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path-of-my-childhood · 4 years ago

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Musicians On Musicians: Paul McCartney & Taylor Swift

By: Patrick Doyle for Rolling Stone Date: November 13th 2020

On songwriting secrets, making albums at home, and what they’ve learned during the pandemic.

Taylor Swift arrived early to Paul McCartney’s London office in October, “mask on, brimming with excitement.” “I mostly work from home these days,” she writes about that day, “and today feels like a rare school field trip that you actually want to go on.”

Swift showed up without a team, doing her own hair and makeup. In addition to being two of the most famous pop songwriters in the world, Swift and McCartney have spent the past year on similar journeys. McCartney, isolated at home in the U.K., recorded McCartney III. Like his first solo album, in 1970, he played nearly all of the instruments himself, resulting in some of his most wildly ambitious songs in a long time. Swift also took some new chances, writing over email with the National’s Aaron Dessner and recording the raw Folklore, which abandons arena pop entirely in favor of rich character songs. It’s the bestselling album of 2020.

Swift listened to McCartney III as she prepared for today’s conversation; McCartney delved into Folkore. Before the photo shoot, Swift caught up with his daughters Mary (who would be photographing them) and Stella (who designed Swift’s clothes; the two are close friends). “I’ve met Paul a few times, mostly onstage at parties, but we’ll get to that later,” Swift writes. “Soon he walks in with his wife, Nancy. They’re a sunny and playful pair, and I immediately feel like this will be a good day. During the shoot, Paul dances and takes almost none of it too seriously and sings along to Motown songs playing from the speakers. A few times Mary scolds, ‘Daaad, try to stand still!’ And it feels like a window into a pretty awesome family dynamic. We walk into his office for a chat, and after I make a nervous request, Paul is kind enough to handwrite my favorite lyric of his and sign it. He makes a joke about me selling it, and I laugh because it’s something I know I’ll cherish for the rest of my life. That’s around the time when we start talking about music.”

Taylor Swift: I think it’s important to note that if this year had gone the way that we thought it was going to go, you and I would have played Glastonbury this year, and instead, you and I both made albums in isolation.

Paul McCartney: Yeah!

Swift: And I remember thinking it would have been so much fun because the times that I’ve run into you, I correlate with being some of the most fun nights of my life. I was at a party with you, when everybody just started playing music. And it was Dave Grohl playing, and you...

McCartney: You were playing one of his songs, weren’t you?

Swift: Yes, I was playing his song called “Best of You,” but I was playing it on piano, and he didn’t recognize it until about halfway through. I just remember thinking, “Are you the catalyst for the most fun times ever?” Is it your willingness to get up and play music that makes everyone feel like this is a thing that can happen tonight?

McCartney: I mean, I think it’s a bit of everything, isn’t it? I’ll tell you who was very... Reese Witherspoon was like, “Are you going to sing?” I said “Oh, I don’t know.” She said, “You’ve got to, yeah!” She’s bossing me around. So I said, “Whoa,” so it’s a bit of that.

Swift: I love that person, because the party does not turn musical without that person.

McCartney: Yeah, that’s true.

Swift: If nobody says, “Can you guys play music?” we’re not going to invite ourselves up onstage at whatever living-room party it is.

McCartney: I seem to remember Woody Harrelson got on the piano, and he starts playing “Let It Be,” and I’m thinking, “I can do that better.” So I said, “Come on, move over, Woody.” So we’re both playing it. It was really nice... I love people like Dan Aykroyd, who’s just full of energy and he loves his music so much, but he’s not necessarily a musician, but he just wanders around the room, just saying, “You got to get up, got to get up, do some stuff.”

Swift: I listened to your new record. And I loved a lot of things about it, but it really did feel like kind of a flex to write, produce, and play every instrument on every track. To me, that’s like flexing a muscle and saying, “I can do all this on my own if I have to.”

McCartney: Well, I don’t think like that, I must admit. I just picked up some of these instruments over the years. We had a piano at home that my dad played, so I picked around on that. I wrote the melody to “When I’m 64” when I was, you know, a teenager.

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: When the Beatles went to Hamburg, there were always drum kits knocking around, so when there was a quiet moment, I’d say, “Do you mind if I have a knock around?” So I was able to practice, you know, without practicing. That’s why I play right-handed. Guitar was just the first instrument I got. Guitar turned to bass; it also turned into ukulele, mandolin. Suddenly, it’s like, “Wow,” but it’s really only two or three instruments.

Swift: Well, I think that’s downplaying it a little bit. In my mind, it came with a visual of you being in the country, kind of absorbing the sort of do-it-yourself [quality] that has had to come with the quarantine and this pandemic. I found that I’ve adapted a do-it-yourself mentality to a lot of things in my career that I used to outsource. I’m just wondering what a day of recording in the pandemic looked like for you.

McCartney: Well, I’m very lucky because I have a studio that’s, like, 20 minutes away from where I live. We were in lockdown on a farm, a sheep farm with my daughter Mary and her four kids and her husband. So I had four of my grandkids, I had Mary, who’s a great cook, so I would just drive myself to the studio. And there were two other guys that could come in and we’d be very careful and distanced and everything: my engineer Steve, and then my equipment guy Keith. So the three of us made the record, and I just started off. I had to do a little bit of film music - I had to do an instrumental for a film thing - so I did that. And I just kept going, and that turned into the opening track on the album. I would just come in, say, “Oh, yeah, what are we gonna do?” [Then] have some sort of idea, and start doing it. Normally, I’d start with the instrument I wrote it on, either piano or guitar, and then probably add some drums and then a bit of bass till it started to sound like a record, and then just gradually layer it all up. It was fun.

Swift: That’s so cool.

McCartney: What about yours? You’re playing guitar and piano on yours.

Swift: Yeah, on some of it, but a lot of it was made with Aaron Dessner, who’s in a band called the National that I really love. And I had met him at a concert a year before, and I had a conversation with him, asking him how he writes. It’s my favorite thing to ask people who I’m a fan of. And he had an interesting answer. He said, “All the band members live in different parts of the world. So I make tracks. And I send them to our lead singer, Matt, and he writes the top line.” I just remember thinking, “That is really efficient.” And I kind of stored it in my brain as a future idea for a project. You know, how you have these ideas... “Maybe one day I’ll do this.” I always had in my head: “Maybe one day I’ll work with Aaron Dessner.”

So when lockdown happened, I was in L.A., and we kind of got stuck there. It’s not a terrible place to be stuck. We were there for four months maybe, and during that time, I sent an email to Aaron Dessner and I said, “Do you think you would want to work during this time? Because my brain is all scrambled, and I need to make something, even if we’re just kind of making songs that we don’t know what will happen...”

McCartney: Yeah, that was the thing. You could do stuff - you didn’t really worry it was going to turn into anything.

Swift: Yeah, and it turned out he had been writing instrumental tracks to keep from absolutely going crazy during the pandemic as well, so he sends me this file of probably 30 instrumentals, and the first one I opened ended up being a song called “Cardigan,” and it really happened rapid-fire like that. He’d send me a track; he’d make new tracks, add to the folder; I would write the entire top line for a song, and he wouldn’t know what the song would be about, what it was going to be called, where I was going to put the chorus. I had originally thought, “Maybe I’ll make an album in the next year, and put it out in January or something,” but it ended up being done and we put it out in July. And I just thought there are no rules anymore, because I used to put all these parameters on myself, like, “How will this song sound in a stadium? How will this song sound on radio?” If you take away all the parameters, what do you make? And I guess the answer is Folklore.

McCartney: And it’s more music for yourself than music that’s got to go do a job. My thing was similar to that: After having done this little bit of film music, I had a lot of stuff that I had been working on, but I’d said, “I’m just going home now,” and it’d be left half-finished. So I just started saying, “Well, what about that? I never finished that.” So we’d pull it out, and we said, “Oh, well, this could be good.” And because it didn’t have to amount to anything, I would say, “Ah, I really want to do tape loops. I don’t care if they fit on this song, I just want to do some.” So I go and make some tape loops, and put them in the song, just really trying to do stuff that I fancy.

I had no idea it would end up as an album; I may have been a bit less indulgent, but if a track was eight minutes long, to tell you the truth, what I thought was, “I’ll be taking it home tonight, Mary will be cooking, the grandkids will all be there running around, and someone, maybe Simon, Mary’s husband, is going to say, ‘What did you do today?’ And I’m going to go, ‘Oh,’ and then get my phone and play it for them.” So this became the ritual.

Swift: That’s the coziest thing I’ve ever heard.

McCartney: Well, it’s like eight minutes long, and I said, “I hate it when I’m playing someone something and it finishes after three minutes.” I kind of like that it just [continues] on.

Swift: You want to stay in the zone.

McCartney: It just keeps going on. I would just come home, “Well, what did you do today?” “Oh, well, I did this. I’m halfway through this,” or, “We finished this.”

Swift: I was wondering about the numerology element to McCartney III. McCartney I, II, and III have all come out on years with zeroes.

McCartney: Ends of decades.

Swift: Was that important?

McCartney: Yeah, well, this was being done in 2020, and I didn’t really think about it. I think everyone expected great things of 2020. “It’s gonna be great! Look at that number! 2020! Auspicious!” Then suddenly Covid hit, and it was like, “That’s gonna be auspicious all right, but maybe for the wrong reasons.” Someone said to me, “Well, you put out McCartney right after the Beatles broke up, and that was 1970, and then you did McCartney II in 1980.” And I said, “Oh, I’m going to release this in 2020 just for whatever you call it, the numerology...”

Swift: The numerology, the kind of look, the symbolism. I love numbers. Numbers kind of rule my whole world. The numbers 13... 89 is a big one. I have a few others that I find...

McCartney: Thirteen is lucky for some.

Swift: Yeah, it’s lucky for me. It’s my birthday. It’s all these weird coincidences of good things that have happened. Now, when I see it places, I look at it as a sign that things are going the way they’re supposed to. They may not be good now, they could be painful now, but things are on a track. I don’t know, I love the numerology.

McCartney: It’s spooky, Taylor. It’s very spooky. Now wait a minute: Where’d you get 89?

Swift: That’s when I was born, in 1989, and so I see it in different places and I just think it’s...

McCartney: No, it’s good. I like that, where certain things you attach yourself to, and you get a good feeling off them. I think that’s great.

Swift: Yeah, one of my favorite artists, Bon Iver, he has this thing with the number 22. But I was also wondering: You have always kind of seeked out a band or a communal atmosphere with like, you know, the Beatles and Wings, and then Egypt Station. I thought it was interesting when I realized you had made a record with no one else. I just wondered, did that feel natural?

McCartney: It’s one of the things I’ve done. Like with McCartney, because the Beatles had broken up, there was no alternative but to get a drum kit at home, get a guitar, get an amp, get a bass, and just make something for myself. So on that album, which I didn’t really expect to do very well, I don’t think it did. But people sort of say, “I like that. It was a very casual album.” It didn’t really have to mean anything. So I’ve done that, the play-everything-myself thing. And then I discovered synths and stuff, and sequencers, so I had a few of those at home. I just thought I’m going to play around with this and record it, so that became McCartney II. But it’s a thing I do. Certain people can do it. Stevie Wonder can do it. Stevie Winwood, I believe, has done it. So there are certain people quite like that.

When you’re working with someone else, you have to worry about their variances. Whereas your own variance, you kind of know it. It’s just something I’ve grown to like. Once you can do it, it becomes a little bit addictive. I actually made some records under the name the Fireman.

Swift: Love a pseudonym.

McCartney: Yeah, for the fun! But, you know, let’s face it, you crave fame and attention when you’re young. And I just remembered the other day, I was the guy in the Beatles that would write to journalists and say [speaks in a formal voice]: “We are a semiprofessional rock combo, and I’d think you’d like [us]... We’ve written over 100 songs (which was a lie), my friend John and I. If you mention us in your newspaper...” You know, I was always, like, craving the attention.

Swift: The hustle! That’s so great, though.

McCartney: Well, yeah, you need that.

Swift: Yeah, I think, when a pseudonym comes in is when you still have a love for making the work and you don’t want the work to become overshadowed by this thing that’s been built around you, based on what people know about you. And that’s when it’s really fun to create fake names and write under them.

McCartney: Do you ever do that?

Swift: Oh, yeah.

McCartney: Oh, yeah? Oh, well, we didn’t know that! Is that a widely known fact?

Swift: I think it is now, but it wasn’t. I wrote under the name Nils Sjöberg because those are two of the most popular names of Swedish males. I wrote this song called “This Is What You Came For” that Rihanna ended up singing. And nobody knew for a while. I remembered always hearing that when Prince wrote “Manic Monday,” they didn’t reveal it for a couple of months.

McCartney: Yeah, it also proves you can do something without the fame tag. I did something for Peter and Gordon; my girlfriend’s brother and his mate were in a band called Peter and Gordon. And I used to write under the name Bernard Webb.

Swift: [Laughs.] That’s a good one! I love it.

McCartney: As Americans call it, Ber-nard Webb. I did the Fireman thing. I worked with a producer, a guy called Youth, who’s this real cool dude. We got along great. He did a mix for me early on, and we got friendly. I would just go into the studio, and he would say, “Hey, what about this groove?” and he’d just made me have a little groove going. He’d say, “You ought to put some bass on it. Put some drums on it.” I’d just spend the whole day putting stuff on it. And we’d make these tracks, and nobody knew who Fireman was for a while. We must have sold all of 15 copies.

Swift: Thrilling, absolutely thrilling.

McCartney: And we didn’t mind, you know?

Swift: I think it’s so cool that you do projects that are just for you. Because I went with my family to see you in concert in 2010 or 2011, and the thing I took away from the show most was that it was the most selfless set list I had ever seen. It was completely geared toward what it would thrill us to hear. It had new stuff, but it had every hit we wanted to hear, every song we’d ever cried to, every song people had gotten married to, or been brokenhearted to. And I just remembered thinking, “I’ve got to remember that,” that you do that set list for your fans.

McCartney: You do that, do you?

Swift: I do now. I think that learning that lesson from you taught me at a really important stage in my career that if people want to hear “Love Story” and “Shake It Off,” and I’ve played them 300 million times, play them the 300-millionth-and-first time. I think there are times to be selfish in your career, and times to be selfless, and sometimes they line up.

McCartney: I always remembered going to concerts as a kid, completely before the Beatles, and I really hoped they would play the ones I loved. And if they didn’t, it was kind of disappointing. I had no money, and the family wasn’t wealthy. So this would be a big deal for me, to save up for months to afford the concert ticket.

Swift: Yeah, it feels like a bond. It feels like that person on the stage has given something, and it makes you as a crowd want to give even more back, in terms of applause, in terms of dedication. And I just remembered feeling that bond in the crowd, and thinking, “He’s up there playing these Beatles songs, my dad is crying, my mom is trying to figure out how to work her phone because her hands are shaking so much.” Because seeing the excitement course through not only me, but my family and the entire crowd in Nashville, it just was really special. I love learning lessons and not having to learn them the hard way. Like learning nice lessons I really value.

McCartney: Well, that’s great, and I’m glad that set you on that path. I understand people who don’t want to do that, and if you do, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s a jukebox show.” I hear what they’re saying. But I think it’s a bit of a cheat, because the people who come to our shows have spent a lot of money. We can afford to go to a couple of shows and it doesn’t make much difference. But a lot of ordinary working folks... it’s a big event in their life, and so I try and deliver. I also, like you say, try and put in a few weirdos.

Swift: That’s the best. I want to hear current things, too, to update me on where the artist is. I was wondering about lyrics, and where you were lyrically when you were making this record. Because when I was making Folklore, I went lyrically in a total direction of escapism and romanticism. And I wrote songs imagining I was, like, a pioneer woman in a forbidden love affair [laughs]. I was completely...

McCartney: Was this “I want to give you a child”? Is that one of the lines?

Swift: Oh, that’s a song called “Peace.”

McCartney: “Peace,” I like that one.

Swift: “Peace” is actually more rooted in my personal life. I know you have done a really excellent job of this in your personal life: carving out a human life within a public life, and how scary that can be when you do fall in love and you meet someone, especially if you’ve met someone who has a very grounded, normal way of living. I, oftentimes, in my anxieties, can control how I am as a person and how normal I act and rationalize things, but I cannot control if there are 20 photographers outside in the bushes and what they do and if they follow our car and if they interrupt our lives. I can’t control if there’s going to be a fake weird headline about us in the news tomorrow.

McCartney: So how does that go? Does your partner sympathize with that and understand?

Swift: Oh, absolutely.

McCartney: They have to, don’t they?

Swift: But I think that in knowing him and being in the relationship I am in now, I have definitely made decisions that have made my life feel more like a real life and less like just a storyline to be commented on in tabloids. Whether that’s deciding where to live, who to hang out with, when to not take a picture - the idea of privacy feels so strange to try to explain, but it’s really just trying to find bits of normalcy. That’s what that song “Peace” is talking about. Like, would it be enough if I could never fully achieve the normalcy that we both crave? Stella always tells me that she had as normal a childhood as she could ever hope for under the circumstances.

McCartney: Yeah, it was very important to us to try and keep their feet on the ground amongst the craziness.

