When I first got the magazine, the Beatles were on the cover. The Beatles!
Its been one year since I purchased the fancy remastered version of The Beatles White album. What would follow became one of my most ambitious projects ever.
Get Back: I saw all of the hubbub about The Beatles catalog being re-released on super cleaned-up digitally remastered blah blah fancypants cds on 9-9-9. This along with the The Beatles Rock Band video game created a little The Beatles mini-renaissance. I always considered myself to be a The Beatles fan. While reading about the new discs, I realized I actually had never owned any of their albums, just a bunch of compilations and greatest hits collections. So with a Wal-Mart gift card burning a hole in my pocket, I thought, maybe I’ll buy one.
The White Album: That was plenty famous and a double album, so it had a lot of songs. In movies, people always mention The White Album. Plus it had While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Back in the USSR which I already loved. Then it had a whole bunch of stuff I’d never heard. I was surprised at how little of The Beatles catalog I was actually familiar with. So I killed this CD. I listened to on straight repeat in the car and on the iPod for 2 weeks straight. It was fan-friggin-tastic. I couldn’t believe how good these songs are that I’d never even heard of.
Project The Beatles expert: Then I decided that I wanted to be a The Beatles Expert. If the songs I’d never heard of on this album were this good, then I want to hear the rest. I resolved to listen to one new album each month for the next year. (I combined their first two albums into one month to make it fit neatly into a single year) The goal, know every The Beatles Album as well as if I’d been listening to them since the 60’s.
And In The End: A Year later I know every last one them. I would say without hesitation that I am an absolute expert on The Beatles, at least with regard to their albums and songs. That was fun. Because no project can truly be complete without making a ridiculous nerd list of some sort to mark its completion, I am now in the process of ranking the 200+ The Beatles songs in order of well some sort of hybrid list of what I think is the best/my favorite. I will begin counting them down from worst to best in the weeks to come.
