Reviews
 Keep It Simple
Van Morrison
Roger McGuinn @ the Huntington IMAC, Long Island, NY - April 4, 2008
Emily Saxe @ the Allen Room/Jazz at Lincoln Center - April 5, 2008
Another Country
Tift Merritt
Be Your Own Pet
Get Awkward
Paul McCartney – The McCartney Years (DVD)
Juno – Music from the Motion Picture
Various Artists
Yes - Their Definitive Story
Day and Night Driving
Seven Mary Three
InterMedia Arts Center 2/2/08
Huntington, NY
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The Beatles
Chart Position = # 1 on March 1970
The other Beatles might have considered Paul McCartney a real drag to work with, but there is no denying his instinctive sense of melody. I also firmly believe that he initially had the best interests of the band in mind while he was subtly driving everyone else crazy, but dozens of factors should be taken into account when considering the breakup of the band. In short, it was a four-way divorce that was messily contested. After the group collapsed, the song “Let It Be” gained a relevance that wasn’t truly visible until the dust settled. It’s hard to say if I am reading meaning into McCartney’s performance here, but in light of the events under which it was recorded, his singing sounds truly soulful.
McCartney had one of the most diverse voices in rock-and-roll history. He probably still does, although you can’t tell from most of his subsequent solo work. He could move from the sweet gentility of “Blackbird” to the screaming insanity of “Helter Skelter” in a heartbeat, and this broad palette of colors helped him find the proper voice to suit the mood that his songs called for. Unfortunately, this would sometimes cause him to sound forced or phony, as though he were reaching into his bag of tricks simply for effect. Occasionally, though, he’d write something that would demand more than a deliberate stylization, something that would require a deeper commitment than mere affectation. “Hey Jude” was such a song, and so is “Let It Be.” By singing simply and letting his emotion determine the intensity, he not only gets the point of the song across, but pulls his audience into it, as well.
McCartney uses his frail voice on the verse and waits until the chorus gains momentum before he adds deeper overtones to his singing, giving the impression that he is gaining strength as the song progresses. Since “Let It Be” addresses the need to accept fate, this approach is not just suitable, but soulful. He alludes to the memory of his mother, Mary (and thus cleverly invokes religious imagery as well), as a source of strength and comfort, thus personifying what would otherwise be a universal sentiment. McCartney had a right to feel that he had done all he could to resuscitate the Beatles, but now that they resisted his help, he sang “Let It Be” the only way that he could: with a resigned sense of surrender.
“Let It Be” is an excellent song on its own terms, but if you were a Beatles fan, it was terribly depressing in its finality. It was well nigh impossible to escape the implicit meaning of the title. For fans, it was not at all easy to accept the fact that the band that had led the way through the socially turbulent ‘60s had come to a grinding halt with the onset of the ‘70s. George Harrison would address the same topic on the title song of his first post-Beatles solo album, All Things Must Pass, and John Lennon would also do his best to destroy the myth that plagued him, with his song “God.” Even Ringo Starr would get in his few cents’ worth with the song “Early 1970,” on the B side of his hit single “It Don’t Come Easy.” McCartney, though, had the temerity to say it while they were still together and, perhaps unwittingly, wrote what was to become the epitaph for the greatest band of all time.
 
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