Swift: She went to a regular school...

McCartney: Yeah, she did.

Swift: And you would go trick-or-treating with them, wearing masks.

McCartney: All of them did, yeah. It was important, but it worked pretty well, because when they kind of reached adulthood, they would meet other kids who might have gone to private schools, who were a little less grounded.

And they could be the budding mothers to [kids]. I remember Mary had a friend, Orlando. Not Bloom. She used to really counsel him. And it’s ’cause she’d gone through that. Obviously, they got made fun of, my kids. They’d come in the classroom and somebody would sing, “Na na na na,” you know, one of the songs. And they’d have to handle that. They’d have to front it out.

Swift: Did that give you a lot of anxiety when you had kids, when you felt like all this pressure that’s been put on me is spilling over onto them, that they didn’t sign up for it? Was that hard for you?

McCartney: Yeah, a little bit, but it wasn’t like it is now. You know, we were just living a kind of semi-hippie life, where we withdrew from a lot of stuff. The kids would be doing all the ordinary things, and their school friends would be coming up to the house and having parties, and it was just great. I remember one lovely evening when it was Stella’s birthday, and she brought a bunch of school kids up. And, you know, they’d all ignore me. It happens very quickly. At first they’re like, “Oh, yeah, he’s like a famous guy,” and then it’s like [yawns]. I like that. I go in the other room and suddenly I hear this music going on. And one of the kids, his name was Luke, and he’s doing break dancing.

Swift: Ohhh!

McCartney: He was a really good break dancer, so all the kids are hanging out. That allowed them to be kind of normal with those kids. The other thing is, I don’t live fancy. I really don’t. Sometimes it’s a little bit of an embarrassment, if I’ve got someone coming to visit me, or who I know…

Swift: Cares about that stuff?

McCartney: Who’s got a nice big house, you know. Quincy Jones came to see me and I’m, like, making him a veggie burger or something. I’m doing some cooking. This was after I’d lost Linda, in between there. But the point I’m making is that I’m very consciously thinking, “Oh, God, Quincy’s got to be thinking, ‘What is this guy on? He hasn’t got big things going on. It’s not a fancy house at all. And we’re eating in the kitchen! He’s not even got the dining room going,’” you know?

Swift: I think that sounds like a perfect day.

McCartney: But that’s me. I’m awkward like that. That’s my kind of thing. Maybe I should have, like, a big stately home. Maybe I should get a staff. But I think I couldn’t do that. I’d be so embarrassed. I’d want to walk around dressed as I want to walk around, or naked, if I wanted to.

Swift: That can’t happen in Downton Abbey.

McCartney: [Laughs.] Exactly.

Swift: I remember what I wanted to know about, which is lyrics. Like, when you’re in this kind of strange, unparalleled time, and you’re making this record, are lyrics first? Or is it when you get a little melodic idea?

McCartney: It was a bit of both. As it kind of always is with me. There’s no fixed way. People used to ask me and John, “Well, who does the words, who does the music?” I used to say, “We both do both.” We used to say we don’t have a formula, and we don’t want one. Because the minute we get a formula, we should rip it up. I will sometimes, as I did with a couple of songs on this album, sit down at the piano and just start noodling around, and I’ll get a little idea and start to fill that out. So the lyrics - for me, it’s following a trail. I’ll start [sings “Find My Way,” a song from “McCartney III”]: “I can find my way. I know my left from right, da da da.” And I’ll just sort of fill it in. Like, we know this song, and I’m trying to remember the lyrics. Sometimes I’ll just be inspired by something. I had a little book which was all about the constellations and the stars and the orbits of Venus and...

Swift: Oh, I know that song - “The Kiss of Venus”?

McCartney: Yeah, “The Kiss of Venus.” And I just thought, “That’s a nice phrase.” So I was actually just taking phrases out of the book, harmonic sounds. And the book is talking about the maths of the universe, and how when things orbit around each other, and if you trace all the patterns, it becomes like a lotus flower.

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: It’s very magical.

Swift: That is magical. I definitely relate to needing to find magical things in this very not-magical time, needing to read more books and learn to sew, and watch movies that take place hundreds of years ago. In a time where, if you look at the news, you just want to have a panic attack - I really relate to the idea that you are thinking about stars and constellations.

McCartney: Did you do that on Folklore?

Swift: Yes. I was reading so much more than I ever did, and watching so many more films.

McCartney: What stuff were you reading?

Swift: I was reading, you know, books like Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, which I highly recommend, and books that dealt with times past, a world that doesn’t exist anymore. I was also using words I always wanted to use - kind of bigger, flowerier, prettier words, like “epiphany,” in songs. I always thought, “Well, that’ll never track on pop radio,” but when I was making this record, I thought, “What tracks? Nothing makes sense anymore. If there’s chaos everywhere, why don’t I just use the damn word I want to use in the song?”

McCartney: Exactly. So you’d see the word in a book and think, “I love that word”?

Swift: Yeah, I have favorite words, like “elegies” and “epiphany” and “divorcée,” and just words that I think sound beautiful, and I have lists and lists of them.

McCartney: How about “marzipan”?

Swift: Love “marzipan.”

McCartney: The other day, I was remembering when we wrote “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”: “kaleidoscope.”

Swift: “Kaleidoscope” is one of mine! I have a song on 1989, a song called “Welcome to New York,” that I put the word “kaleidoscope” in just because I’m obsessed with the word.

McCartney: I think a love of words is a great thing, particularly if you’re going to try to write a lyric, and for me, it’s like, “What is this going to say to that person?” I often feel like I’m writing to someone who is not doing so well. So I’m trying to write songs that might help. Not in a goody-goody, crusading kind of way, but just thinking there have been so many times in my life when I’ve heard a song and felt so much better. I think that’s the angle I want, that inspirational thing.

I remember once, a friend of mine from Liverpool, we were teenagers and we were going to a fairground. He was a schoolmate, and we had these jackets that had a little fleck in the material, which was the cool thing at the time.

Swift: We should have done matching jackets for this photo shoot.

McCartney: Find me a fleck, I’m in. But we went to the fair, and I just remember - this is what happens with songs - there was this girl at the fair. This is just a little Liverpool fair - it was in a place called Sefton Park - and there was this girl, who was so beautiful. She wasn’t a star. She was so beautiful. Everyone was following her, and it’s like, “Wow.” It’s like a magical scene, you know? But all this gave me a headache, so I ended up going back to his house - I didn’t normally get headaches. And we thought, “What can we do?” So we put on the Elvis song “All Shook Up.” By the end of that song, my headache had gone. I thought, you know, “That’s powerful.”

Swift: That really is powerful.

McCartney: I love that, when people stop me in the street and say, “Oh, I was going through an illness and I listened to a lot of your stuff, and I’m better now and it got me through,” or kids will say, “It got me through exams.” You know, they’re studying, they’re going crazy, but they put your music on. I’m sure it happens with a lot of your fans. It inspires them, you know?

Swift: Yeah, I definitely think about that as a goal. There’s so much stress everywhere you turn that I kind of wanted to make an album that felt sort of like a hug, or like your favorite sweater that makes you feel like you want to put it on.

McCartney: What, a “cardigan”?

Swift: Like a good cardigan, a good, worn-in cardigan. Or something that makes you reminisce on your childhood. I think sadness can be cozy. It can obviously be traumatic and stressful, too, but I kind of was trying to lean into sadness that feels like somehow enveloping in not such a scary way - like nostalgia and whimsy incorporated into a feeling like you’re not all right. Because I don’t think anybody was really feeling like they were in their prime this year. Isolation can mean escaping into your imagination in a way that’s kind of nice.

McCartney: I think a lot of people have found that. I would say to people, “I feel a bit guilty about saying I’m actually enjoying this quarantine thing,” and people go, “Yeah, I know, don’t say it to anyone.” A lot of people are really suffering.

Swift: Because there’s a lot in life that’s arbitrary. Completely and totally arbitrary. And [the quarantine] is really shining a light on that, and also a lot of things we have that we outsource that you can actually do yourself.

McCartney: I love that. This is why I said I live simply. That’s, like, at the core of it. With so many things, something goes wrong and you go, “Oh, I’ll get somebody to fix that.” And then it’s like, “No, let me have a look at it...”

Swift: Get a hammer and a nail.

McCartney: “Maybe I can put that picture up.” It’s not rocket science. The period after the Beatles, when we went to live in Scotland on a really - talk about dumpy - little farm. I mean, I see pictures of it now and I’m not ashamed, but I’m almost ashamed. Because it’s like, “God, nobody’s cleaned up around here.”

But it was really a relief. Because when I was with the Beatles, we’d formed Apple Records, and if I wanted a Christmas tree, someone would just buy it. And I thought, after a while, “No, you know what? I really would like to go and buy our Christmas tree. Because that’s what everyone does.” So you go down - “I’ll have that one” - and you carried it back. I mean, it’s little, but it’s huge at the same time.

I needed a table in Scotland and I was looking through a catalog and I thought, “I could make one. I did woodwork in school, so I know what a dovetail joint is.” So I just figured it out. I’m just sitting in the kitchen, and I’m whittling away at this wood and I made this little joint. There was no nail technology - it was glue. And I was scared to put it together. I said, “It’s not going to fit,” but one day, I got my woodwork glue and thought, “There’s no going back.” But it turned out to be a real nice little table I was very proud of. It was that sense of achievement.

The weird thing was, Stella went up to Scotland recently and I said, “Isn’t it there?” and she said, “No.” Anyway, I searched for it. Nobody remembered it. Somebody said, “Well, there’s a pile of wood in the corner of one of the barns, maybe that’s it. Maybe they used it for firewood.” I said, “No, it’s not firewood.” Anyway, we found it, and do you know how joyous that was for me? I was like, “You found my table?!” Somebody might say that’s a bit boring.

Swift: No, it’s cool!

McCartney: But it was a real sort of great thing for me to be able to do stuff for yourself. You were talking about sewing. I mean normally, in your position, you’ve got any amount of tailors.

Swift: Well, there’s been a bit of a baby boom recently; several of my friends have gotten pregnant.

McCartney: Oh, yeah, you’re at the age.

Swift: And I was just thinking, “I really want to spend time with my hands, making something for their children.” So I made this really cool flying-squirrel stuffed animal that I sent to one of my friends. I sent a teddy bear to another one, and I started making these little silk baby blankets with embroidery. It’s gotten pretty fancy. And I’ve been painting a lot.

McCartney: What do you paint? Watercolors?

Swift: Acrylic or oil. Whenever I do watercolor, all I paint is flowers. When I have oil, I really like to do landscapes. I always kind of return to painting a lonely little cottage on a hill.

McCartney: It’s a bit of a romantic dream. I agree with you, though, I think you’ve got to have dreams, particularly this year. You’ve got to have something to escape to. When you say “escapism,” it sounds like a dirty word, but this year, it definitely wasn’t. And in the books you’re reading, you’ve gone into that world. That’s, I think, a great thing. Then you come back out. I normally will read a lot before I go to bed. So I’ll come back out, then I’ll go to sleep, so I think it really is nice to have those dreams that can be fantasies or stuff you want to achieve.

Swift: You’re creating characters. This was the first album where I ever created characters, or wrote about the life of a real-life person. There’s a song called “The Last Great American Dynasty” that’s about this real-life heiress who lived just an absolutely chaotic, hectic...

McCartney: She’s a fantasy character?

Swift: She’s a real person. Who lived in the house that I live in.

McCartney: She’s a real person? I listened to that and I thought, “Who is this?”

Swift: Her name was Rebekah Harkness. And she lived in the house that I ended up buying in Rhode Island. That’s how I learned about her. But she was a woman who was very, very talked about, and everything she did was scandalous. I found a connection in that. But I also was thinking about how you write “Eleanor Rigby” and go into that whole story about what all these people in this town are doing and how their lives intersect, and I hadn’t really done that in a very long time with my music. It had always been so microscope personal.

McCartney: Yeah, ’cause you were writing breakup songs like they were going out of style.

Swift: I was, before my luck changed [laughs]. I still write breakup songs. I love a good breakup song. Because somewhere in the world, I always have a friend going through a breakup, and that will make me write one.

McCartney: Yeah, this goes back to this thing of me and John: When you’ve got a formula, break it. I don’t have a formula. It’s the mood I’m in. So I love the idea of writing a character. And, you know, trying to think, “What am I basing this on?” So “Eleanor Rigby” was based on old ladies I knew as a kid. For some reason or other, I got great relationships with a couple of local old ladies. I was thinking the other day, I don’t know how I met them, it wasn’t like they were family. I’d just run into them, and I’d do their shopping for them.

Swift: That’s amazing.

McCartney: It just felt good to me. I would sit and talk, and they’d have amazing stories. That’s what I liked. They would have stories from the wartime - because I was born actually in the war - and so these old ladies, they were participating in the war. This one lady I used to sort of just hang out with, she had a crystal radio that I found very magical. In the war, a lot of people made their own radios - you’d make them out of crystals [sings “The Twilight Zone” theme].

Swift: How did I not know this? That sounds like something I would have tried to learn about.

McCartney: It’s interesting, because there is a lot of parallels with the virus and lockdowns and wartime. It happened to everyone. Like, this isn’t HIV, or SARS, or Avian flu, which happened to others, generally. This has happened to everyone, all around the world. That’s the defining thing about this particular virus. And, you know, my parents... it happened to everyone in Britain, including the queen and Churchill. War happened. So they were all part of this thing, and they all had to figure out a way through it. So you figured out Folklore. I figured out McCartney III.

Swift: And a lot of people have been baking sourdough bread. Whatever gets you through!

McCartney: Some people used to make radios. And they’d take a crystal - we should look it up, but it actually is a crystal. I thought, “Oh, no, they just called it a crystal radio,” but it’s actually crystals like we know and love.

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: And somehow they get the radio waves - this crystal attracts them - they tune it in, and that’s how they used to get their news. Back to “Eleanor Rigby,” so I would think of her and think of what she’s doing and then just try to get lyrical, just try to bring poetry into it, words you love, just try to get images like “picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been,” and Father McKenzie “is darning his socks in the night.” You know, he’s a religious man, so I could’ve said, you know, “preparing his Bible,” which would have been more obvious. But “darning his socks” kind of says more about him. So you get into this lovely fantasy. And that’s the magic of songs, you know. It’s a black hole, and then you start doing this process, and then there’s this beautiful little flower that you’ve just made. So it is very like embroidery, making something.

Swift: Making a table.

McCartney: Making a table.

Swift: Wow, it would’ve been so fun to play Glastonbury for the 50th anniversary together.

McCartney: It would’ve been great, wouldn’t it? And I was going to be asking you to play with me.

Swift: Were you going to invite me? I was hoping that you would. I was going to ask you.

McCartney: I would’ve done “Shake It Off.”

Swift: Oh, my God, that would have been amazing.

McCartney: I know it, it’s in C!

Swift: One thing I just find so cool about you is that you really do seem to have the joy of it, still, just no matter what. You seem to have the purest sense of joy of playing an instrument and making music, and that’s just the best, I think.

McCartney: Well, we’re just so lucky, aren’t we?

Swift: We’re really lucky.

McCartney: I don’t know if it ever happens to you, but with me, it’s like, “Oh, my god, I’ve ended up as a musician.”

Swift: Yeah, I can’t believe it’s my job.

McCartney: I must tell you a story I told Mary the other day, which is just one of my favorite little sort of Beatles stories. We were in a terrible, big blizzard, going from London to Liverpool, which we always did. We’d be working in London and then drive back in the van, just the four of us with our roadie, who would be driving. And this was a blizzard. You couldn’t see the road. At one point, it slid off and it went down an embankment. So it was “Ahhh,” a bunch of yelling. We ended up at the bottom. It didn’t flip, luckily, but so there we are, and then it’s like, “Oh, how are we going to get back up? We’re in a van. It’s snowing, and there’s no way.” We’re all standing around in a little circle, and thinking, “What are we going to do?” And one of us said, “Well, something will happen.” And I thought that was just the greatest. I love that, that’s a philosophy.

Swift: “Something will happen.”

McCartney: And it did. We sort of went up the bank, we thumbed a lift, we got the lorry driver to take us, and Mal, our roadie, sorted the van and everything. So that was kind of our career. And I suppose that’s like how I ended up being a musician and a songwriter: “Something will happen.”

Swift: That’s the best.

McCartney: It’s so stupid it’s brilliant. It’s great if you’re ever in that sort of panic attack: “Oh, my God,” or, “Ahhh, what am I going to do?”

Swift: “Something will happen.”

McCartney: All right then, thanks for doing this, and this was, you know, a lot of fun.

Swift: You’re the best. This was so awesome. Those were some quality stories!

#this just might be the longest post I have ever posted #I have so much work so I'll read and edit later #taylor swift #paul mccartney #Rolling Stone magazine #interview #folklore era

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sgt-paul · 4 years ago

Photo

MUSICIANS ON MUSICIANS: Paul McCartney & Taylor Swift

❝ During the shoot, Paul dances and takes almost none of it too seriously and sings along to Motown songs playing from the speakers. A few times Mary scolds, ‘Daaad, try to stand still!’ And it feels like a window into a pretty awesome family dynamic. ❞

interview below the cut:

Paul McCartney: Yeah!

