro to the Rio Bravo Bridge, cro...

Volume 7 & 8 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

 With the commercial success of Band on the Run and Venus and Mars , Paul had all but erased the demon of being "merely" the cute Beatle.  He had his own success, with Wings, and could stand his own compositions up next to what he did in the Beatles.   Wings at the Speed of Sound went to number one on the strength of "Let "Em In" and "Silly Love Songs," which I chose not to include because in this project the critique that lead to its creation may not have been an issue.  Instead, I include his great, "With A Little Luck" that came out in 1978 on   London Town and the great single "Mull of Kyntyre," which is so damn Scottish its easy to see why it was a hit in Great Britain but no where else. I certainly don't agree with the contemporary critics who characterized George Harrison's Thirty Three and 1/3 as his "best release since All Things Must Pass."   In fact I think the earlier releases of Living In The Materi...