The website for the book Still the Greatest: The Essential Songs of the Beatles' Solo Careers
Hosts Ryan and Chris of the excellent McCartney podcast TAKE IT AWAY and I recently discussed THE SONGS THE BEATLES GAVE AWAY TO OTHER ARTISTS.
We play Paul and John’s unreleased demos and compare them with singles by the Stones, Peter and Gordon, Badfinger, Cilla Black, Billy J. Kramer and more.
If you want it, here it is, come and get it!
Episode 22 – Songs Paul Gave Away
From Thunder Press, it’s a take off on Where’s Waldo with twenty double-page illustrations packed with Beatles trivia in which you have to find Ringo and other Beatles-related people and things, and fifty pages of text.
The artwork by Oliver Goddard, Takayo Akiyama, and David Ryan Robinson is beautiful, each with their own inimitable style: from childlike whimsy to outrageous psychedelia.
With the prose I did my best to cover all the bases from the boys’ early days in Liverpool to their final album, Abbey Road, all told from Ringo’s perspective.
You can look inside at Amazon here:
Richard Linklater’s terrific film Boyhood has a great sequence where the father, Ethan Hawke, gives his son a mix of solo Beatles tracks. Buzzfeed printed Hawke’s playlist along with his heartfelt note about how coming to terms with the Beatles’ breakup echoed coming to terms with his own divorce. Thanks to Hawke and Linklater for reminding the world that the great Beatle music didn’t stop in 1970!
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ethanhawke/boyhood-the-black-album?bftw=main#3f36lx9
For the first time, Apple and iTunes released a compilation of solo songs featuring cuts by all four Beatles last month. Perhaps they are running out of ways of repackaging the ’60s catalog and are testing the waters for a whole new era in (solo) Beatles collections, if all the estates can get on the same page regarding the licensing issues. Obviously, I think that would be fantastic, though personally I think they could have chosen stronger songs to make a splashier statement for this first effort. Still, it must be said that George’s “Let it Down” and Paul’s “Call Me Back Again” were pretty out-of-the-box choices, so you have to give them props for that. John’s “Love” is a near-standard, and Ringo’s “Walk With Me” is a reunion with Paul, so those are more obvious choices for what will hopefully become a new tradition. Here’s a recent article on the e.p.:
http://ultimateclassicrock.com/beatles-free-itunes/
Here’s a great website with all the daily Beatle news:
