Love (Beatles album)

• 1. Introduction

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  George Harrison died in November 2001, years before the Beatles album Love was released. He never heard the finished work. Yet the original idea had come from Harrison, through his friendship with Cirque du Soleil's founder, Guy Laliberté. Love, released in November 2006, is a soundtrack album built for the Cirque du Soleil stage show of the same name. Produced by George Martin and his son Giles, it draws on 130 individual commercially released and demo recordings. Paul McCartney said the result "puts The Beatles back together again, because suddenly there's John and George with me and Ringo". Making that happen required the consent of two surviving Beatles and the estates of two who had died.

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• 2. The Green Light

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  Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr gave their approval to Love directly. Yoko Ono signed off on behalf of John Lennon's estate, and Olivia Harrison did the same for George's. With all four parties in agreement, George Martin and Giles Martin could begin.

  Giles Martin's first act was not to start mixing. Worried that final approval might not come, he made digital back-ups of every original multi-track recording. That decision gave him material to work with while the project's future was still uncertain.

  His first real demo combined "Within You Without You" with "Tomorrow Never Knows". He then presented it to McCartney and Starr, and by his own account he was nervous about their reaction. In his recollection, "they loved it". McCartney's response was immediate: "This is what we should be doing, more of this."

  The Martins ultimately mixed more material than appeared on the final album. A version of "She's Leaving Home" was among the unused pieces. A version of "Girl" that Giles Martin was particularly fond of was eventually released in 2011 as a bonus track on iTunes.

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• 3. Mashup Culture

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  Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, released in 2004, had already shown what the Beatles' catalogue could yield as raw material. That record fused Jay-Z's vocal performances with music from the Beatles' White Album from 1968. Go Home Productions' "Paperback Believer" went further, combining the Beatles' "Paperback Writer" with the Monkees' "Daydream Believer". By the mid-2000s, the Beatles had become the default source material for producers working in the mashup tradition.

  McCartney was aware of that shift. He hired mashup producer Freelance Hellraiser as a DJ for his 2004 world tour. That collaboration led to the 2005 release Twin Freaks. He later described himself as a fan of what he called the "bootleg explosion".

  Neil Spencer of The Observer wrote that Love's tracks are "set in an ambient flow of sound collages". David Cavanagh described the album as mashups and megamixes that play "plurally, in collage form". He wrote that the result placed the Beatles in "a 21st century sampladelic culture". Giles Martin described his process as working with "the original four tracks, eight tracks and two tracks". His overall description of the album: "a new experience, a way of re-living the whole Beatles musical lifespan in a very condensed period".

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• 4. Building the Sound

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  "Lady Madonna" as rebuilt for Love contains layers its original recording never had. The Martins added Billy Preston's organ solo from "I Want You (She's So Heavy)". Eric Clapton's guitar solo from "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" appears there too. The piano from "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and the guitar riff from "Hey Bulldog" complete the picture. That approach, drawing material from entirely separate recordings, runs through the whole album.

  "Strawberry Fields Forever" was given particularly dense treatment. The Martins built it up from an acoustic demo, adding sections from take 1 and take 26. At its close, the track incorporates the orchestral section from "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and the piano solo from "In My Life". It also includes brass from "Penny Lane", cello and harpsichord from "Piggies", and the coda of "Hello, Goodbye".

  "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" carries the full original song within a new frame. Guitars from "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" and heavily delayed vocals from "Helter Skelter" run alongside it. Horse sounds from "Good Morning, Good Morning", harmonium from "Cry Baby Cry", and laughter from "Piggies" were folded in. Giles Martin said the adjacent "Blue Jay Way" section was shaped by a director's request for a "macabre Victorian circus" atmosphere.

  George Martin wrote entirely new music specifically for "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". The Martins used a George Harrison demo of the song previously issued on the Anthology 3 compilation. Martin composed a new orchestral score for it and described the result as his final Beatles string arrangement.

  Among the album's smaller tracks is "Gnik Nus", which runs just 55 seconds. The title spells "Sun King" backwards. The track plays the "Sun King" vocal arrangement in reverse over a tambura drone.

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• 5. Reception and Legacy

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  Love debuted at number 3 on the UK Albums Chart in its first week, trailing Westlife's The Love Album and Oasis' Stop the Clocks. In the United States, it entered the Billboard 200 at number 4. It was certified Platinum in the United States before the end of 2006.

  At the 50th Grammy Awards in February 2008, Love won Best Compilation Soundtrack Album and Best Surround Sound Album.

  Writing for Entertainment Weekly in 2007, Chris Willman made an unusually strong case for the album's place in the Beatles catalogue. He called Love "the album you'd give a kid who needs to discover the Beatles for the first time". He also said it worked equally well for "the jaded boomer who's hearing these songs for the ten thousandth time". Willman found Love fresher than other archival Beatles releases like Let It Be... Naked and the Anthology collections. He contrasted it with the 1s compilation, which he called "that uninspired hits set", noting it had sold 10 million copies.

  In 2017, Uncut placed Love at number 75 in their list of "The 101 Weirdest Albums of All Time". George Martin died in 2016, and Love stands as his final album as a producer. Ringo Starr described the experience of hearing it as "really powerful for me", adding that he "even heard things I'd forgotten we'd recorded".

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