McCartney: You were playing one of his songs, weren’t you?

McCartney: I mean, I think it’s a bit of everything, isn’t it? I’ll tell you who was very … Reese Witherspoon was like, “Are you going to sing?” I said “Oh, I don’t know.” She said, “You’ve got to, yeah!” She’s bossing me around. So I said, “Whoa,” so it’s a bit of that.

Swift: I love that person, because the party does not turn musical without that person.

McCartney: Yeah, that’s true.

Swift: If nobody says, “Can you guys play music?” we’re not going to invite ourselves up onstage at whatever living-room party it is.

McCartney: I seem to remember Woody Harrelson got on the piano, and he starts playing “Let It Be,” and I’m thinking, “I can do that better.” So I said, “Come on, move over, Woody.” So we’re both playing it. It was really nice.… I love people like Dan Aykroyd, who’s just full of energy and he loves his music so much, but he’s not necessarily a musician, but he just wanders around the room, just saying, “You got to get up, got to get up, do some stuff.”

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: Well, I’m very lucky because I have a studio that’s, like, 20 minutes away from where I live. We were in lockdown on a farm, a sheep farm with my daughter Mary and her four kids and her husband. So I had four of my grandkids, I had Mary, who’s a great cook, so I would just drive myself to the studio. And there were two other guys that could come in and we’d be very careful and distanced and everything: my engineer Steve, and then my equipment guy Keith. So the three of us made the record, and I just started off. I had to do a little bit of film music — I had to do an instrumental for a film thing — so I did that. And I just kept going, and that turned into the opening track on the album. I would just come in, say, “Oh, yeah, what are we gonna do?” [Then] have some sort of idea, and start doing it. Normally, I’d start with the instrument I wrote it on, either piano or guitar, and then probably add some drums and then a bit of bass till it started to sound like a record, and then just gradually layer it all up. It was fun.

Swift: That’s so cool.

McCartney: What about yours? You’re playing guitar and piano on yours.

Swift: Yeah, on some of it, but a lot of it was made with Aaron Dessner, who’s in a band called the National that I really love. And I had met him at a concert a year before, and I had a conversation with him, asking him how he writes. It’s my favorite thing to ask people who I’m a fan of. And he had an interesting answer. He said, “All the band members live in different parts of the world. So I make tracks. And I send them to our lead singer, Matt, and he writes the top line.” I just remember thinking, “That is really efficient.” And I kind of stored it in my brain as a future idea for a project. You know, how you have these ideas… “Maybe one day I’ll do this.” I always had in my head: “Maybe one day I’ll work with Aaron Dessner.”

McCartney: Yeah, that was the thing. You could do stuff — you didn’t really worry it was going to turn into anything.

Swift: That’s the coziest thing I’ve ever heard.

McCartney: Well, it’s like eight minutes long, and I said, “I hate it when I’m playing someone something and it finishes after three minutes.” I kind of like that it just [continues] on.

Swift: You want to stay in the zone.

McCartney: It just keeps going on. I would just come home, “Well, what did you do today?” “Oh, well, I did this. I’m halfway through this,” or, “We finished this.”

Swift: I was wondering about the numerology element to McCartney III. McCartney I, II, and III have all come out on years with zeroes.

McCartney: Ends of decades.

Swift: Was that important?

Swift: The numerology, the kind of look, the symbolism. I love numbers. Numbers kind of rule my whole world. The numbers 13 … 89 is a big one. I have a few others that I find…

McCartney: Thirteen is lucky for some.

McCartney: It’s spooky, Taylor. It’s very spooky. Now wait a minute: Where’d you get 89?

Swift: That’s when I was born, in 1989, and so I see it in different places and I just think it’s…

McCartney: No, it’s good. I like that, where certain things you attach yourself to, and you get a good feeling off them. I think that’s great.

Swift: Love a pseudonym.

McCartney: Yeah, for the fun! But, you know, let’s face it, you crave fame and attention when you’re young. And I just remembered the other day, I was the guy in the Beatles that would write to journalists and say [speaks in a formal voice]: “We are a semiprofessional rock combo, and I’d think you’d like [us].… We’ve written over 100 songs (which was a lie), my friend John and I. If you mention us in your newspaper…” You know, I was always, like, craving the attention.

Swift: The hustle! That’s so great, though.

McCartney: Well, yeah, you need that.

McCartney: Do you ever do that?

Swift: Oh, yeah.

McCartney: Oh, yeah? Oh, well, we didn’t know that! Is that a widely known fact?

Swift: [Laughs.] That’s a good one! I love it.

Swift: Thrilling, absolutely thrilling.

McCartney: And we didn’t mind, you know?

McCartney: You do that, do you?

McCartney: Well, that’s great, and I’m glad that set you on that path. I understand people who don’t want to do that, and if you do, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s a jukebox show.” I hear what they’re saying. But I think it’s a bit of a cheat, because the people who come to our shows have spent a lot of money. We can afford to go to a couple of shows and it doesn’t make much difference. But a lot of ordinary working folks … it’s a big event in their life, and so I try and deliver. I also, like you say, try and put in a few weirdos.

McCartney: Was this “I want to give you a child”? Is that one of the lines?

Swift: Oh, that’s a song called “Peace.”

McCartney: “Peace,” I like that one.

McCartney: So how does that go? Does your partner sympathize with that and understand?

Swift: Oh, absolutely.

McCartney: They have to, don’t they?

Swift: But I think that in knowing him and being in the relationship I am in now, I have definitely made decisions that have made my life feel more like a real life and less like just a storyline to be commented on in tabloids. Whether that’s deciding where to live, who to hang out with, when to not take a picture — the idea of privacy feels so strange to try to explain, but it’s really just trying to find bits of normalcy. That’s what that song “Peace” is talking about. Like, would it be enough if I could never fully achieve the normalcy that we both crave? Stella always tells me that she had as normal a childhood as she could ever hope for under the circumstances.

McCartney: Yeah, it was very important to us to try and keep their feet on the ground amongst the craziness.

Swift: She went to a regular school .…

McCartney: Yeah, she did.

Swift: And you would go trick-or-treating with them, wearing masks.

Swift: Ohhh!

Swift: Cares about that stuff?

Swift: I think that sounds like a perfect day.

Swift: That can’t happen in Downton Abbey.

McCartney: [Laughs.] Exactly.

McCartney: It was a bit of both. As it kind of always is with me. There’s no fixed way. People used to ask me and John, “Well, who does the words, who does the music?” I used to say, “We both do both.” We used to say we don’t have a formula, and we don’t want one. Because the minute we get a formula, we should rip it up. I will sometimes, as I did with a couple of songs on this album, sit down at the piano and just start noodling around, and I’ll get a little idea and start to fill that out. So the lyrics — for me, it’s following a trail. I’ll start [sings “Find My Way,” a song from “McCartney III”]: “I can find my way. I know my left from right, da da da.” And I’ll just sort of fill it in. Like, we know this song, and I’m trying to remember the lyrics. Sometimes I’ll just be inspired by something. I had a little book which was all about the constellations and the stars and the orbits of Venus and.…

Swift: Oh, I know that song — “The Kiss of Venus”?

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: It’s very magical.

Swift: That is magical. I definitely relate to needing to find magical things in this very not-magical time, needing to read more books and learn to sew, and watch movies that take place hundreds of years ago. In a time where, if you look at the news, you just want to have a panic attack — I really relate to the idea that you are thinking about stars and constellations.

McCartney: Did you do that on Folklore?

Swift: Yes. I was reading so much more than I ever did, and watching so many more films.

McCartney: What stuff were you reading?

Swift: I was reading, you know, books like Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, which I highly recommend, and books that dealt with times past, a world that doesn’t exist anymore. I was also using words I always wanted to use — kind of bigger, flowerier, prettier words, like “epiphany,” in songs. I always thought, “Well, that’ll never track on pop radio,” but when I was making this record, I thought, “What tracks? Nothing makes sense anymore. If there’s chaos everywhere, why don’t I just use the damn word I want to use in the song?”

McCartney: Exactly. So you’d see the word in a book and think, “I love that word”?

Swift: Yeah, I have favorite words, like “elegies” and “epiphany” and “divorcée,” and just words that I think sound beautiful, and I have lists and lists of them.

McCartney: How about “marzipan”?

Swift: Love “marzipan.”

McCartney: The other day, I was remembering when we wrote “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”: “kaleidoscope.”

Swift: “Kaleidoscope” is one of mine! I have a song on 1989, a song called “Welcome to New York,” that I put the word “kaleidoscope” in just because I’m obsessed with the word.

Swift: We should have done matching jackets for this photo shoot.

McCartney: Find me a fleck, I’m in. But we went to the fair, and I just remember — this is what happens with songs — there was this girl at the fair. This is just a little Liverpool fair — it was in a place called Sefton Park — and there was this girl, who was so beautiful. She wasn’t a star. She was so beautiful. Everyone was following her, and it’s like, “Wow.” It’s like a magical scene, you know? But all this gave me a headache, so I ended up going back to his house — I didn’t normally get headaches. And we thought, “What can we do?” So we put on the Elvis song “All Shook Up.” By the end of that song, my headache had gone. I thought, you know, “That’s powerful.”

Swift: That really is powerful.

McCartney: What, a “cardigan”?

Swift: Like a good cardigan, a good, worn-in cardigan. Or something that makes you reminisce on your childhood. I think sadness can be cozy. It can obviously be traumatic and stressful, too, but I kind of was trying to lean into sadness that feels like somehow enveloping in not such a scary way — like nostalgia and whimsy incorporated into a feeling like you’re not all right. Because I don’t think anybody was really feeling like they were in their prime this year. Isolation can mean escaping into your imagination in a way that’s kind of nice.

Swift: Get a hammer and a nail.

McCartney: “Maybe I can put that picture up.” It’s not rocket science. The period after the Beatles, when we went to live in Scotland on a really — talk about dumpy — little farm. I mean, I see pictures of it now and I’m not ashamed, but I’m almost ashamed. Because it’s like, “God, nobody’s cleaned up around here.”

But it was really a relief. Because when I was with the Beatles, we’d formed Apple Records, and if I wanted a Christmas tree, someone would just buy it. And I thought, after a while, “No, you know what? I really would like to go and buy our Christmas tree. Because that’s what everyone does.” So you go down — “I’ll have that one” — and you carried it back. I mean, it’s little, but it’s huge at the same time.

I needed a table in Scotland and I was looking through a catalog and I thought, “I could make one. I did woodwork in school, so I know what a dovetail joint is.” So I just figured it out. I’m just sitting in the kitchen, and I’m whittling away at this wood and I made this little joint. There was no nail technology — it was glue. And I was scared to put it together. I said, “It’s not going to fit,” but one day, I got my woodwork glue and thought, “There’s no going back.” But it turned out to be a real nice little table I was very proud of. It was that sense of achievement.

Swift: No, it’s cool!

McCartney: But it was a real sort of great thing for me to be able to do stuff for yourself. You were talking about sewing. I mean normally, in your position, you’ve got any amount of tailors.

Swift: Well, there’s been a bit of a baby boom recently; several of my friends have gotten pregnant.

McCartney: Oh, yeah, you’re at the age.

McCartney: What do you paint? Watercolors?

Swift: Acrylic or oil. Whenever I do watercolor, all I paint is flowers. When I have oil, I really like to do landscapes. I always kind of return to painting a lonely little cottage on a hill.

McCartney: She’s a fantasy character?

Swift: She’s a real person. Who lived in the house that I live in.

McCartney: She’s a real person? I listened to that and I thought, “Who is this?”

McCartney: Yeah, ’cause you were writing breakup songs like they were going out of style.

Swift: That’s amazing.

McCartney: It just felt good to me. I would sit and talk, and they’d have amazing stories. That’s what I liked. They would have stories from the wartime — because I was born actually in the war — and so these old ladies, they were participating in the war. This one lady I used to sort of just hang out with, she had a crystal radio that I found very magical. In the war, a lot of people made their own radios — you’d make them out of crystals [sings “The Twilight Zone” theme].

Swift: How did I not know this? That sounds like something I would have tried to learn about.

McCartney: It’s interesting, because there is a lot of parallels with the virus and lockdowns and wartime. It happened to everyone. Like, this isn’t HIV, or SARS, or Avian flu, which happened to others, generally. This has happened to everyone, all around the world. That’s the defining thing about this particular virus. And, you know, my parents … it happened to everyone in Britain, including the queen and Churchill. War happened. So they were all part of this thing, and they all had to figure out a way through it. So you figured out Folklore. I figured out McCartney III.

Swift: And a lot of people have been baking sourdough bread. Whatever gets you through!

McCartney: Some people used to make radios. And they’d take a crystal — we should look it up, but it actually is a crystal. I thought, “Oh, no, they just called it a crystal radio,” but it’s actually crystals like we know and love.

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: And somehow they get the radio waves — this crystal attracts them — they tune it in, and that’s how they used to get their news. Back to “Eleanor Rigby,” so I would think of her and think of what she’s doing and then just try to get lyrical, just try to bring poetry into it, words you love, just try to get images like “picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been,” and Father McKenzie “is darning his socks in the night.” You know, he’s a religious man, so I could’ve said, you know, “preparing his Bible,” which would have been more obvious. But “darning his socks” kind of says more about him. So you get into this lovely fantasy. And that’s the magic of songs, you know. It’s a black hole, and then you start doing this process, and then there’s this beautiful little flower that you’ve just made. So it is very like embroidery, making something.

Swift: Making a table.

McCartney: Making a table.

Swift: Wow, it would’ve been so fun to play Glastonbury for the 50th anniversary together.

McCartney: It would’ve been great, wouldn’t it? And I was going to be asking you to play with me.

Swift: Were you going to invite me? I was hoping that you would. I was going to ask you.

McCartney: I would’ve done “Shake It Off.”

Swift: Oh, my God, that would have been amazing.

McCartney: I know it, it’s in C!

McCartney: Well, we’re just so lucky, aren’t we?

Swift: We’re really lucky.

McCartney: I don’t know if it ever happens to you, but with me, it’s like, “Oh, my god, I’ve ended up as a musician.”

Swift: Yeah, I can’t believe it’s my job.

Swift: “Something will happen.”

Swift: That’s the best.

McCartney: It’s so stupid it’s brilliant. It’s great if you’re ever in that sort of panic attack: “Oh, my God,” or, “Ahhh, what am I going to do?”

Swift: “Something will happen.”

McCartney: All right then, thanks for doing this, and this was, you know, a lot of fun.

Swift: You’re the best. This was so awesome. Those were some quality stories!

#paul mccartney #old paul #taylor swift #*m #💖#grandpaul #silver stubble #(aahh king)#(I LOVE HIM SO MUCH F*CK OFF EVERYONE)#(the thumbs lads. its always about the thumbs)

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megan1412 · 3 years ago

Text

Get Back

Fast forward a few years. The band is falling apart, and John and Paul have to consider how this is going to affect their family.

————————————————————————

1969

John crawls out of bed and puts on his glasses. He sees the clock, 6 AM. He groans and gets up to stretch. He sees Paul passed out on the bed. He rolls his eyes and shakes Paul. He gets a groan from his husband.

“Jesus John. Leave me be. I’m too tired.”

“We have to go record today.”

“What’s the bloody point? We never get anything accomplished anymore. George and Ringo are at each other’s throats almost every day. Me and you barely agree on anything anymore. May as well just stop going in.”

John rolls his eyes and puts on his robe. He decides to go downstairs and make some tea. He doesn’t notice, but he has a shadow following him down. As he gets to the kitchen, he hears a creak and spins around. Elizabeth is standing behind him with a grin. He sighs and bends down.

“What are you doing up this early lambkin?”

“I heard you wake up.”

“Well it’s too early. Come here and give your daddy a hug.”

Elizabeth runs up to John and embraces him. She messes with his beard as he tries to shake himself awake.

“When are we gonna see Uncle Ringo and Uncle George again?”

“I don’t know sweetheart. They are going through a tough time right now.”

“Are they no longer friends?”

“I don’t know. But things are rough. You needn’t worry about these things dear.”

“I know. But you’ll be ok right Daddy?”

“Yes. For you and Jules and Sean. And your Dada too. You should go back up to bed.”

“Ok”

She runs up back to bed and John sits down at the table with his tea. He lights a joint and looks out the window. Where things going to be ok?

Later on when John finally got Paul up, they went to Abbey Road to continue on the new album. Pretty much right off the bat, George and Ringo had a disagreement, and Paul was trying to boss everyone around. It was driving everyone insane. Even George Martin was ready to come down there and slap someone. Linda was sitting around looking confused and nervous. John looked at her with annoyance. Ever since Paul met Linda he had spent a lot of time with her. He understood that Linda needed help with Heather and all that, but he couldn’t help but feel jealous.

“Look can we get on with the bloody thing? We don’t have all day.” Paul said with his head in his hands.

“I’m ready if you all will get your head out of your arses!” George said bitterly.

“Can we please just get on with it? Please?” Ringo pleaded.

“Ok let’s go I guess.” John said quietly.

As they begin to play Get Back, Paul messes up a chord and gets frustrated.

