Surprised by Love

So, for Christmas my niece, Eva, and my nephew, Ezra, were kind enough to send me a $25 gift certificate to Barnes & Noble. After much consideration, I decided to take a little bit of a risk and pick up the new Beatles album Love.

Now, if you're not familiar with the concept, it's pretty simple: in order to score the Cirque du Soleil show based on the music of The Beatles—also called Love, of course—George Martin and his son Giles went back into the archives at Abbey Road Studios, grabbed all of the original four-track recordings and…well, I think the phrase the cool kids are using today is something like "mashed them up."

Let me repeat that, clearly: they made new Beatles songs out of bits and pieces of old Beatles songs, in both stereo and 5.1 Dolby surround.

Sounds horrible doesn't it? A high-gloss, reanimated FrankenBeatle nightmare stumbling around and chucking fond memories into wells before the torch bearing purists chase it down and burn it, right?

Well, it's not. It's actually pretty breathtaking.

I'm not going to gush over it too much; the link's up there and y'all can check out snippets of the songs to see if it's to your taste. Plus, there's a great podcast interview with Giles Martin over at NPR's All Songs Considered that'll let you hear the music with some context. Please, feel free.

I'm also not going to justify the project too much. Sure, it was done by George Martin and had the approval of the surviving Beatles and the widows of the dead Beatles, but the cynics will just say they're milking more money from a dated catalog, and I don't know how to argue against that position effectively. So I'm not going to bother.

I will say this: I've been listening to the music of The Beatles—really listening to it, intently listening to it—for over 25 years, now, and it sometimes feels like the musical equivalent of comfort food: it's great, it's easy, it's nice, but it's not very surprising. Love is amazing in that it puts an element of surprise and wonder back into music I've come to love so much that I take it for granted. Sometimes it was so poignant that I was moved to tears.

Also, there's this totally awesome transition into "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" that makes the song seem to coalesce out of the air as if a bunch of fireflies gradually stopped flying randomly and eased into some fragile and complicated ballet. It's weird and beautiful and it really reminds you that this is a song about hallucinating.

That alone was worth the price of admission to me.