Call this mix the postscript of Beatles Week at Popdose … a postscript that’s a couple of weeks late! But better late than never, right? There’s been a lot of talk about the marketing savvy of Beatles merchandise, and it’s pretty damn impressive. I mean, getting people to buy remastered recordings they’ve probably had in their collections for years (and I’m talking about vinyl, cassette, 8 track, CD, and mp3s) is no easy feat – unless the product really is superior to what came before. And yes, the remasters did live up to the hype. But if I may start a second sentence with a conjunction, what also lives up to the hype is the long shadow of the Beatles’ style of music on popular recording artists. Billy Joel, Andy Partridge, Roland Orzabal, Jeff Lynne, Neil Finn, and the Gallagher boys must have all, at one point or another, fantasized about being “The 5th Beatle” while singing along to one of the Fab Four’s songs. So much so, that they all wrote songs that were unabashedly Beatlesque.
“Scandinavian Skies,” Billy Joel (download)
Billy is certainly a singer/songwriter who doesn’t need to copy the style of musical giants since, well, he’s in that pantheon. I’m not a big fan of his music, but The Nylon Curtain was, for me, the most impressive of his catalog. The sappy love songs were absent and the themes tackled were certainly a step up from what came before and after this album — and having several nods to the Beatles only added to the depth of this album. (more…)