“Damn it I forgot the chord.”

“Oh great. You wrote the bloody song can we get on with it?” John said, annoyed.

“Can you get off my arse for one second Lennon?”

“There’s a lot of things that I need to be on your sorry arse about McCartney!”

“Like what?”

“The fact that that woman is here!”

“Linda?”

“Yes, ever since you met her you have been bringing her and that kid around and it’s been disturbing the sessions.”

“She’s my friend and she’s allowed to be here if she wants to!”

“You are breaking the deal!”

The bickering went on for another half hour. Linda had got up and left with Heather. George was packing up and preparing to leave and Ringo noticed.

“Where are you going?” Ringo says bitterly.

“Home. No use in staying here while the lovebirds argue.”

“Well then, go and see Olivia then.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Suddenly, the control room’s door burst open. George Martin came down with a dangerous look in his eye. Everyone shut up.

“Look, if you four cannot behave like men then we may as well pack up and end this! I’m not wasting my time listening to four grown up men argue like toddlers. This is not healthy. Either get your shit together or disband the group!”

The four men looked at each other with wide eyes. George never got that pissed. They began to pack up in silence and rearranged the setup. George stormed out first, leaving Ringo trailing behind groaning. As Paul put up his Hofner, John spoke up.

“You go on home. I’m going out for a bit.”

“For a drink? John it’s three in the afternoon.”

“No. I’m visiting someone.”

He picked up his guitar case and walked out to call a cab, leaving Paul alone in the studio with his thoughts.

The cab arrived at Cynthia’s house. He knocked on the door and then appeared Cynthia. One look made her understand and she pulled him inside.

“I don’t understand what’s happening Cyn. Things have been going to shit for a while now. George and Ringo are at each other’s throats, me and Paul can’t agree on anything anymore and I’m jealous of this woman he met and is helping out. I don’t know what to do.”

Cynthia just listened as John poured out his emotions. She hadn’t seen John this stressed out in a long time. She held his hand and just looked up at him. When he finished, she gave him a minute and decided to give some tough love.

“You know John, you can be a bit of an arse sometimes right?”

“Yes…. I know.”

“You all can be. I’ve known you since we were teenagers. No one besides me and Paul and Mimi know you better. You need to let your guard down and know how to negotiate better.”

“But how to handle George and Ringo?”

“Let them dish out their anger on each other. It’s none of your business. What’s your business is working on your marriage and your business relationship with your husband. What if one day your anger accidentally comes out on Jules, Sean, and Lizzie?”

He went dead silent. He realized that he needed to work on his anger so that his kids don’t get in the middle of it.

“Think about that. Now go home John. Work on it. Make it right.”

“Your right Cyn. Your right.”

He hugged her goodbye and called a cab to get home. As he approached the house it was a quarter to seven. The porch light was flickering on and the sun was setting. He paid the cab driver and ran up the steps. Paul swung open the door and looked at John with cold eyes. John ran up to Paul and hugged him to much surprise from his husband.

“We need to work on this Paul. For the sake of us. For the sake of the kids. We need to work on us.”

Paul’s cold demeanor made him uncomfortable as he continued to hold his husband. The kids were sitting on the staircase with unsure expressions. Paul pulled away and met John’s somber gaze.

“I know we do. But for now, I think we need to be apart for a bit.”

The words cut John like a knife.

“What?”

“Just for a few days. Go stay with Mimi or your sister. I need to be alone with the kids.”

“Please… Paul don’t shut me out.”

“I’m not. I’ll call you later.”

The door shut and startled John. He stayed on the porch unsure of what just happened. He decided to call a cab and call Mimi. When he got to the bus station, he called Mimi.

“Hello?”

“Hey Mimi. Its John.”

“What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“I need a place to stay for a little while.”

“Good lord John Winston. When are you expected to come in?”

“In about two and a half hours.”

“Are you ok?”

“No. No I’m not.”

To be continued……

#the beatles #john lennon #paulmccartney #1960's music #mclennon fanfiction #the Lennon-McCartney family saga #chapter 10 #part one #to be continued

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toovirgins · 3 years ago

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Le Rêve - Part 6

Summary: After an unproductive studio session, George and Ringo leave in a hurry. John later returns to find his glasses and another unwelcome surprise.

Things were different now.

Not entirely—they still had the band, the songwriting partnership, the united front for the media and press. It’s just that now, the tour was completed with determination and efficiency, becoming just another box to check off. Now, Paul relied much more heavily on George’s suggestions, and in a fit of jealousy or competition (Who could be sure? What was the difference?), John did the same. Now, Lennon-McCartney hardly wrote together and never wrote alone, needing George or Ringo to be in the space as a buffer.

When Paul had come back into the room that night, George knew he’d found John. He entered wordlessly, immediately throwing all of his belongings into his trunk, and George didn’t have the heart to ask where he was going. He and Ringo simply stared, too afraid to test the waters that were more tumultuous than they’d ever seen.

When Paul had finished packing, he’d looked pointedly at Ringo until the man understood. Ringo pushed himself up out of the armchair and followed him out of the room. He’d returned only minutes later with a sad smile in George’s direction that he assumed was meant to be reassuring, but instead was plain unsettling—a visual marker of the notion that something had changed within the group. Ringo had unpacked his things on Paul’s side, and that was that.

They weren’t allowed to talk about what happened. It was this unspoken rule, but a rule nonetheless—which was rather fine with George at first, anyway. But as time dragged on and the air grew no less hostile, George figured that he would rather talk about it for hours if it meant getting the old dynamic back. He was torn between two opposite poles of the spectrum, a futile effort of trying to please both Lennon and McCartney. There was a bitterness flourishing within him at the recognition of his usefulness only when they didn’t need each other. But objectively speaking, he was given more say, more credit, more songs. He couldn’t complain. Or he shouldn’t complain.

Something about the unspoken rule led George and Ringo not to talk about it with each other, either. George knew Ringo was absolutely dying to; at every uncomfortable or unnatural interaction between John and Paul, George knew a concerned glance from Ringo was coming his way. Ringo needed to talk about things, and George felt right guilty in deliberately ignoring the desire. He was just holding out hope that if no one addressed it in any context, the universe would wash away that it even happened, and the band—their livelihoods—would live on.

The quick succession of knuckles against the side of his head jerked him out of his daydream (nightmare?).

“Hello?” Ringo quipped. “Anyone home?”

George scowled and slumped deeper into his seat. “Barely.”

He and Ringo had been dicking about in the studio for the past half-hour. It was just the two of them—Paul hadn’t shown up, and John, already in a sour mood for the day, had cursed the man under his breath and stalked off. That had been about an hour ago, and when John didn’t return, the remaining boys gave up trying to focus. After a brief quarrel over who dropped the ball on bringing the marbles and playing cards, Ringo suggested a friendly competition over who could butcher “She Loves You” on their respective instruments in a funnier fashion. Which, credit where credit was due, was incredibly entertaining; only minutes before now, George had been rolling on the ground in laughter when Ringo had seemingly pulled a bicycle horn from his arse and honked it in place of the famed McCartney-Harrison “Ooh’s”.

However, as many things do when one has an attention span of about two minutes, the game soon grew tired—the song was only so long—and the pair had resorted to quiet, mindless fiddling on their instruments. In turn, the lapse into silence and thought had led George down his aforementioned neuro-rabbithole.

“Are you all right?” Ringo questioned, lifting an eyebrow in his direction. “Y’just seem a bit… off lately, I dunno.” There was an urge there, a pull. Ringo was nearly leaned forward off his chair.

“Off how?” George mused, entertaining the idea a bit. His tone was light, but his expression was stern. It was clear that they were both acknowledging the Unspoken Thing; it was also clear that it would remain as such.

Ringo bit his lip and shrugged back, evidently noting George’s reservations. “Y’know. Quiet-like. At least, more so than usual.”

George scoffed at the referenced nickname. The Quiet Beatle. As if! Give him a question worth answering, and they’d see who the quiet one was then. Certainly not him. “I’ve just got a lot on me mind,” he muttered, lifting a shoulder.

“You’re more in demand than before,” Ringo pointed out bluntly.

A rub of the temples didn’t do much to soothe the stress in his body. The weight of the emotional and mental burdens he’d carried over the last few weeks was beginning to settle on his shoulders with Ringo’s prodding. A sudden exhaustion clouded over him. “I know.”

“Is that bad?”

George looked at his friend with dull eyes. “Should it be?”

He didn’t need an answer, but it still stung a bit not to get one.

After a long beat of silence, Ringo hastily changed the subject. “Maybe we should call it quits for the day,” he suggested with a half-hearted grin, tapping the bass drum lightly and modestly. It was almost a tick at this point, the drummer seemingly wholly unaware of his actions.

George decided to play along with the shift in energy. “I agree, Ritchie. Feels a bit useless without Their Royal Highnesses around to conduct us,” he added with a roll of the eyes and a giggle.

Ringo hummed in agreement. “Oh, John, oh, Paul, please save us! We can’t even remember what album we’re supposed to be working on!” He cackled at his own joke.

“Help!, isn’t it?” George partly ignored the dramatic flair and turned to flick off the amp. He caught Ringo’s sparkling stare as he reached to unplug his Rickenbacker.

“No, mate. We’ve done that one already. Y’know, the whole ‘film’ bit?”

George blinked. “Right.”

“George Harrison, foremost Beatles expert,” Ringo chided. He glared reproachfully at an imaginary camera. “Don’t do drugs, kids.”

“Piss off!” George tried to glower, overruled by the laughter in his voice. Ringo offered him a hand and pulled him up out of the chair.

“Fancy a smoke?”

George’s lips drew into a wide grin. Based on the context, he knew exactly what kind of smoke he was implying. “Race ya to the car.”

—

“Mind telling me where everyone ran off to?”

Paul lifted an accusatory gaze in John’s direction as the man entered the room, his brow deeply furrowed in concentration.

“How should I know?” John answered, scanning the room fervently. His eyes hadn’t met Paul’s yet, Paul noted with a twinge of annoyance.

“Was there not a session today?” Paul hinted, irked by the idea that John too may have tried to skip out. Sure, Paul had been late, but at least he’d intended on coming.

John paused for a moment, shooting him a critical glare. “You tell me.”

He didn’t feel like trying to defend himself.

After a long moment of staring expectantly, John realized he wasn’t going to get an answer. He huffed and returned to his search, tipping over a chair to peer underneath it.

Paul rolled his eyes and offered the glasses at arm’s length, clearing his throat to draw the attention. John blushed and hurried over to snatch them up. He quickly stuffed them back into his pocket.

In response to the twinge of curiosity in his gaze, Paul only shrugged. “Left ‘em on the settee over there, you did. Just figured you would return for them sooner or later.”

John grunted in response.

Paul raised an eyebrow as the man began to head for the door. “All right, then. Mind at least telling me where you’re running off to?”

“I just came back for me glasses.”

“Came back?”

“You weren’t there,” John muttered, nearly inaudible. “I left.”

Paul stiffened, viciously reprimanding the sentimental twitch his heart gave to John’s response. “’M just late. Got caught up in traffic, is all.”

It was a silly excuse. John quirked an eyebrow at the boldfaced lie, knowing good and well Cavendish was barely a ten-minute walk. Paul watched him chew his lip for a moment before deciding to let it be.

Paul accepted John’s compliance graciously and returned to tuning his bass. His skin prickled as he felt John’s eyes on him, watching him closely. Tensions were still incredibly high between them, on account of the thing-that-happened-but-“never-happened”—and it was taking a lot of getting used to. The feeling was unsettling; time and again Paul would have to physically restrain himself, ignoring the twitching desire in his hand to touch John or biting back a witty comment that only John would understand. The emotional connection they’d had was gone, or at least dormant, and Paul couldn’t for the life of him figure out what was going through that thick head anymore. It even seemed that Ringo and George had a better guess than him.

It was miserable, really, having to pretend that everything was just dandy. There had been a substantial amount of press upon return from the tour, which was more of an irritation than anything else. There, he could slide into his Paul McCharmly persona, the façade already being somewhat of a character. The lie got quite easy to live when one was already acting. But the media circus was relatively quiet now (as it would ever be), and the hardest part was trying to pretend in front of the three people that knew him better than anyone else alive.

He wasn’t even sure who the pretending was for anymore. It certainly did nothing to quiet his mind or soul.

“What are you working on?” It was a half-arsed effort at conversation, but an effort nonetheless.

“Nothing, yet,” Paul answered, frowning in the direction of his instrument. “I’ve got a bit—real simple, for ‘Wait’. Might add some flare to it, might finish it. Might run it through and absolutely hate it and scrap it. Who knows,” he concluded, almost to himself.

“I think we should talk.” John’s voice, quiet, low.

Paul glanced up at him with a start, desperately trying to mask the surprise on his face. John was looking at him with an odd expression on his face, something Paul couldn’t quite put words to. Only then did he realize that it was the first time the two of them had been alone since the incident.

Heart pounding, he tensed. “When?”

“Now.” The answer was definitive.

“About what?” Paul responded sheepishly.

John’s eyes flashed.

Let’s just forget it ever happened.

Paul felt a sudden wave of stubbornness wash over him, feeling hollow at the abrupt activation of the memory. Of course he couldn’t fucking forget it happened. He couldn’t, and he shouldn’t be expected to. None of them should. Paul noticed the sad, wondering gazes from the other bandmates as well. Sweeping it under the rug had been wholly counterproductive to the entire group (though he didn’t entirely want to test the alternative, either). Best case scenario, the whole thing wouldn’t have happened.

But it did. And life was infinitely worse now because of it.

Paul swallowed hard. This was all John’s fault. Paul could have kept the dream a secret for the rest of his life. A few shameful wanking sessions was probably all it would take to get over it, and while he might look at John a bit differently after, at least John wouldn’t be looking at him differently. About a week of awkwardness would likely ensue, and John would make some offhand comment about how Paul was acting queer, and the two would laugh it off, only one of them knowing how much truth the comment carried. It was John’s fault, because Paul could have figured it out on his own.

“You know what,” John answered coldly.

John wanted to be cold? Paul could do cold. “I really don’t,” he countered with sickeningly false innocence. “What’s got you all worked up, Johnny?”

“Fuck off, Paul, you know what I’m talking about. Don’t try to fuckin’ skirt around it anymore.”

Paul’s heart was hammering in his throat, the blood rushing in his ears. After weeks of drowning in his own head, hearing the words come out of John’s mouth so… dismissively was blindingly infuriating. He had been driving himself mad trying not to talk about it, to think about it, to feel it. He’d shoved the memory down with so much force he’d thought his soul would pop, only to watch it helplessly bubble back to the surface. There was no forgetting it, and there was no addressing it. And now, John was breaking the number one Unspoken Rule of the Unspoken Thing like he never gave a shit about them in the first place.

“Skirting ar-? I’m not skirting around anything. I’m truly blanking, Johnny.” He paused, throat too constricted to swallow the massive lump in it. “Are you sure it’s not something I was supposed to forget?” The comment didn’t have near the effect Paul had hoped.

“Every conversation’s got to turn into a fuckin’ brawl with you, doesn’t it?” John crossed his arms, looking like nothing more than a pissed-off older sibling.

Paul was beside himself. His voice cracked, the words coming out in a near-shriek, but he was so furious that it hardly mattered. “With me? Every conversation is a brawl with me?”

“D’you need to bloody hear it again?” John looked minorly inconvenienced. If he’d had a watch on, he’d be sure to check it right now lazily. His demeanor was utterly vexatious, awakening feelings Paul didn’t even know he had. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this upset with someone.

“You think you get some type of medal, standing up in front of me and acting like none of this matters?” Paul was on his feet now, openly striding towards him. Startled, John stumbled backward a step before smacking his back against the wall. “You want a bleeding award?” Paul raised his tone an octave and fluttered his eyelashes dramatically, a mockery on all levels: “Oh, John, you’re so stony and brave, I bet nothing ever rattles my big, strong man!”

“Fuck you,” John whispered, his eyes begging the conversation to slow down. But Paul was on a roll now, and he’d be damned if he didn’t let out all of the pent-up pain John and John alone had caused over the last few weeks.

“No, fuck you. Do you know how hard it’s been? News flash, John. Not everything is about how you feel. Hard to believe, I know.” John opened his mouth to speak, but Paul cut him off. He was practically on him now, pushing John against the wall as he helplessly cowered under Paul’s alarming tirade.

“Do you know how hard it’s been for me? Trying to figure out if I’m a goddamn queer because of you? And how about the sleepless nights, eh? You’ve had those too, I know it.” A sick sense of pride effloresced in Paul’s chest as John’s eyes shot wide with recognition. “Lying in bed and wondering if you’re not who you thought you were. Wondering what when wrong along the way to make you this way, and what the hell you can do about it now. It’s maddening. And you took my right to get an answer, John.” Paul’s voice broke a bit at the next part. “Talking to you was my only hope at figuring this out and you took it away from me. And now we can’t talk about anything anymore.”

When John started to speak again, Paul lifted a final triumphant hand in his face. “I’m not done. Because let me tell you, Lennon, I don’t care if you need to bawl it out or never think about it again. But don’t stand here and fucking bullshit me like this. I know you.”

