At a wedding with a live band playing songs from the 50's and 60's and no Beatles... This is slightly depressing.

This acoustic demo of while my guitar gently weeps is gorgeous. Far more mournful and introspective almost... I nearly like this one beter.

I love the tracks on Anthologies where The Beatles make mistakes. It is refreshing to see that side of The Beatles.

Post 12 ... She Loves You

Almost done with the Anthologies, but I got a little slowed down Yesterday buy my other love, college football. There was so many good games and it had been so long. I also am going to a wedding today in Cleveland so I will have plenty of time to listen and read The Anthology during the ride up there. However I am going to not be near a computer so am going to be doing my posts form my phone so they will be short and sweet and hopefully plentiful (and probably without titles ... unless I figure out how to do that from my phone.)

Post 11 ... It Won't Be Long

Well, I was super busy at work yesterday and spent most of my time conducting experiments in our engineering lab, which sadly has no iPod hook-up, so I couldn't listen today at work. But like I briefly stated in a post from my cell phone this afternoon, I did finish the US Beatles albums, and out of all of The Beatles albums, US and UK, Yellow Submarine is still easily my least favorite and Abby Road is still my favorite. But I am warming up to some others ... Please, Please Me, for example, is a really solid record that I wouldn't have given much of a chance if I wasn't on this Beatles fast; so for this I am thankful. Also I did really enjoy the two CDs of UK singles released in the US, Yesterday ... and Today and Magical Mystery Tour--tons of classic songs on both albums. Magical Mystery Tour has some of my favorite Beatles songs on it; how can you go wrong with "Fool on the Hill" and "Strawberry Fields"?

On another note, I saw a list from EW on the best and worst Beatles songs, and this has inspired me to make a comprehensive list ranking all of the songs from top to bottom, so look for that toward the end of the month.

Post 10 ... Money (That's What I Want)

US releases complete through anthology coming up. Busy at work, but I hope to post later today.

Post 9 … Everybody’s Got Something to...

Well, since I have been babbling on this blog, I thought itmight be a good idea to let you know who I am.

My name is Matt. I was born on October 12, 1982, in Youngstown, Ohio, and lived in its suburb, Austintown, until 2002. My father worked (still does) in a steel mill, my mom has MS and was a stay-at-home mother to my older brother and me. My maternal grandparents lived nearby and were a huge part of my early life. My mother goes to church most Sundays; my father went on
Easter and Christmas when he wasn’t working, and I stopped altogether when I was about fourteen, because it never made sense to me.

I am and have always been overweight. I like sports but was never any good at them; I may be the slowest runner you will ever meet because I am duck-footed. I have been wearing glasses since I was fourteen due to a slight case of myopia. I was a bit of a pyromaniac as a child; however, I always made sure to have water in the vicinity so that my fires wouldn’t spread where I had not intended. I was smart, the school wanted me to skip the 3rd grade, I was in gifted classes, took AP courses in high school. I had enough friends so that I wasn’t bored as a youngster and enough that I never was home as a teen.

Music has always been the number one love of my life. It started with oldies and pop for me, but then my brother got into metal, which made me get into metal. At eight and older I was a huge fan of Ozzy and Maiden to start off, then moved onto Megadeth and Pantera. I saved my allowance for months so I could buy a CD player, amplifier and Speakers at the age of nine.

When I was in my early teens, it was Nirvana, Snoop Dogg, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Alice in Chains, STP, etc. Then I got OK Computer for my 15th birthday and everything changed. Although I was still into metal and hard rock, it changed my outlook on what I was looking for in music. No longer was I looking for someone to identify with, I was looking for something I hadn’t heard before or for something to be done better than I had ever heard it being done before.

I played bass in a band for four years in high school that sounded sometimes like Tool and sometimes like The Deftones. It was fun, but by the end we were worn out and our musical tastes changed in different ways, as teen tastes often do, and it seemed like time to call it quits. At the end of this I was very much into bands that were all over the map, like Glassjaw, Radiohead, Rival Schools, UNKLE, Weezer, Tori Amos, Dillinger Escape Plan, and At the Drive In.

