Another Week Another Vinyl: The Beatles: Let It Be

During this weeks adventure in my local record store I was just searching for anything that would spark my interest. I had no biases this week unlike prior weeks where I looked for a specific band. This week I was open to anything. After around fifteen minutes of rummaging through the store I had a copy of Neil Young with Crazy Horse, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere in my hands and ready to check out. I felt a little empty when walking closer and closer to the counter, and decided that I just wasn’t feeling Neil Young today. I decided to give one last shot and look through the letter “H” section. There was no rhyme or reason behind looking through that specific letter, instead just a blind hope that maybe something great would pop up. And then around halfway through I stumbled across a copy of The Beatles Let It Be. It seems to have been misplaced, and I’ve always had a huge soft spot for this album. While critics claim you can hear the dysfunction within the band, I beg the differ– this is a collection of some of their greatest songs, and the performance was top notch.

Yet when bringing this album home I didn’t have the same feeling that I usually had when listening to it. Something just didn’t seem right, and it didn’t take much time for me to spot what was wrong. Phil Spector was the problem, my heart had been with the Naked version of Let It Be, not the original. The songs didn’t seem to have the same great flow as the remastered Naked version, the “Wall of Sound” was simply irritating and was taking away from the intimacy in “Across the Universe” and so many others. Why did Spector have to ruin this fantastic album which contained some of the greatest Beatles songs like, “I Me Mine”, “Across the Universe”, and “Let it Be”? But when thinking back on it, it could certainly be worse. The Naked version could have never been released at all, leaving us with this over produced “Wall of Sound.”

Despite my constant nagging about Spector and his big dirty fingerprints which are smudged all over this record, it’s a classic with or without his inclusion. The songs may not feel as intimate, but they still hit home. People will find any reason to knock this album down because of the circumstances at the moment, but in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make... Oops, I mean, in the end, this album is phenomenal!