John straightened against the wall, eyes flashing with a hatred that almost made Paul’s knees buckle. “You don’t have a bloody clue what’s bullshit. Your whole foundation is bullshit. You’re not pissed at me because you’re upset that our pretty union wasn’t consummated, and thus I robbed you of a chance to explore this bit of newfound sexuality.” John’s tone was mocking, saturated with pretentiousness and exaggeration. “You’re pissed at me because I was just another shag you didn’t get to fully add to your sexual conquests. Grow the fuck up, Paul. You want to talk about knowing each other? I know you. You’re the one who’s bullshitting yourself, not me.”

Attacking John back felt like a safer bet than trying to defend himself. “Like you were there for some miraculous consummation? Some beautiful, heart-wrenching dénouement to a tragic love story? You’re full of it. Don’t come for me like you had some higher ground to speak from. We’re not special, John. We don’t have some kind of cosmic soulmate connection where we can read each other’s minds and desires. You and I, as anything, aren’t going to live happily ever after. Go buy into some other fuckin’ fantasy.”

“You were a mistake,” John spat.

“Mistakes happened,” Paul concluded. “I didn’t.”

John gaped at him as Paul pushed off. His chest was heaving, tight with unrestrained breaths, looking like a cornered animal. Though it was impossible to explain, Paul watched in real time as something shattered in John’s soul. He didn’t know what it was, and it didn’t seem like John knew, either. Paul turned on his heel before he could give the sight any more thought.

“You told me to forget it. So that’s what I’m doing. For good.” Paul stalked back to where his guitar lay on the ground. He began to gather his belongings and pack up for the day. “This conversation is over.”

“So that’s it? You don’t want to talk about it?” John called out to him, planting himself in the doorway as Paul made for the exit.

“Get out of the way, John.”

He held his ground and spoke honestly for the first time in a long, long time. “You’re not gonna talk about it, yeah? That’s fine. Fuckin’ beautiful. I’ll talk about it. I love you.”

#the beatles #beatles fanfiction #john lennon #paul mccartney #george harrison #ringo starr #mclennon #part 6 #chapter fic #ao3 #more angst #there's a happy ending coming soon i promise

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blankiejacket · 5 years ago

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Hypotheses about George

Okay so here’s where I think George was at during and after the Beatles’ breakup:

1. George wanted to be ACKNOWLEDGED as a true talent by Paul, and Paul didn’t give him that. Paul gave him help and assistance and backup (and let’s face it, also some of the greatest f--king bass playing that has ever been recorded) with George’s best songs (Here Comes the Sun and Something), but Paul did not do enough to make George feel recognized as a PEER by Paul. Paul was very careful in his treatment of George during Abbey Road -- he asked George to play a solo on Let It Be partly b/c George was so peeved that Paul told him *not* to play a solo on Hey Jude -- and George did an amazing job (Let It Be has a fantastic George solo), but this was not enough for George to feel recognized by Paul.

See, Paul was George’s big bro. George knew Paul before the others. AND Paul was the “musical director” of the Beatles, his opinion really mattered. If Paul had given George recognition as a peer songwriter or as a great guitarist, I really think George would have fought harder for the Beatles to stay together. But Paul didn’t, so George didn’t.

2. Partly as a result of 1, George sided with John in the J vs. P wars that ended the Beatles, and Ringo sided with George. John “rewarded” George by asking him to play on his s--tty, crappy, frankly evil “How Do You Sleep?” f--k you song to Paul, and George gleefully went partly b/c Paul had hurt him unknowingly, and partly b/c George wanted to show he really was a good enough musician to do cool s--t and play well and play on John’s tracks WITHOUT PAUL.

3. But this alienated George from Paul for at least 10 years if not, frankly. 25. Paul did not reach out to George through the 1970s and I don’t really think through the 1980s either -- behold Paul’s absence form the RnR Hall of Fame induction of the Beatles. And look at George’s stricken face as he accepts the induction on behalf of the band and says, “We all love Paul very much,” like he has to say that b/c everyone is wondering where the f--k Paul McCartney is that night.

4. And the thing is, George thought that in choosing John, he would get John, but you know what? John simply did not care very much about George in the absence of Paul. John cared about the Beatles, and he loved Paul so much that when he wasn’t with Paul he hated him (some ppl are like that with their emotions, if they love you but can’t have you they hate you, at least for a while, John was not very balanced emotionally), but George, all on his own, as in John-and-George? John did not think about George. That’s just the truth. Ringo made a special effort to show both John and Paul he loved them and wanted to hang with them even 1-on-1 or with other friends. But George was prickly and negative and frankly bitter and John wasn’t seeking that energy (from anyone but Yoko lol). So whatever George thought he would get by throwing over Paul for John -- approval, acknowledgement, the feeling of being a peer as opposed to a kid brother or sideman or supporting player -- never materialized.

5. So George got neither John nor Paul all through the 1970s.

It makes me sad for George, though he created the situation for himself. But, you know (every Beatles fan knows), they ALL played their parts in the tragic end of the greatest musical collaboration of all time. I just wanted to post this because many fans discuss the tragedy of John and Paul a lot. But the J and P tragedy was also a George tragedy. It’s George’s lot to be overwritten and sort of left out even in the story of the sad demise of the band. But to George’s credit, John and Paul could not be as great without the foursome -- without each other, and George and Ringo -- as they had been all together. They were not so great individually that their solo genius ever topped the Beatles’ collective genius. I wonder if that brought George some slim consolation.

I also wonder, if George got so good as a songwriter that he wrote arguably the best songs on Abbey Road, imagine how good he could have gotten if the Beatles had continued?!?! But I guess I think that about all four of them. Then again, I suppose the Beatles did everything they were supposed to do in this timeline and reality. They have the greatest story and the best body of work. It’s just hard because their story starts out so happy, and ends so sad.

#the beatles #beatles #george harrison #john lennon #paul mccartney #ringo starr

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nerianasims · 4 years ago

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Billboard #1s 1980

Under the cut.

KC & The Sunshine Band -- "Please Don't Go" -- January 5, 1980

Is that falsetto in the opening or merely an attempt at it? KC & The Sunshine Band trying to do a sincere, sad ballad does not work. Now I have the dance remix by KWS that was a hit in the 90s (and apparently plagiarized from a Euro-dance group) in my head.

Michael Jackson -- "Rock With You" -- January 18, 1980

I thought I had never heard this song before until I heard the chorus. Oh yeah, this one. I don't know if Michael Jackson singing a sex jam would have worked for me before, well, all the child molestation coming to light. Now it really doesn't. There's only so much "separate the art from the artist" I'm capable of, though I am in favor of it. On another note, in the video, he's wearing the sparkliest outfit I have ever seen.

The Captain & Tennille -- "Do That To Me One More Time" -- February 16, 1980

I don't want to think about The Captain doing it even once. That is the problem with this song. Other than that, I think it's a perfectly acceptable cheesy love song. Well, except for the... plastic flute? I don't know what that is, but I'm not fond of it.

On a kind of strange note, I scrolled ahead, and starting here, I recognize almost all the songs for the next couple years on this list. Maybe they were played more on the oldies stations? At clubs? Restaurants? Maybe I came to musical consciousnous at three and a half years old?

Queen -- "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" -- February 23, 1980

This is not a top tier Queen song, but Freddie Mercury belching would be better music than anything Barry Gibb did. Not top tier, but still very fun. And it's always great hearing Freddie Mercury do whatever the hell he wants to do with his voice. Here, he has fun doing a little bit of Elvis, but not too much. It's a rockability track by Queen. So it's great.

Pink Floyd -- "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)" -- March 22, 1980

We don't need no education. This is a song about the horrible British teachers who used withering sarcasm and cruelty against the children under their care. (Like Snape, basically.) I think it's about boarding schools, since the teachers apparently have control over whether or not the kids get pudding. British boarding schools were terrible. British boarding schools are terrible, though they seem to be trying to be better. We'll see. They have hundreds of years' practice at bricking kids' psyches up in walls, and I don't trust them to change. Um, anyway, it's a good song, but not one I'd choose to listen to separate from the entire album.

Blondie -- "Call Me" -- April 19, 1980

This song actually does start with "Color me your color, baby." Or I suppose "colour" since Blondie are Brits. But it's not like the lyrics are deep -- if you can understand "Call me," you get it. I guess it's technically a love song, but since Debbie Harry sings in such an intentionally icy manner, it's anything but passionate. It's still fun and light and musically interesting.

Lipps, Inc. -- "Funkytown" -- May 31, 1980

This song is about moving out of a town that's stifling and to a town that's right for you -- "Funkytown." It could be any big city with a music scene. It's a dance song with very few lyrics, and yet the lyrics are important. The singer has "talked about it talked about it talked about it," but is determined to finally do it. It's a good funky disco song, and a good send-off for the genre's dominance.

Paul McCartney and theWings -- "Coming Up (Live At Glasgow)" -- June 28, 1980

It sounds a little bit like McCartney trying to do Philly soul, horns included. But lighter, because Paul McCartney. I can't remember the lyrics even just after I heard them, but it's a love song. Quite boring.

Billy Joel -- "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" -- July 19, 1980

I love a lot of Billy Joel songs. I don't really love this one. I like the sentiment -- "Oh, it doesn't matter what they say in the papers/ 'Cause it's always been the same old scene/ There's a new band in town but you can't get the sound/ From a story in a magazine/ Aimed at your average teen." He also criticizes the 80s' roaring materialism, which hadn't even hit its nadir yet. But I dunno. Maybe it's a little slow? It needs something.

Olivia Newton-John -- "Magic" -- August 2, 1980

I had never heard of the movie Xanadu until about a decade ago. It's a staple of bad movie sites. Its plot is bonkers, and some very 1980 blockhead is the male lead. The story would have made more sense and the movie been far better if Olivia Newton-John's character had gotten together with Gene Kelly, who's also in the movie, instead. Anyway, this love song is from the movie's soundtrack. It's got a little bit of that mystical vibe that Stevie Nicks did so well, and that always appeals to me. I can't pretend this is a great song, or even necessarily a good one. But it speaks to the 12-year old in me.

Christopher Cross -- "Sailing" -- August 30, 1980

This is the most Florida song ever. Because it doesn't sound like he really has a boat. "Fantasy, it gets the best of me/ When I'm sailing/ All caught up in the reverie, every word is a symphony/ Won't you believe me?" Musically, it sounds like it would go well with a sailboat. But almost none of us have sailboats. We have fantasies. It's a nice-sounding song, and if you think about it enough, it becomes more complex than it seems.

Diana Ross -- "Upside Down" -- September 6, 1980

I'm going to have to face up to the fact that I usually don't like how Diana Ross sings. She's too slick and detached for me, without lyrics that go with that. I cannot believe this woman was ever turned "upside down" by love. And of course the guy she's singing this to is cheating. But she's okay with it, because of course she is, he's just so awesome that she's singing to him "respectfully." I like this song musically, except for Diana Ross' emotionally distant singing, but I hate the lyrics, and I am extremely sick of this no-maintenance schtick.

Queen -- "Another One Bites the Dust" -- October 4, 1980

This might be the only Queen song I don't like. I'm not saying it's bad. It's probably very good. But I have heard the chorus way too much. Otoh, I've heard "We Will Rock You" even more, and I still like that. Maybe there's too much... stuff in this one? I don't know. It's definitely too repetitive. It's no "Don't Stop Me Now," that's for sure. Queen's best songs never reached #1 in the U.S., and I don't know if any came near until "Bohemian Rhapsody" hit #2 when I was in high school. But reaching the charts is a very bad sign of whether or not music is actually good.

Barbra Streisand -- "Woman in Love" -- October 25, 1980

I'm not going to go back to check, but I think Barbra Streisand has exactly the same pose and expression on the covers of all her singles. This one was written by Barry Gibb, oh joy. I wondered if this would be an additive or a multiplicative factor in how bad the song (which I had never heard) was. Something happened that I didn't expect: It made the song so boring it slips out of my head while I’m listening to it. There's the line "no truth is ever a lie." Brilliant, Barry, what a lyricist. Also, that line is not true. Barry Gibb was apparently not familiar with Othello. Anyway, since I'm just bored, I guess Streisand and Gibb together is actually better than them separately. Still bad, though.

Kenny Rogers -- "Lady" -- November 15, 1980

It's a love song in which the narrator sings that he's your knight in shining armor. That sentiment should be surrounded by more interesting music in some way. Something operatic, or mystical, or country, something. Kenny Rogers was never one of my favorites, but he's capable of something. This song is nothing. Lionel Richie wrote it, so of course.

John Lennon -- "(Just Like) Starting Over" -- December 27, 1980

This song hit #1 just after Lennon was murdered. I was 4 years old, but I actually remember when John Lennon was murdered -- I was in the car with one or more parental units (I don't remember who), and it came on the radio. I was upset. I knew Beatles music, my parents played it all the time, and I knew who John Lennon was. I'm still extremely sad about his death today. This song is about how happy he was with Yoko, all settled down and looking forward to a nice, calm, loving future together. Ugh I'm gonna cry.

BEST OF 1980 -- "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" by Queen. WORST OF 1980 -- "Please Don't Go" by KC & The Sunshine Band

#billboard number ones

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ts1989fanatic · 6 years ago

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Taylor Swift’s ‘ME!’: What the Hell Is Going on Here?

Welcome to the era of pastels, butterflies and her new cat

By ROB SHEFFIELD

Last night at midnight, Taylor Swift officially closed out the Reputation era and rang in the new. She debuted “ME!,” her tantalizing first tease of the TS7 metamorphosis, a duet with Brendon Urie from Panic! At the Disco. So much going on. The pastels. The rainbows. The French dialogue. The lovingly framed portrait of the Dixie Chicks on the wall. Her yee-haw go-go boots. Her Pattie Boyd bouffant. The “Delicate”-style vocoder vocals. The Jacques Demy umbrellas. So much disco, so much panic. Her new third cat. Happy New Era’s Day.

At this point, she’s been teasing her new albums with lead singles long enough to show how she likes to do these things. The Taylor Lead Single is a genre unto itself, and “ME!” has all the signs: It’s campy, it’s bubbly, it’s got a spoken-word interlude (“hey kids, spelling is fun!”) and a video loaded with in-jokes. It’s a totally canonical Taylor Lead Single. But the question is: What does it really tell us about the album to come and the new music she’s got up her sleeve?

Keep in mind: The first song Swift debuts is always an outlier. She doesn’t like to give the album’s secrets away too fast. She prefers to throw people off the scent. Why does she like to mess with fans’ minds this way? She just does. “Innocent” from Speak Now (which she debuted at the 2010 VMAs), “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” from Red, “Shake It Off” from 1989, “Look What You Made Me Do” from Reputation—what these songs have in common is that they’re musically far afield from their albums. They’re big thematic statements addressing her public image; they talk about the celebrity Taylor, rather than the personal one. But they usually don’t end up sounding much like the other songs on the album.

“Look What You Made Me Do” was the most cleverly misleading head-fake of her career—everybody thought Reputation was going to be a whole album of celebrity shade, which turned out to be just 2 of the 15 songs. (Whew!) But arguably it did the job too well—it created a false narrative for Reputation that was hard for people to shake, even after they heard what was (pretty damn explicitly) an album of love songs. “ME!” is far more playful, but it still pokes fun at her image, with lines like, “I know that I went psycho on the phone.” You know she’s swerving hard back into Old Tay mode when she includes a line about a boy running after her in the rain calling her name. (But did he throw pebbles at her window?)

Her obvious role model for lead-single-izing: Thriller. Strange as it seems now, when Michael Jackson was preparing to drop Thriller on the world in 1982, the first song he released was…. “The Girl Is Mine.” So everybody thought Thriller was going to be a whole album of corny ballads using the word “doggone.” Even his duet partner Paul McCartney found it baffling — as he admitted, “You could say it’s shallow.” (And this from the ex-Beatle who released a 1972 solo single of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”) That’s part of why “Billie Jean” stunned the world — nobody was ready for it, because he’d fooled us all with “The Girl Is Mine.” That’s how MJ wanted it. And that’s how Taylor likes to do it, too.

Every Taylor Lead Single is required to have a spoken-word moment: “Spelling is fun” joins the tradition of “I mean, this is ex-HAUS-ting,” “the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now” and “the fella over there with the hella cool hair.” That’s another way she follows the strategy of “The Girl Is Mine,” since the highlight of that song was the Michael/Macca dialogue, e.g. “Paul, I think I told you I’m a lover, not a fighter!” (The “ME!” video has a neon sign that reads “Lover.”)

Taylor’s spent this whole week teasing the still-unnamed TS7 project — she’s now heavily into butterflies and rainbows and moonbeams and roses, like a flower child in a Jimi Hendrix ballad. Her fab looks all week have evoked Prince in his psychedelic pastel phase circa “Raspberry Beret” and Around the World in A Day — which happened to be his seventh album. She posted a photo yesterday sporting a giant rose, under 22 stars. She’s been striking Speak Now-era fashion poses all week, like her dress at the Time 100 gala. And she brought her longtime bestie Abigail of “Fifteen” fame, a callback to Fearless. Is TS7 going to be All the Taylor Eras, All the Time?

