The Beatles in Process: Three Portraits of the Art of Pop Music This book takes as its core an examination of three historically important Beatles recordings and considers the textured creation process of these works as seen through a close reading and thick description of the musical materials.  Each of these songs and their corresponding recordings involved communities of musicians, engineers, publishers, and producers; each came at a particularly important juncture in the brilliant supernova career of Beatles; each derives from a different songwriter; and each addresses a different set of problems.  Each of these chapters employs a different approach to understanding the musical workings of performance and recording.  The book ends with a comparison of these three aural artifacts as song-recordings in a networked history. “Love Me Do.”  When the Beatles arrived for the first time at EMI’s Abbey Road studios in 1962, they brought noisy equipment and an attitude.  Their ability to adapt shaped this, their first recording in both obvious and subtle ways.  Most notably, the principal songwriter of “Love Me Do,” bassist Paul McCartney worked closely with each of the three different drummers with whom he recorded his song.  A micro-rhythmic inspection of tempo and beat placement in the three recordings reveals how the contexts of the recordings changed the rhythmic flow. “Strawberry Fields Forever.”  Perhaps at the peak of his creative powers, John Lennon began composing “Strawberry Fields Forever”—his ode to a childhood haunt—in the fall of 1966 while on location for a film in Spain.  Comparing drafts, demos, and studio takes, we can understand how the text and music evolved under the influence of those around him, and how important musiking (Christopher Small’s notion of the act of making music) remained for the Beatles even as they abandoned their joint live performances. “Within You without You.”  In the mid sixties, British pop musicians embraced musics of the non-Western world.  The music of India held particular significance for many performers who began incorporating elements of Indian classical music into their recordings.  George Harrison’s budding knowledge of this music presented special challenges for the musicians he engaged in 1967 to record “Within You without You,” even as he created perhaps one of the most successful amalgams of British Orientalist rock. Recordings represent the conclusion of a social, musical, and technological process.  If we consider these aural artifacts as communal constructions, we can trace their history from musical inspirations through the compositional, the performative, and the recording processes.  Borrowing parameters from social network analysis, we can map the evolution of musical ideas to show the musical, technological, and social matrixes through which songs flow, and, in particular, compare the creations of “Love Me Do,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and “Within You without You” for what they reveal about Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison as musicians. Anticipated completion: December 2008 Academic Detritus   |   Return to Thompson Homepage 20 January, 2008