How to Be a Beatle

We talk a lot about the “talent myth” here at Musical U, and how everything we think takes talent or a gift for music is, in fact, learnable. So does that mean you could be a Beatle?

That’s the question I posed back in 2019, and the answer was both surprising and fascinating.

So a little bit of backstory on today’s episode. It’ll be a relatively short one, but hopefully really fun for you, really interesting.

As we’ve rebooted the show, I’ve had reason to go back into the entire back catalogue. We had some kind of housekeeping/admin stuff to do and oh, my gosh, like, there is so much good stuff in the back archive of this show!

And with all humility, it’s not because I’m amazing, it’s because the guests we’ve had on this show are just the best. And it really made me think about how, for a lot of you tuning in now, you might never have seen those episodes, or know that they exist.

So I was thinking about, like, what we could do about that and whether we might do some kind of “lookback” episodes now.

And then this morning, I was hanging this new picture in my office, which, if you’re watching the video version of this podcast, you’ll see. If not, it’s this awesome, colourful, abstract interpretation of the Abbey Road album cover.

And it made me reminisce about something cool we once did, all related to the Beatles.

So the Beatles had come up a lot at Musical U over the years, really, because for a lot of people, they epitomize musicality and talent. You know, we would often be asked over the years things like “well, do I really need to study theory? The Beatles never did.” Or, you know, people would be sheepish about their own creativity and be like “oh, you know, it’s no Beatles song”. Or they’d often be held up, like, if we were questioning the existence of “magical, mystical musical talent”, people would be like “well, what about the Beatles then?” Just like they say “well, what about Mozart?”

And of course there are answers to those, but it came up so much, it kind of made me want to do something about it.

And it’s a little bit like when I got a bee in my bonnet about tone deafness and how many people I talk to and they’d say “oh, I’d love to play music, but I’m tone deaf”. And I went on this whole jag and created tonedeftest.com and the Singtrue app, and I really want to just kind of hammer home that point of, no, you’re not tone deaf.

If you want to do it, you could do it. And it was a bit the same with the Beatles where, you know, in the case of Mozart, we have the historical records to point to and be like “Well, no. He was trained to be a composer from age like two by one of the world’s best composers. So it’s not that mysterious how he became so amazing!”

But with the Beatles, I think a lot of people don’t really know the backstory, or at least don’t understand how it relates to their musicality.

And so for context, I happen to be a huge Beatles fan. My dad is a big Beatles fan, and so I grew up hearing him singing, you know, “Good Day Sunshine” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and other Beatles tunes. And now, as a dad myself, I’m always playing Beatles songs for my daughters. We sing them together. I spent a lot of time in the middle of the night with one of them in a sling, bobbing up and down, singing “Penny Lane” or “Yellow Submarine”.

So I’m a big Beatles fan, and I love the recent documentary, if you saw it, Get Back. It’s epic in length, but it is so fascinating. And actually, if you’re curious about what I’m talking about today in terms of their musicality and was it really magical or, you know, how it all worked, that documentary is an amazing glimpse into what it actually looked like for them to create some of the songs that have stood the test of time.

So all of that, just to say, I’m a Beatles fan, and I think the music is so wide-ranging, it’s kind of hard not to be, right? Like, whatever kind of music you like, the Beatles catalog spans genres and created genres almost in a way that means you’ve almost certainly got a Beatles song you love, right?

And the other thing about it, I think, is that there’s so much to be gleaned on repeat listens, you know, compared to some bands that are amazing, and they have songs that have stood the test of time, often musically, there’s not that much going on. And the Beatles were really remarkable for a whole host of reasons, but partly because they had such rich arrangements, particularly in the later years.

We actually have a whole series. I just thought of it, inside The Musician’s Ear, our course on active listening, that’s also part of the Living Music program. We actually have a whole series of listening guides on Beatles songs. Because if you’re looking to learn to decipher and dissect and understand music by ear and hear all the different layers that are going on, and how it all works together, you almost can’t pick better than Beatles songs.

So the music is fantastic, but there was this issue of, like, people see them as talented and magical and out of reach, and that can actually intimidate them and make them feel like, you know, they’re not naturally gifted the way the Beatles were.

So back in 2019, which I guess is like, five years ago now, I got this idea in my head of, like, could we do a project to really pick that apart and lay out for people the musicality of the Beatles, basically.

Like, how did they do what they do? And what does it mean for you as a musician? And if you’ve ever wondered, you know, could I ever be like them, could we peel back the curtain and show you, you know, what it might take or what they did to become as incredible as they were?

I ended up interviewing six of the world’s leading Beatles experts, specializing in everything from, you know, their origins and backstory and the ten year journey that led to them being an “overnight” success. The kind of truth behind the talent, as it were, also on their songwriting process. And what’s so distinctive about their songs, you know, when their song twists in a certain way or there’s a note that jumps out or the lyrics are doing this. Someone who has spent, you know, probably ten or 15 years really analyzing all of that side of things. One of our own members, Scott Kuehn, came in to talk about something that happened to be an academic research topic of his, which was the Beatlemania phenomenon, and in particular, how it came from the music. Like, it wasn’t just a pop culture teenage thing, there were things in the music that produced that Beatlemania, which is just fascinating. Someone else who wrote the biography of George Martin, the so-called “Fifth Beatle”, and how he, as their producer, had such an impact on their music and their collaboration and their creativity. And even with a top level Beatles cover band, to hear, you know, what it takes to replicate their amazing performances note by note.

So it was a real range of Beatles experts, all bringing their own perspective on the musicality of the Beatles. It was absolutely fascinating. And anyway, as I hung that picture, that one, I was thinking, like I said, how many people tuning in today might not know we ever did that, let alone have heard all those episodes? And I realize we’re on episode 260 something, or probably most of you haven’t heard all 260 something, but those, I guess, eight episodes in particular for Beatles month, are so well worth returning to.

And so it made me want to just jump on quickly today as a brief episode just to kind of promote that series, I guess. Just say, you know, if you’re at all curious how the Beatles did what they did, we’ve got the answer for you. If you’ve ever wondered, how could I be a Beatle? Could I be a Beatle? Can the average person turn into someone that the world looks up to as the magically talented one? Those episodes are a really fun deep dive into the musicality of the Beatles, so I hope you’ll absolutely love checking them out.

I will put a link in the show notes to all those episodes to make it easy for you. Or if you’re on a podcast app, you can go back to episode 167, I believe, back in 2019 to start that series.

So that’s it for today. I’m going to be back tomorrow with a mini interview from one of our guest experts here at Musical U, and later, an excerpt from their masterclass. All around this same topic of creativity and collaboration. And how do you, you know, produce things in a way with other musicians that leads to something greater than any of you alone could have, just like John, Paul, George and Ringo did. So until then, cheers!

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