“ME!” is a song full of her favorite tropes — Joel Little, who co-wrote Lorde’s “Green Light” and “Supercut,” sounds right in her zone. The video opens with the Reputation snakes turning into butterflies. (Just like the jet fighters in Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock”?) Also note how the butterflies rise up to her open window, a callback to the video for “We Are Never Getting Back Together,” which is still the best Taylor Lead Single in history. (It would also be her best video ever, if not for the brilliance that is “Blank Space.”) “ME!” debuts the new cat who has secretly joined Meredith and Olivia. Also, this video has a unicorn—if I’m not mistaken, that’s a Taylor first, which is weird if you think about it.

Nobody enjoys a strategically elaborate album reveal like our girl — no pop star in history has ever made it such an integral part of her artistic evolution. Every album is a huge musical departure, and trying to guess her next move is a sucker’s game. She is never going to make the same album she made last time, and the lead single is never going to spill the tea on where she’s speeding now. A hint, yes; some clues, bien sur; the full story, never.

As they say in France, “Je suis calme,” which translates roughly as “I might be OK but I’m not fine at all,” and the morning after a new Swift song drops is always a mess. Like any Taylor Lead Single, “ME!” is a lot. But there are still a million things we don’t know about this album. And make no mistake, that’s how Taylor wants it.

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stevecanmakeanythingnerdy · 5 years ago

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Battle #3

Ringo Starr: Ringo ( Side 2 )

Vs.

The Cretones: Thin Red Line ( Side 1 )

Ringo Starr: Ringo ( Side 2 )

Sir Richard Starkey, or rather known professionally as Ringo Starr, is an English musician, singer, songwriter and actor who gained worldwide fame as the drummer for The Beatles. He occasionally sang lead vocals with the group, usually for one song on each album, including more notably "With a Little Help from My Friends", and "Yellow Submarine". Unfortunately we’re not here to talk about the Beatles, however big a part of his career it may have been. We’re here to examine his solo work. If I am guessing simply by the number of times I run across this album in bins, I would say this was one of his more popular solo efforts. As in I don’t often see any of his other albums around. This is his third studio effort. It seems to be just one of several in a line of “failures” according to his wiki. I mean, at least the guy continued (s) to put out music, but it is somewhat ironic for someone who was a part of something so monumental in music. I suppose after that there is only one direction you can go...

“Oh My My” is the start of it all. This album (as many of his others do too) featured tunes from m Harrison and McCartney (both Paul and Linda). It also features too much sax for me in the first tune. I think the general conclusion here is that Ringo gets the news from his doctor that his rock career may be over. Very rock radio for the times...think the SNL theme song...no really.

“Step Lightly” follows and is a bit more Beatles-esque. More of what people expected and wanted. “Six O’ Clock” is the McCartney tune and is lamenting about mistreated love. A sweet song in nature, but only mediocre in execution.

“Devil Woman” is probably the best song on the album in my opinion...at least on Side two anyway. Very generic pop lyrics but it has the driving groove needed to keep your interest. Finally is “You and Me (Babe)”! Which is the Harrison song. Very ‘73 for style points and a couples crooner. It’s lazy and carefree and features an impromptu thanks list, perhaps of the drunken variety...? Most of this just feels like Beatles throwaways. Ringo can definitely sing, there is no question of that, but this whole album just feels more like an attempt to stay relevant more than anything. I’m sure Ringo was just glad to be able to put more input and work into a recording than he was able to with his former band. He has been quoted in saying as much. There is a pretty cool art and lyric book inside.

The Cretones: Thin Red Line ( Side 1 )

Cretones were a United States, Los Angeles-based power pop group in the early 1980s. Led by singer/guitarist and former Eddie Boy Band member, Mark Goldenberg (who also wrote the bulk of The Cretones' material), the group had a strong sense of melody and a lyrical wit that placed them a cut above most of their new wave peers. They are perhaps best known as the band that provided three of the songs on Linda Ronstadt's Platinum-selling 1980 New Wave Rock album, Mad Love. Ronstadt's enormous success served to introduce and highlight Mark Goldenberg's aggressive compositions. He also wrote the tune “Automatic” for the Pointer Sisters. So Thin Red Line is their rookie card she to speak and contains a charting single which happens to be the first track, “Real Love”. It’s a catchy number replete with jangle hooks and big narratives. You can instantly tell it was the radio single the label pushed for. Next is the very Elvis Costello vibe of “Everybody’s Mad at Katherine”. This song is not nearly as catchy, but it is redeemed by the cymbal work present. Speaking as a drummer, it’s a difficult thing to pull off being able to bounce around and roll off the crown of a cymbal on beat so kudos are due, in that department at least. “I Can’t Wait” just seems ...like it has a filler vibe, so...meh. “Justine” is a song about a girl so those are always power pop poignant. A good hook to complete the cycle and with full on church organ overload. Clearly it’s about Justine Bateman. Just kidding, but maybe not, the time is right... and there might be some family ties (#seewhatididthere). Finally,

“Mad Love” is the last cut. Another good one buried in the back nine! What gives?!? This is a single for sure! Mid tempo and you know Rick Springfield would be jealous. Super F*****g produced! This band is straight up a less good version of The Records, or possibly Shoes or 20/20. Certainly in that vein. Man, I just can’t get over how big it sounds on vinyl too.

So battle 3 in the books with Ringo being a Starr performer. He took 21 minutes to showcase his talents over 5 songs and 130 calories burned. That’s 26 calories burned per song and 6.19 calories burned per minute. Ringo earned 10 out of 15 possible stars. The Cretones were on a thin red line, but managed to still burn 112 calories over 5 songs and 17 minutes. They averaged 22.40 calories per song and 6.59 calories burned per minute. The Cretones earned 11 out of 15 possible stars. Seems as though The Cretones win!

The Cretones: “Justine”

https://youtu.be/tJMXMSx_cfE

#Randomrecordworkoutseasonseven

#Randomrecordworkout

#randomrecordworkout #randomrecordworkoutseason7 #ringo starr #the beatles #ringo #the cretones #80s music #new wave #70s music #vinyl collection #vinyl #records

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goodgirlwhoshopeful · 6 years ago

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LINK

#p: taylor swift #I like this #Taylor swift #ME!#me out now

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timetrickster · 6 years ago

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Living W/ Immortality: Episode 3: Altair & Vega

EXT. FINN’S HOME

It’s been 3 weeks since what happened that night. Ever since LUCIAN had attacked WAN SHI TONG’S Library. FINN sits down at the table for breakfast with his MOM and ERIN’S had gone silent ever since that night. MOM looks at him knowing something’s wrong.

MOM

You’re silent. That’s never a good sign. What happened?

FINN

I’m fine mom.

She sits down next to him and looks him in the eyes.

MOM

No, you’re not.

FINN is silent after the truth in that simple statement cut deeper inside both hearts.

MOM

You boys have been silent for weeks and if there’s anything that I know about my own boys. Your silence means you’re facing something, but you don’t want me to worry.

FINN is silent and looks at his hands. He puts his headphones on then looks through his phone to play the next song. He presses on a song and plays “King Of The Clouds by Panic! At The Disco. FINN decides to leave and MOM doesn’t do anything to stop him. FINN slowly walks far from view from his house.

He murmurs the words to the song.

FINN

Some days I lie wide awake ‘til the sun hits my face. And I fade, elevate from the Earth. Far away to a place…

He stops in his tracks, as he looks around him for a bit in silence. Suddenly LUCIAN appears in front of him.

LUCIAN

Boo.

He starts to freak out falling backward. Holding his head with both hands and guarding his face.

FINN

It’s not real. It’s not real.

He repeats to himself. Suddenly flash images of LUCIAN appear in his mind. He breathes heavily and tears fall down his face. His head shakes and heats up from the pressure of all the things overwhelming him. He clenches his teeth showing this face of mixed emotion, fear, and anger.

FINN screams in a rage then punches a hole in a random wall. He breathes heavy breaths before realizing what he’s done.

FINN

Crap…

He tries to budge his arm out but it’s stuck. The song stops at “

FINN

Really?! I have super strength and I can get my arm out of a stupid stone wall?!

SERENA shows up all of a sudden and notices FINN.

SERENA

Hey, Finn… uh… you okay? Did you punch my wall?

FINN still awkwardly having half of his arm through the wall.

FINN

No… I touched a piece of the wall and it made a hole and my arm fell in.

SERENA

Uh… ok… I’ll believe you for now, but you need help?

FINN

Yes, please.

SERENA laughs and pulls on FINN’S other arm and gets out of the wall. His right arm now covered in stone dust.

FINN

Thank you…

(looks at his right arm covered in dust)

Crap.

SERENA

You’re welcome and are you okay?

FINN

I guess I’m fine. Also, Hey.

SERENA

What do you mean by that? And Hi!

FINN

Just something happened last night that set me off and… I don’t know how to deal with it.

SERENA

Do you want to talk about it?

FINN shows reluctance, fearing that she wouldn’t understand the world of magic and the fact he’s an immortal with a 2nd personality in his head.

SERENA (cont’d)

It’s okay. You don’t have to talk about it. Maybe when you’re ready?

FINN nods ‘yes’.

SERENA

Okay then. Wanna walk to school?

FINN

I’d love that.

FINN smiles and they start walking together.

SERENA

Got any new oldies songs for me to listen too?

FINN

Uh… Yeah, let me… you know what, I’ll let you choose it.

She looks through the playlist labeled “Time”

SERENA

Time?

FINN

It’s a collection of songs that resonate with my vibes. Songs from now to the 50s.

SERENA laughs at him.

SERENA

You’re adorable.

FINN

Ok, no more songs for you.

FINN tries to grab his phone back and struggles with SERENA

SERENA

Please… I’m sorry.

FINN

Fine.

He lets go of the phone.

SERENA

Yay!

She scrolls through his playlist and presses on one song. The song, “Say Say Say” by Paul McCartney plays. The song plays as the two walks together to school and spends the entire day together. The song plays through a slow montage of scenes with them all together. In classes, at lunch, hanging around the campus.

CUT TO:

END OF THE SCHOOL DAY.

The song ends at Hook 2. It’s now the end of school and the two are walking together again.

SERENA

I’m fucking tired dude.

FINN

Same…

SERENA laughs at something.

SERENA

I did love Mr. Braistch’s class today. Best teacher ever.

FINN

Did he make another racist joke? Or did he throw another insult at Waipahu again? Wait… don’t tell me, Chinese or Filipino? Either one it’s fuckin hilarious.

SERENA

He picked on Steven and said “When China takes over America, I’d be the one white guy to help with capturing Americans.” then said, “Steven when you become the general of Ewa Beach, don’t forget about me. I helped.”

FINN laughs at the story.

FINN

Oh god. You know one time, he told the Filipinos in the room that he loves their president.

SERENA

What’s wrong with that?

FINN

The current president of the Philippines started a war on drugs and said anyone would be killed on sight even holding drugs.

SERENA

Wow… yeah, that’s dark.

FINN

I know… I’m probably going to hell for laughing.

SERENA laughs at what he said then touches FINN’S shoulder.

SERENA

Aw. You’re already going to hell.

She breaks into laughter again as well as FINN.

SERENA (cont’d)

I’m kidding, you know I love you girl.

FINN

Fuck you, dude.

He jokingly says. SERENA is still laughing. FINN gets a little bitter and had this angry face. Then keeps walking.

SERENA Aw. I’m sorry. Come here.

She stops him and holds out her arms and FINN was still bitter and shakes his head. He keeps walking. She laughs at him being bitter and still bothers him for a hug.

SERENA (cont’d)

Please…

FINN

No.

SERENA

Please. PLEASE please please please please, please! If you don't give me a hug I'm gonna DIEEEEE. If you don't hug me I'm gonna start crying. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. (making a song out of it) oh-baby please please PLEASE! Oh-baby, please. That was 'Please' by Serena with Finn on bass.

FINN finally stops being bitter as he finally gives in. Still holding a bitter face but smiles a little after accepting the hug.

SERENA

Yay! Thank you. I’m sorry.

FINN

(He laughs for a bit)

You’re welcome. I forgive you but bass? Really? Bass?

SERENA does an evil laugh. It makes FINN smile.

FINN

You’re weird. I like you, dude. Wanna hang out tonight?

SERENA

I’d love to. What are we doing? Arcade again?

FINN

I was thinking of heading to the park and doing some star gazing… I don’t know why but I’ve wanted to try it out and it doesn’t hurt to try something new.

SERENA

I like that idea. Are we gonna go by the benches?

FINN

Sure… better than laying in the grass. See ya soon.

He waves bye to her as she leaves.

ERIN (V.O)

I’m impressed. You actually didn’t freak out and over think.

FINN

Thanks, Erin. Erin? Hey! Where’d you go? You’ve been silent for weeks.

ERIN (V.O)

Just needed some time to think. After the whole Lucian thing, I just needed some peace. You know?

FINN

Yeah. Good to have you back bud.

ERIN (V.O)

Good to be back. Again, you actually asked Serena out, once again I’m impressed.

FINN

That’s a first.

FINN enters his house and rushes to his room to get ready for his stargazing date with SERENA. Reprise “Just The Two Of Us” by Grover Washington Jr. plays. Picks up 3rd Verse. Shows a montage of both FINN & SERENA getting ready for the stargazing date.

FINN & SERENA

I got to get ready!

CUT TO.

NIGHT. EWA BEACH

The song keeps playing in the background. FINN leaves the house and walks to the park with a bag of food in hand.

ERIN (V.O)

Food? Drinks? Clever.

FINN

Thanks, dude.

ERIN (V.O)

What are you planning Evers?

FINN smiles.

FINN

Nothing, why?

ERIN (V.O)

You have that specific smile on your face. The smile that tells me you have a plan or created something amazing. Come on Evers! TELL ME!

LUCIAN/NARRATOR (V.O)

How adorable… the immortal two faced dumbass finally found love. Well… hopefully, if the author figures out how to do that in the next few scenes when I try to take him and his romance. Along with the other two background immortals. The author’s a bit unpredictable… which I admire.

The song keeps playing. FINN is slowly walking to the park. Other people are out playing by the playground and other sports-related activities. Meanwhile, these two laid out a blanket over a park table and both sit down on the table top. Song finishes.

FINN

I brought us dinner from Chum Wah Kum.

He holds a plastic bag with two plate lunches inside, along with utensils and napkins.

SERENA

Aw, thanks!

She grabs her plate lunch out of the bag and begins to eat and look at stars.

SERENA (cont’d)

They’re really pretty tonight.

FINN

I used to do this from time to time. I’d sit on my roof and use a telescope. Watching the stars glow in the ocean of space. It was beautiful in the silence of the night.

SERENA

Holy shit, that last sentence was poetic as fuck.

He laughs a little.

FINN

I’m not a poetic dude.

SERENA

Stop lying, I know you are! Mr. Artsy!

FINN

Nah…

SERENA

Oh come on, you’ve done so many artsy stuff. I’ve seen you draw, paint, make short films for media club, write stories, take photos and edit them. I heard you wrote a poem for that one girl.

FINN

Uh, she rejected me by the way. But yeah, kinda left that guy behind.

SERENA

Oh damn, my bad. Well, she doesn’t deserve you, if you took the time and patience to write that girl a poem.

FINN

I know… I know.

SERENA

And what made you leave being Mr. Artsy behind?

FINN

Self-Judgement, being hypercritical, literally everything where I worry about myself and what people see come from me.

SERENA

But why?

FINN

Lost myself for a while… fell away from who I used to be.

SERENA Well, whenever you feel ready to come back to Mr. Creative, I’ll be waiting for you.

FINN

Thank you. Can we look at stars now?

SERENA

Yes, please!

They both lie down on the tabletop and look at the stars. The song “Lights Down Low” by MAX plays in the background as the gaze at random stars.

SERENA

What now?

FINN

Just look at the stars. Sorry, haven’t done this in a while. Forgot all the star systems and all that.

SERENA

It’s fine. You can point out whatever and make it up along as we go.

She points to one constellation.

SERENA (cont’d)

What’s that one?

FINN

That’s the constellation of Sagittarius.

SERENA

See you do remember something!

FINN

Yeah but that one’s my zodiac so I remember that one.

SERENA

What’s are those two?

She points to two different constellations. FINN looks at them and instantly recognizes them.

FINN

Altair and Vega… There’s actually a love story between the two. I don’t know if you want to hear it.

SERENA

Tell me!

FINN

Uh okay.

(He laughs a little then gets into this narration style voice)

I’m trying to remember but Altair and Vega were deeply in love. But we're separated by the celestial river of the Milky Way. But on one special day a year, Vega’s tears would call upon all the magpies in the world and the would form a bridge so they could spend one night of happiness together.

SERENA was astonished by the story. FINN smiles a bit awkwardly.

SERENA

That’s beautiful.

LUCIAN/NARRATOR (V.O)

Uh! Boring!

Both FINN & SERENA hear LUCIAN’S voice. Record scratch sound effect plays and the song stops at 1st Chorus.

LUCIAN/NARRATOR (V.O)(Cont’d)

I will admit, it was a nice romantic story that you gave. But the author really likes to elongate the scenes.