I went to college for a year at a branch of Kent State while living at home, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. I decided I wanted to be an engineer and also to move out of Youngstown, so I moved to Columbus to go to OSU. Throughout college, my musical tastes moved more indie, to bands like Cursive and Mars Volta, …Trail of Dead, BRMC, etc.

Currently I have been out of school and in the work force for 3+ years. I am happily married with two furry-canine children: Penny and Lucy. This is a list of bands of which I have 20 songs or more by on my iPod, so you can get an idea of what I like (there will be some abbreviation): Alice in Chains, AYWKUBTTOD, Arcade Fire, At the Drive In, Bat for Lashes, The Beastie Boys, The Beatles (obviously), Between the Burried and Me, Black Keys, Bjork, BRMC, Blur, Bob Dylan, Springsteen, Cave in, Chiodos, The Cure, Cursive, CSS, Curtis Mayfield, Deathcab, Deftones, Dillinger Escape Plan, Drowning Man, Dolly Parton, Elbow, Elliot Smith, Faith No More, Failure, Flaming Lips, Fleet Foxes, FOTC, GlassJaw, Godspeed, Grizzly Bear, Head Automatica, Iron Maiden, Jenny Lewis, John Vanderslice, Johny Cash, Lil Wyne, Led Zep, M83, Mars Volta, Michael Jackson, Minus the Bear, Mogwai, NERD, NIN, Nirvana, Notorious BIG, Outkast, Pink Floyd, Portishead, Primus, QOTSA, RATM, RHCP, The Roots, Sigur Ros, Smashing Pumpkins, Streets, Sufjan Stevens, Sunny Day Real estate, Supper Furry Animials, Tegan & Sara, Thursday, Tool, Tori Amos, TVOTR, UNKLE, Weezer.

If there is anything else you would like to know … ask.

Post 8 … Hello, Goodbye

In doing my research and diving deep into the fine details of all things Beatle--reading background stories behind albums, tracks, recording sessions, life stories, ect.--I found myself in a “not seeing the forest for the trees moment." There is so much music and so much information that it is hard to imagine that The Beatles got all of this done in a period of about just over seven years (longer in reality, but from the world's perspective this is pretty close as it is the period of time between the first and last UK album releases). Not to mention the touring, the making of movies, the spiritual quests to India, and simply living their lives. It astonishes really, the effect they had on the world in such a short period. It might be a stretch, but the four of them probably will have had the biggest influence on the human race after Mohammed, Jesus, Shakespeare, and thr Buddha. Maybe this is what John meant when he said The Beatles were bigger than Jesus.

It made me wonder what in the hell have I been doing with my life up until now.

Post 7 ... A Hard Days Night.

Man, US audiences really got screwed on the Hard Days' Night and Help! albums. On the US version, five tracks from the UK version of Hard Days' Night were replaced by four George Martin remakes of other tracks on the album, and the US version of Help! has half the original tracks swapped with five instrumentals composed for the movie and a weird detracting intro to "Help!" added. I know there are lots of differences in the track listings of their early works, but these seem like the most egregious offenses. US audiences also had to wait a year after the UK to get their hands on an album with "Yesterday" on it. It is obvious that Capitol Records was out on some crazy money-grab: this way they could turn one album into two with the addition of some instrumentals.

I guess this could be seen as the difference between rock music today and rock music then--the song seemed to be the big thing. Now the album seems to be the emphasis. I mean, singles still sell albums today, but no one buys CD singles. Now iTunes and previously Napster may have brought back the single culture, but I don't see a US distributer getting away with chopping up an album of say U2's to make more cash off of it. That said, I do thank the US for putting together full albums of non-album singles and b-sides later in the Beatles career--for example, Magical Mystery Tour.

As for me, I am doing fine and am more than enjoying this so far.

Post 6 … End

Even though I have been very busy and not at my desk this morning at work, I have found the time to finish the Beatles' UK records.  So now I am going to listen to all of the US releases in the order of their release. To try to experience the Beatles the way that America did starting with Beatle-mania. The only difference is I do not have Introducing … The Beatles and will be replacing it with The Early Beatles. All of the tracks included on The Early Beatles are on Introducing anyway.  Its missing a song or two depending on which version of Introducing you have, and it’s a little different order--but if you don’t tell, then I won’t either.