Mega Music Talent

Posts Tagged ‘The Beatles’

Do you remember that haunting song by the Beatles, the one with the line “Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name, nobody came”?

A very sad song, and at the time it was rather out of keeping with the type of songs that we had come to expect from the ‘fab four’.

Just to remind you, here are a couple of verses of that song.

“Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name
Nobody came
Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave
No one was saved

So, who was Eleanor Rigby, and was she a real person or was she just a figment of the imagination, something like ‘lovely Rita, meter maid’?

Well, I was playing some gigs recently in Liverpool, and although my evenings were busy, the rest of the day was free and so I decided to use my spare time to do some research into this and to try and find out if there really was an Eleanor Rigby.

I looked up a few points of reference in the local library, donned my Sherlock Holmes hat, and set off for a suburb of Liverpool known as Woolton.

In the Anglican church there you will find a typical English churchyard, surrounding the church, and you will find many tombstones, but one headstone in particular caught my attention.

Wait for it. The headstone is dedicated to an Eleanor Rigby.

Having located such an interesting gravestone I then began to ask myself if any of the Beatles lived anywhere nearby. And guess what? As a child John Lennon used to live in Menlove Avenue, which is very close to the church.

This made me think back to my childhood, and I remember as a young boy I and my friends would often play in our local churchyard, playing hide and seek and other games behind the headstones.

Therefore it is not unreasonable to assume that John Lennon also probably often went into this churchyard, and would have seen the headstone dedicated to Eleanor Rigby.

Now unfortunately I only had a couple of days in Liverpool so I was not able to dig any deeper into this, but I intend to return soon and continue my research.

I want to spend some time going through the church records, and I would like to see what I can find out about the other people mentioned on Eleanor,s headstone.

If you would like to be kept posted on this, and kept up to date with my research, then please click on the following link. You will be taken to a page and near the bottom you will find my email address. Just send me a note saying keep me informed or something like that, and I will email you whenever I have found out some fresh information.

Click on Eleanor Rigby to be kept updated.

Author Bio: Click on Eleanor Rigby to be kept updated.

Paul McCartney’s newest album was released in November of 2008 but it’s not exactly a Paul McCartney album. It’s officially an album by the experimental music group called The Fireman. Hopefully you are now intrigued and are wondering what in the heck I’m talking about. And you should be intrigued if you enjoy interesting music that stretches the boundaries of “normal” song arrangements.

So who is The Fireman and what do they have to do with Paul McCartney? The Fireman is a duo consisting of a producer who goes by the name Youth (his real name is Martin Glover) and a former bass player for a certain influential 1960s band named Paul McCartney (ah yes, how did you guess?)

If you haven’t heard of The Fireman before that’s because they have only released two previous albums which haven’t gained much widespread attention. One of which was basically a remix album (1993′s Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest) and a second that was a psychedelic, almost entirely instrumental, ambient album (1998′s Rushes which I highly recommend.) Neither of these albums were very publicized and neither made the charts in the UK or the US.

Their newest album, Electric Arguments, is a shift for the group in that it has been more heavily promoted (and it did enter the charts in the US and the UK although only at #67 & 71) and in that it includes songs with vocal melodies & lyrics rather than pure instrumentals (in fact every song on the album features vocals.)

This is very exciting for McCartney fans like myself who have greatly enjoyed McCartney’s more experimental tendencies (such as the tape loops on “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the second album from The Fireman (Rushes,) or The Liverpool Sound Collage.) Finally we get to hear the combination of McCartney’s songwriting & singing talents (and his vocals sound amazing on this album) combined with his experimental musical ideas.

It’s a thrilling ride especially when you consider the rather psychedelic notion that this is the same man who basically gave birth to many of the musical styles of today. This 66 year old man who has seen the music he helped give birth to develop into many different styles of music. And here he is in 2008 still producing inventive original music. It’s truly a beautiful thing if you are into music for the art of it and not for the scene (yes I’m looking at you Pitchfork Media.)

One of the really great things about this album is the way that McCartney stretches his vocals. On each song they sound completely different than the song before (or just about any song he’s ever released in the passed.) There’s a rawness to his vocals that is really exciting to listen to.

There’s a lot of different styles of music on Electric Arguments from ragged rock (track 1 opens the album with a noisy Led Zeppelin-esque rocker) to quiet acoustic music (Track 2 “Two Magpies”) to spaced out hard to describe electronica inspired music.

One of the highlights for me is track 6, “Light From Your Lighthouse” which features probably the weirdest vocal on the album (and that’s saying quite a bit.) It’s also probably the catchiest song on the album. It actually reminds me a great deal of Ween which is a very good thing. I don’t think a lot of people realize how inspired by McCartney Ween actually are. It was Paul, after all, who was behind of the “genre pastiches” with The Beatles (“Rocky Raccoon,” “Honey Pie,” “When I’m 64,” “Back In The USSR.”) By the way, if you are more of an old school classic rock fan and you’ve never heard Ween, I recommend you check them out. Start out with something like White Pepper so you don’t get scared away!

All said, I think Electric Arguments is sure to go down as one of the best albums of 2008 and as one of the most essential albums in Paul McCartney’s solo career.

The author Johnny Moon says you should go to http://www.MusicByDay.com for more music magic.