Several shadowy figures appear before them. Only showing red glowing eyes. They grab FINN and attempt to grab SERENA but he manages to free her from their grip before they disappear in a flash.

CUT TO:

INT - ANCIENT TEMPLE

FINN wakes up in some sort of an ancient temple. He looks around, find two monsters guarding a doorway. ATHENA & TAVEN bound and stuck to the walls of this circular dome room. LUCIAN was on the other end doing some weird shit.

FINN

(Intensely worried)

Erin?

ERIN (V.O)

(Intensely worried)

Yeah?

FINN

(Intensely worried)

What do we do?

ERIN (V.O)

(Intensely worried)

I have no fuckin clue.

Tags: @cometworks, @cookiecuttercritter, @coloursintheblur

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thecoleopterawithana · 6 years ago

Note

hi! i've seen talk of an interview paul gave (i guess last year?) where he talks about how 'two of us' is about him and john - he said it was written about them driving one day, getting out of the car in the middle of nowhere and playing guitar together? or something to that affect? the interview was played on the beatles siriusxm channel last year as an intro to 'two of us'. do you know where i can hear it? i can't find it anywhere. thanks!

Hey there! Thank you for your ask!

Well, what a find that would be! But I never really heard of that specific story in relation to John, only to Linda.

As a kid I loved getting lost. I would say to my father – let’s get lost. But you could never seem to be able to get really lost. All signs would eventually lead back to New York or wherever we were staying! Then, when I moved to England to be with Paul, we would put Martha in the back of the car and drive out of London. As soon as we were on the open road I’d say, ‘Let’s get lost’ and we’d keep driving without looking at any signs. Hence the line in the song, 'Two of us going nowhere’.

Paul wrote Two Of Us on one of those days out. It’s about us. We just pulled off in a wood somewhere and parked the car. I went off walking while Paul sat in the car and started writing. He also mentions the postcards because we used to send a lot of postcards to each other.

– Linda McCartney, in “A Hard Day’s Write”, by Steve Turner.

I don’t think that Paul ever publicly said that it was about John too, despite this being one of the few songs that mainstream authors and historians recognize as having certain lyrics that seem to fit Paul’s old relationship with John better than the more recent one with Linda.

You and I have memories

Longer than the road that stretches out ahead

And this other line is thought to refer to the business tensions within Apple:

You and me chasing paper

Getting nowhere

There are also impromptu interpretations of the emotional subtext of the song being done by John and Paul themselves during its recording, where the pair share a mic, giving rise to the thrilling saga:

JOHN: Am I singing on this, or what?

PAUL: I don’t know, really. [pause] Melody. Two of us… You have to remember the words too.

JOHN: Yes, I’ve got ’em here.

PAUL: Well, learn ’em.

JOHN: Yeah. [pause] I almost know ’em.

And a couple of weeks later:

PAUL: Um, let’s try and get ‘Two Of Us’.

JOHN: Okay. [pause] Am I still singing it? [long pause]

PAUL: Yeah.

After another take:

PAUL: Okay, “two of us riding nowhere,” that’s as if – [that’s] said we’re like – two, but then “we’re on our way home—” JOHN: It’s like we’re like a couple of queens. PAUL: Yeah. Well, you know. Well, I mean, that’s— JOHN: We’re a couple of queens… PAUL: [American accent] That’s just too bad. Unless you want to get Paul and Paula in. [pause] Poetic license, John.JOHN: [American accent] You’re telling me, Paul.

And finally, Paul himself alludes to the continuing narrative in their songs:

PAUL: It’s like, uh, “We have to get back.” “We’re on our way home.”JOHN: Yeah.PAUL: There’s a story. There’s another one – ‘Don’t Let Me Down’. “Oh darling, I’ll never let you down.” Like we’re doing— JOHN: Yeah. It’s like you and me are lovers. PAUL: [reserved] Yeah. [pause]JOHN: We’ll just have to camp it up for those two. PAUL: Yeah. Well, I’ll be wearing my skirt for the show, anyway.

[Please head to the links to listen to the audio clips!]

So while I believe that the story about them driving nowhere is about his adventures in the countryside with Linda, a part of the song can also be about John (or at least John made it so, in a way, by being rather keen on singing that one with Paul).

Either way, I checked the Beatles Channel on SiriusXM using a free preview, and I’m afraid they don’t really summarize the contents of each broadcast, so it’s really hard to search for the particular one you’re seeking.

But if someone has any idea of the interview the anon is referring to, please let us know!

#two of us #lennon mccartney #paul mccartney #john lennon #the person i actually picked as my partner #macca #johnny #elision #1969 #asks me why #my stuff

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makistar2018 · 6 years ago

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Taylor Swift’s ‘ME!’: What the Hell Is Going on Here?

Welcome to the era of pastels, butterflies and her new cat

By ROB SHEFFIELD April 26, 2019

Taylor Swift duets with Brendon Urie from Panic! At the Disco in single "ME!" TAS Rights Management

Keep in mind: The first song Swift debuts is always an outlier. She doesn’t like to give the album’s secrets away too fast. She prefers to throw people off the scent. Why does she like to mess with fans’ minds this way? She just does. “Innocent” from Speak Now(which she debuted at the 2010 VMAs), “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” from Red, “Shake It Off” from 1989, “Look What You Made Me Do” from Reputation—what these songs have in common is that they’re musically far afield from their albums. They’re big thematic statements addressing her public image; they talk about the celebrity Taylor, rather than the personal one. But they usually don’t end up sounding much like the other songs on the album.

Rolling Stone

#taylor swift #ME!#ts7 #2019.04.26 #rolling stone

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geezeralert · 6 years ago

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Deep Dive Duly Delivers

From my boxes: Some sleeves that came with Beatles’ 45 rpm records

(Second of three parts)

I still love Beatles music.

In my months of replaying and studying all the songs produced in the group’s eight-year recording period (1962-1970), I continued to close my eyes and listen raptly to the tunes, often over and over and over (my practice since youth for favorite songs; I’m like a little kid repeatedly playing a favorite video or asking for a re-reading of a favorite book).

From “She Loves You” to “All My Loving” to “Words of Love” to “No Reply” to “Tell Me Why” to “She Said She Said” to “Hey Bulldog” to “Penny Lane” to “With A Little Help From My Friends” to “Get Back” to “Two of Us” to “Let It Be” to “Glass Onion” to the “long medley” on side two of “Abbey Road” . . . the foursome’s pop output of 50-plus years ago remains among the most pleasant sounds to my ears.

That state of enjoyment is to be expected, I guess. These musical creations dominated the soundtrack of my taste-formulating teen years, ahead of other loves like Motown, Sinatra, the Beach Boys and the myriad of hits coming out AM and FM radio.

Of course, my knowledge of the Beatles’ songs is now greatly enhanced, which, I’m pleased to find, only serves to heighten my enjoyment.

Learning how individual songs were conceived and executed, and then hearing the eventual product and how (or if) it reflects — by design or accident —the artists’ intentions, adds layers of fun to the listening experience.

The same was true for songs I do not particularly enjoy, like “Rain,” as those I do, like “Penny Lane” or “Two of Us.”

For “Rain,” the revelation was that Ringo Starr considers his drumming work on the song his best ever. Song chronicler Ian MacDonald (“Revolution in the Head”) called Starr’s work “superb” while also lavishing praise on Paul McCartney’s “high register bass” as “sometimes so inventive that it threatens to overwhelm the track.”

Perhaps any “true fan” of the Beatles knew such details but I never paid attention to either the drumming, the bass line or just about anything else about that song. Now, listening to it with this new knowledge, I at least give it some respect.

Likewise, for many tunes I did listen to closely and often over the years, there were plenty of tidbits that make them even more fun to hear.

Like the painstaking attention paid by McCartney to the rather simple-sounding (to me) “Penny Lane,” the technically expert drumming of Starr on “She Said She Said” (called “the outstanding track” on “Revolver” by MacDonald, who says that album is considered by many the Beatles’ best) and the performance on “”Two of Us.”

Hearing that last tune, with my new knowledge, had me choking back tears.

Understand, “Two of Us” was recorded for the Beatles’ second to last album, “Let It Be,” and I played it after months of reviewing their musical endeavors as boyhood chums (McCartney wrote “When I’m 64,” one of the classics from “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band,” when he was 16), as a newly formed band spending hours at their craft in a foreign country, as an insanely popular pop group dominating the musical world, as a trend-setting studio creative force, as a drug-addled crumpling unit and, finally, as bitterly feuding individual musical achievers no longer interested in being a fabulous foursome.

But even as the storm clouds gathered, producing occasional thunder claps, there were still lightening flashes of what made the Beatles the Beatles.

Moments like the one, in late January 1969, when McCartney and John Lennon sang in beautiful harmony — a sound straight out of 1962 — strumming acoustic guitars, on “Two of Us.”

“The close harmonies of “Two of Us” reminded McCartney and Lennon of their teenage Everly Brothers impersonations and, during the second day’s work on it, they broke off to sing ‘Bye Bye Love,’” wrote MacDonald.

The image of these two boyhood chums and creative masterminds, after years of ups and downs, burying the hatchet for a few minutes while under the influence of nostalgia — well . . . (insert cry-face emoji).

To be sure, that continued camaraderie for all four group members was captured in the “Let It Be” film, along with the more well-known contentiousness. They jammed to rock ‘n roll standards in the studio and played their last live performance as a group on the rooftop.

The books I consulted also told how these four individuals continued to work together despite all their mounting, serious differences, and, like the tale of the “Two of Us” recording, those passages were among the most noteworthy to me during my research.

MacDonald notes this this lasting togetherness showed the Beatles to be “in no respect an ordinary phenomenon.”

He continued:

“Many have spoken of the charismatic atmosphere that switched on whenever all four were together — a group-mindedness which kept them united through a further 18 months (after their “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper” successes) of in-fighting during which they recorded well over 50 more tracks and which continued, albeit less reliably than before, to function as the psychic antenna by which they maintained contact with the shifting currents of popular feeling at large.”

Listening to their musical creations while getting more details about how much they were starting to really hate each other in the late 1960s was a indeed revelation for this big Beatles fan.

It culminated with the tale told by the engineer Geoff Emerick (“Here There and Everywhere, My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles”) of the band’s final recording together, Lennon’s “Because,” as it wrapped up the “Abbey Road” album.

The tune brought their legendary producer George Martin back into the studio to orchestrate nine harmony parts. For technical reasons, it required John, Paul and George Harrison to sing their three-part harmony together live, rather than overdubbing each part one at a time, and then add two additional passes to add on the remaining six parts.

Emerick recounts how the three Beatles were totally into the effort.

“They knew they were doing something special and they were determined to get it right. There was no clowning around that day, no joking; everyone was very serious, very focused,” he wrote.

He continued:

“That day I saw the four Beatles at their finest: there was 100 percent concentration from all of them — even Ringo, sitting quietly with his eyes closed, silently urging his bandmates on to their best performance — all working in tandem to get that vocal nailed, spot on. It was a stark example of the kind of teamwork that had been so sorely lacking for years. It’s tempting to imagine what the Beatles might have been able to accomplish if they could only have captured and sustained that spirit just a little longer.”

For me, though, the “Because” effort was amazing for taking place at all, both in terms of the Beatles’ problems and just how long any group of performers can co-exist and produce excellence.

Another fascinating act of cooperation, in my judgment, was Paul helping John on his very personal “Ballad of John and Yoko.” By that time, Yoko One was an extremely divisive element in the groups’ universe so I found this friendly cooperation especially praiseworthy.

Speaking of Yoko . . .

Of course, all Beatles fans have read stories of how disruptive her constant presence was during the final years. But one of the biggest revelations I’ll take away from my project is just how badly she disrupted the group’s cohesiveness and creativity, from early 1968 forward.

Emerick believes much of the improved atmosphere in the recording studio during “Abbey Road” could be attributable to the absence of John and Yoko, who were injured in a car accident in Scotland.

When the pair finally were recovered enough to attend the recording sessions, John arranged for a bed to be brought into the studio for Yoko, complete with a microphone suspended over her so she could comment on the proceedings.

Yikes

Wrote the engineer:

“For the next several weeks, Yoko lived in that bed. Her wardrobe consisted of a series of flimsy nightgowns, accessorized with a regal tiara, carefully positioned to hide the scar on her forehead from the accident. As she gained her strength, so too did she gain her confidence, slowly but surely starting to annoy the other Beatles and George Martin with her comments.”

Interestingly, as the Abbey Road sessions progressed and Ono got out of bed, she was asked by John to stay in the control room while he, Paul and George performed what, in my opinion, was one of the most incredible feats of their later years: the three simultaneous guitar solos during “The End.”

I always wondered how that section of the song was done and was amazed to find that it was all three of them taking turns. I never tire listening to it.

Emerick says perhaps it was Yoko’s absence “or perhaps it was because on some subconscious level they had decided to suspend their egos for the sake of the music, but for the hour or so it took them to play those solos, all the bad blood, all the fighting, all the crap that had gone down between the three former friends was forgotten. John, Paul and George looked like they had gone back in time, like they were kids again, playing together for the sheer enjoyment of it. More than anything, they reminded me of gunslingers, with their guitars strapped on, looks of steely-eyed resolve, determined to outdo one another. Yet there was animosity, no tension at all — you could tell that they were simply having fun.”

I suppose knowledge of these scenarios, and the different parts played by the Beatles, in something that separates the really big fans of the Beatles from the really huge fans.

The latter already knew those details. And they also can say what songs were played when and by whom without consulting the various books that I used.

And they know a lot of other things that were news to me in my research.

Like the fact that Harrison auditioned his classic “Something” (originally eight minutes long!) for the group during the “White Album” along with “Old Brown Shoe” and “All Things Must Pass” but had them rejected.

Perhaps even some “really big” fans also had picked up those tidbits over the years while I missed them.

In any event, here’s some of they other things that jumped out at me in addition to the inspiring, intermittent camaraderie and the depressing, disruptive force of Yoko Ono:

** The amount of drug use by the group and the effect it had on their music.

The marijuana, the LSD and, for Lennon, the heroin all took at least the two main songwriters into their various musical directions. MacDonald notes that 50 days after the soaring achievement of “Because” Lennon “was back in the studio howling his addiction in ‘Cold Turkey.’” He makes the conclusion that heroin was “flowing coldly around its composer’s body” at the “Because” sessions.

** The influence of their various girlfriends on their songs.

Many of the songs chart the various stages of McCartney’s romances with Jane Asher and Linda Eastman along with John Lennon’s marriage/breakup with Cynthia and, of course, infatuation with Yoko.

** The nonsense of their lyrics— many of them were just thrown together and others had strictly personal meanings.

Under scrutiny, a vast number of their early songs are far better musically than lyrically. I guess the simple old “moon June” love messages sounded plenty deep enough to my teen ears. The Beatles themselves got tired of them and rarely returned to basic love songs in their later years.

Then we have a lot of phrases or passages that have meaning only to them, like those in “I Am the Walrus” (Lennon says it was a deliberate attempt to parody “the fashion for psychedelic lyrics” prevalent at the time) “Across the Universe” “Savoy Truffle” and “Glass Onion,” to name a few.

Another example: McCartney and Lennon, in a fit of marijuana-inspired laughter, made up some Spanish-sounding gibberish for “Sun King” on Abbey Road.

** The synchronizing of the songs — how they came at us on albums or singles — was far different than how they were conceived or executed.

I suppose this is pretty obvious to even the most passing fan but when you experience the songs in the order they were recorded, as I did by following MacDonald’s sequential presentation of them, it gives you a much different feel than what we originally had.

One example: “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” intended for “Sgt. Pepper” (they were the second and third songs recorded for that album, after “When I’m 64”) but released instead as a 45 rpm single, were followed in the studio by the intricate “A Day in the Life,” which eventually was put at the end of that album, giving it its unforgettable finale.

That sequence presents a far different perspective on the songs than how they were publically presented and received.

Another tidbit: The last song recorded by the Beatles as a group was “I Me Mine,” a Harrison tune produced for the “Let It Be” album after it was played informally in the “Let It Be” movie. It was formally performed and mixed after the “Abbey Road” sessions had wrapped.

Lennon was absent for that session so it was ironic that the next time the former Beatles recorded together was when his three ex-bandmates gathered again, after his death, to play with Lennon’s home-produced tune, “Free As a Bird.” That tape (three songs recorded by Lennon) was provided McCartney by Ono at Lennon’s 1994 induction into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame.

Another tidbit in that category: In between “Abbey Road” recording sessions for “The End” and “Sun King/Mean Mr. Mustard,” McCartney recorded “Come and Get It,” playing all the instruments and double tracking the vocal.

The tune went on to be a big hit for the Apple group Badfinger and MacDonald calls it “by far the best unreleased Beatles song.” McCartney “knocked off” the recording in under an hour, he wrote. He offered it for Abbey Road.

** In contrast to the Hall of Fame’s insulting choice to induct Lennon years before honoring McCartney, my conclusion from what I read and heard is that McCartney was the dominating force behind the band’s production, creativity and longevity.

He softened Lennon’s often-harsh musical tendencies and pushed all of the others to better themselves, often to their annoyance.

In fact, McCartney’s criticisms of Harrison’s guitar playing was a major source of the friction in the group. There are several tales of McCartney going back into the studio to re-do the guitar solos for his songs.

He also kept the group involved in challenging projects, like the “Magical Mystery Tour” film and attempts at stripped down recordings for “Let It Be,” at times when other members wanted to just end things.

And his continued musical endeavors surely pushed the others to also keep trying to explore and create.

As a teen, Lennon was my favorite Beatle (every kid had to choose one!). Now . . . it’s complicated.

** A fun part of my listening experience was following the progress of the four Beatles as musicians, particularly McCartney on bass.

He was made the group’s bass player by default in their teenage beginnings. He quickly progressed to some great work on “All My Loving” and “Tell Me Why.” And from there, he perfected his skill on the instrument until it became a major contributor to a lot of the recordings, most especially “Hey Bulldog.”

I also was impressed by Starr’s drumming. He has been downgraded by some as a “human metronome” and a deep-background player in the Beatles saga but he gets a lot of credit in the books I read for his savvy, expert drumming. My own listening, as a simple fan, supports those conclusions.

Beatles songs were not about blasting percussion but needed the steady, consistent, skilled drum sounds that Starr provided.

** Another interesting part of the project was learning various music or recording terms.

These included: arpeggio (“the notes of a chord played in succession as a fan-like spread rather than as a single sound, as if on a harp”; used on “You Never Give Me Your Money,” “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “Sun King,” the middle of “Here Comes the Sun” and “Because.”); ADT (artificial double tracking, used often for Beatles’ voices and now a music industry stable); flanging (too technical to summarize here); and compression (“reduction of the overall dynamics generated by a voice or instrument”).

The amount of what we hear (and love) that is affected by such studio tricks as ADT, flanging, compression, manipulation of microphones or drums, or changing speeds on recorded material (to name just some of them) was astonishing to learn.

** Taking the Beatles’ catalogue as a whole over a short period of time demonstrated just how much effort the group put into always trying new sounds, new recording techniques and new musical approaches.

These could range from a simple change in how a piano was played (“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” “Oh Darlin’”) to an entirely radical approach like “Revolution 9.”

This was done out of personal musical interest along with inter-group competition and intra-group competition. It was a key to why the group remained together, creative and popular for far longer than normal bands, particularly those in the rock era.

To be sure, the three primary songwriters in the group also borrowed liberally from what sounds were popular at the time — Motown, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, psychedelia, the Byrds, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Who, the Kinks — but improved on them and created a sound all their own.

** MacDonald feels the McCartney song “You Never Give Me Your Money” was the earliest musical acknowledgment that the group was coming to a close, particularly its opening verses.

“To anyone who loves the Beatles, the bittersweet nostalgia of this music is hard to hear without a tear in the eye. Here, an entire era — the idealistic, innocent Sixties — is bravely bidden farewell.

“Having regretted this loss, the song shows us what it was all about in a quick kaleidoscopic resume of the group’s ambiguous blend of sadness, subversive laughter and resolute optimism. Everything hangs on the words ‘nowhere to go,’ arrived at ruefully but instantly spun around and seen from the other side: as freedom, as opportunity. The Beatles’ future may be gone but McCartney is determined to salvage their spirit, and that of the Sixties, for his future. ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ marks the psychological opening of his solo career.”

** Emerick’s own conclusion about the Beatles’ breakup gave me a new perspective.

He begins with an opinion I found startling, given all his and others’ accounts of how well the Beatles could still get along even as their inter-personal troubles mounted:

“By the end, it’s fair to say that the four Beatles hated one another, for a variety of reasons. It’s actually understandable, considering all the time they’d spent together, stuck in hotel rooms and recording studios for year after year; no wonder they couldn’t wait to get away from one another. When the announcement was made, I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that it had been almost four years since they’d done their last tour. For four years, they had been doing nothing but recording in that dank, depressing place known as Abbey Road.”

Emerick goes on the discount the financial squabbles or presence of Yoko Ono as the key reasons for the end of the group, saying Ono was good for Lennon. He concludes:

“No, I always felt that the main reason for the breakup was irreconcilable artistic differences. John, Paul, and George Harrison simply wanted to follow different paths. John wanted to make art; Paul wanted to continue doing pop music; and George just wanted to pursue his Eastern interests. Sadly, inevitably, there was no common ground anymore, only a common history.”

So, having digested all this material over the last few months, where does that leave me as a Beatles fan?

I’ll explore that in part three of this little exercise, coming tomorrow.

#Beatles #Music #Music history #Sixties #paul mccartney #john lennon #george harrison #ringo starr #rocknroll #beatles fan

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saxafimedianetwork · 6 years ago

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We unearth little-known tidbits of information about the King of Pop Michael Jackson’s life, on what would have been his 60th birthday

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1. He was born in Gary, Indiana. He remains the city’s most famous resident, with Gary never recovering from the loss of its factory industry in the 1960s. That said, it’s also home to Jesse Powell, Kym Mazelle and Sista Monica Parker.

2. His parents had musical ambitions of their own. Mother Katherine Jackson played the clarinet and piano, and aspired to be a country and western singer. Father Joe was a guitarist and made extra cash performing in local R’n’B bands.

3. His first public performance was in 1963. When he was 5 he sang Shirley Bassey’s Climb Ev’ry Mountain at a public event organized by Garnett Elementary School’s Kindergarten.

4. His father was the first to notice the talent in his children. He would invite music executives to the family home, where The Jacksons would audition in the living room.

5. James Brown was his major inspiration. The late Godfather of Soul inspired Jackson to hit the stage. Speaking at his public funeral in 2007, Jackson recalled how, “Ever since I was a small child, no more than like 6 years old, my mother would wake me no matter what time it was, if I was sleeping, no matter what I was doing, to watch the television to see the master at work.”

6. He made his recording debut at 9 years old. It was on Big Boy by The Jackson 5, which was released by a small label in January 1968. It didn’t sell in large numbers, but it was enough to notify the major labels that these kids had talent.

7. His love for books began as a young teen. His early favorites were Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. He reportedly amassed a library of more than 10,000 books.

8. His relationship with his sister La Toya was based on their love of practical jokes. His favorite was tormenting her with fake spiders and tarantulas. He would place a suspect creature on the phone in La Toya’s bedroom and would then call her and wait for her scream.

9. He began touring as an 8-year-old. As part of the first run of shows in America’s Midwest, The Jackson 5 supported soul legends Etta James, Gladys Knight and Sam & Dave.

10. He was never particularly fond of his voice during early recordings with The Jackson 5. Despite the acclaim, he would often lament the high pitch of his voice in later interviews, describing it as similar to that of Minnie Mouse.

11. It could have been The Jackson 6. Nearly 18 months before he was born, his mother gave birth to a set of twins, Marlon and Brandon. As a result of a severely premature pregnancy, Marlon survived but Brandon passed away 24 hours later.

12. Berry Gordy initially wasn’t a fan of Michael and his brothers. The star-maker and head of Motown Records dismissed the idea of signing them to his label, preferring to focus on Stevie Wonder. But he was eventually convinced to give them a shot and he signed them up in 1969.

13. You may not know her name, but Suzanne de Passe had a big role in his artistic development. She was assigned as a mentor and stylist to The Jackson 5 after they joined Motown. That relationship extended to Michael’s solo career, and she was the first one to see him rehearse the iconic dance The Moonwalk in 1983.

14. The Jackson 5’s global hit I Want You Back in 1969, was originally written for Gladys Knight and The Pips and Diana Ross. What’s unusual about the song is that the lovelorn lyrics are sung by Michael, who was barely in his teens at the time.

15. ABC is the first of Jackson’s songs that 50 Cent recalls hearing. Speaking to NME in 2015, the rapper said the track was responsible for him becoming a fan. “I’ve always loved MJ, so I guess it was probably a good place to start music: right here, with the ABCs.”

16. He broke barriers from a young age. When he was a 12-year-old with The Jackson 5, the group became the first black male group to release four back-to-back chart-toppers with 1969’s I Want You Back and 1970’s ABC, The Love You Save and I’ll Be There.

17. There was solo life before Off the Wall. For many, Michael arrived with 1979’s Off the Wall, but he released his debut solo album, Got to Be There, in 1972. It was a solid collection of soul and pop, with covers of Leon Ware’s I Wanna Be Where You Are and Bill Withers’s Ain’t no Sunshine.

18. He won his first and only Golden Globe in 1972. For Ben, a song he wrote for the 1972 horror film of the same name.

19. He always had his ear to the clubs. Jackson was a frequent visitor to the legendary New York City club Studio 54, where he was exposed to beat-boxing, which was an early harbinger to the upcoming hip-hop movement. He went on to incorporate the vocal technique into many of his future songs.

20. His first venture into film was The Wiz. He starred as a scarecrow in the title role of The Wiz, an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. The film was horrible, but it was here he struck up a life-changing partnership with Quincy Jones, who went on to produce his biggest albums.

21. Quincy Jones nicknamed him “Smelly”. This was during their time on The Wiz. “I used to call Michael ‘Smelly’, because he wouldn’t say ‘funky’. He’d say ‘smelly jelly’.”

22. He broke his nose in 1979 during dance practice. He then consulted Hollywood favorite Dr Steven Hoefflin who reportedly performed Jackson’s first rhinoplasty.

23. He only worked with the best. In addition to enlisting Jones to produce the 1979 blockbuster album Off the Wall, the songwriters who helped him on the record included none other than Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder.

24. Unlike many of his peers, Jackson hated singing from a sheet. While recording Off the Wall, he spent the evenings learning lyrics and harmonies, and would arrive at the studio the next day singing them off by heart.

25. Prince visited him during the Off the Wall sessions. Speaking to The National, Quincy Jones recalled how Prince arrived “into the studio like a deer in the headlight – clothes and shirt off – but he was always competing with Michael”.

26. He was the only musical mind behind one of his biggest hits. Off the Wall was full of songwriting collaborations, but Jackson was solely responsible for one of its biggest tracks, Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough. He decided to write the song after constantly humming the melody at home.

27. The change on 1979 single Rock with You. It was originally called I Want to Eat You Up, but that was deemed too risque for Jackson’s heartthrob image.

28. Off the Wall was almost a hit for Karen Carpenter. The hit title track from Off the Wall was originally written for the late Karen Carpenter’s debut solo album. She declined to use it and Jackson made it a top 10 hit instead.

29. The tears in She’s Out of My Life are real. Jackson would break down in tears at the end of each studio take. “We recorded about – I don’t know – 8 to 11 takes, and every one at the end, he just cried,” producer Quincy Jones said. “I said, ‘Hey – that’s supposed to be, leave it on there.’”

30. Jackson surrounded himself with talent in both the studio and the boardroom. With Off the Wall he secured the game-changing royalty rate of 37 cents wholesale per sale. It went on to sell more than 20 million copies.

31. Thriller was a blockbuster fueled by frustration. Despite big sales and critical acclaim, he was irked that Off The Wall didn’t win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year. “It was totally unfair that it didn’t get Record of the Year and it can never happen again,” he told manager John Branca. Thriller went on to win a record-breaking eight Grammys in 1984.

32. Billie Jean doesn’t exist. Despite being the subject of one of his biggest hits, the woman – who in the 1983 song admits she is carrying Jackson’s unborn son – is pure fiction. “The girl in the song is a composite of people my brothers have been plagued with over the years,” Jackson wrote in his memoir Moonwalker.

33. Billie Jean was the first video by an African-American artist to air on MTV. The video revealed Jackson’s new look of a leather suit, pink shirt, red bow tie and his signature single white glove. It was a style copied by kids throughout the United States. It caused one school, New Jersey’s Bound Brook High, to ban students from coming to class wearing white gloves.

34. Jackson introduced his famous Moonwalk in 1983. It was during a live performance of Billie Jean for the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever concert special. He was taught the move by veteran dancer Jeffrey Daniel, who went on to be hired as Jackson’s co-choreographer.

35. Jackson was a music investor from 1983. He bought the rights to select music from funk pioneers Sly and the Family Stone, and the iconic Dion DiMucci songs The Wanderer and Run Around Sue, before landing the rights to the 4,000 song catalogue of ATV Music Publishing, which included the lion’s share of The Beatles’ songs.

36. Jackson’s Beat It was a fiery single … literally. When Eddie Van Halen recorded his blistering solo, the sound of his guitar caused one of the studio speakers to catch fire.

37. The gritty music video for Beat It was a landmark production. The lavish production cost US$100,000 (Dh367,250) at the time. It was set in Los Angeles’ Skid Row and featured up to 80 real-life gang members from the notorious street gangs the Crips and the Bloods.

38. Toto were heavily involved in the making of Thriller. Keyboardist Steve Porcaro co-wrote Human Nature, and Steve Lukather contributed rhythm guitar on Beat It.

39. Thriller was almost Star Light. The lyric “thriller” in the track of the same name was originally “star light”. The decision to change it was down to marketing appeal.

40. PYT (Pretty Young Thing) was never performed live by Jackson. Despite being a well-received single from the Thriller album, the star never featured the song in any of his live sets.

41. Thriller was included in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. The music video for the title track was also placed in the National Film Preservation Board’s National Film Registry of “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant films”.

42. It was with his seventh album, 1987’s Bad that Jackson really came into his own as a songwriter. He wrote nine of the 11 tracks and co-produced the album with Quincy Jones.

43. The title track for the Bad album was supposed to be a duet with Prince. But the latter walked away from it due to the opening line “Your butt is mine”. “Now, who is going to sing that to whom? Cause [he] sure ain’t singing that to me, and I sure ain’t singing it to [him],” Prince said in a TV interview with American comedian Chris Rock.

44. The smooth 1987 ballad I Just Can’t Stop Loving You is a duet with singer Siedah Garrett. She was the third choice after Barbra Streisand and Whitney Houston rejected the offer.

45. The Way You Make Me Feel was his mother’s request. Jackson wrote this track after his mum asked him to write something with a “shuffling kind of rhythm”.

46. Man in the Mirror is one of the few music videos he is hardly in. Other than appearing at the end standing in a crowd, the video is a montage of major events and historical figures.

47. His Superbowl XXVII half-time show in 1993 was game-changing. His pyrotechnics-laced four-song set was watched more than the game itself. It has set the standard for half-time shows ever since.

48. Michael Jackson’s 1991 album Dangerous was hot property. Five days before its release, three armed men broke into a music warehouse in Los Angeles and stole 30,000 copies.

49. The explosive video for Black or White was directed by Hollywood stalwart John Landis. It starred an 11-year-old Macaulay Culkin fresh from his starring role in Home Alone.

50. The music video to Scream was, at the time, in 1995, the most expensive ever produced. It had a US$7m budget. The menacing and arty video starred Jackson and his sister Janet.

51. Even when he wasn’t trying, Michael Jackson broke records. His album Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix, released in 1997, remains the bestselling remix album of all time, with more than six million copies sold, after virtually no promotion.

52. Jackson consistently mixed music with charity work. He was behind a series of Michael and Friends concerts in Germany and Korea, which featured performers such as tenors Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli, as well as rockers Slash and The Scorpions. The money raised went to the non-profit organization War Child.

53. Jackson’s final studio album Invincible was the bestselling album of 2001, despite moderate reviews. It features the song Unbreakable, which had, until then, the unreleased vocals by slain rapper The Notorious BIG.

54. After years of scandals and court cases, Jackson re-emerged on the music stage by announcing his final live tour This Is It. The first 10 shows alone, to be held at London’s O2 Arena in the summer of 2009, would have netted him £50m (Dh236.49m). The residency was extended to 50 shows, but the tour was cancelled following his death on June 25, 2009.

55. This Is It was his first posthumous release. With the This Is It tour abandoned after Jackson’s death, the tour’s title track became the first of many posthumous releases. The song was originally written in the 1980s by Paul Anka.

56. The secrecy of Xscape. Michael Jackson’s second posthumous album, released on May 13, 2014, was such a big deal that journalists were invited to secret listening sessions around the world days before its release. The session for this region was held at Dubai’s now-closed Qbara restaurant.

57. The life and times of Michael Jackson were discussed in detail at the inaugural Dubai Music Week in 2013. It featured a sold-out special panel session on Jackson’s career featuring producer Quincy Jones and other collaborators, the late Rod Temperton (via live video feed) and singer Siedah Garrett.

58. Abu Dhabi and China were discussed as possible sites for the world’s first Jackson family-themed hotel called Jermajesty. Speaking exclusively to The National in 2013, Jermaine Jackson said he was looking at Yas Island as a possible site for the hotel, which would be filled with Jackson family memorabilia. Nothing has been built as yet.

Read also: Jermaine says Michael Jackson was on the verge of converting to Islam

59. To celebrate Michael Jackson’s 60th birthday today (August 29), a large street party was held in New York City last Saturday to celebrate his life. It was organized by the director, and his collaborator, Spike Lee.

60. It is only fitting that the Apollo Theater in New York is hosting its legendary Amateur Night today. It was on the same stage that, in 1967, The Jackson 5 launched their career.

60 Things You May Not Have Known About Michael Jackson

#Birthday #Jacksons #Janet Jackson #Jermaine Jackson #King of Pop #Michael Jackson #Music

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