On November 17th, the Beatles will be releasing a new version of the "Let It Be" album. Using new sound recording techniques, Paul McCartney has gone back into the original album and taken out all of the fluffy stuff like orchestrations and background choirs. It sounds controversial at the basic level, but when one takes into account the manner at which that album was released, it makes sense.

It seems that right in the middle of the Beatles breakup, they still had all of the songs for the "Let It Be" album just sitting around. So John Lennon had Phil Spector come in and put in all of the orchestrated gobbeldy gook and the in between rants that John came up with on spot. Apparently, this went against Paul's wishes for what the album was supposed to be. Believe it or not, he didn't want any of that really orchestrated material on any of his songs on that album, especially "Let It Be," and "The Long and Winding Road." When the Beatles first set out to record that album, they all said that they wanted to go back to a very basic, live-sound approach. So it is a bit contradictory that all of the overdubs and orchestrations were added in later by Phil Spector.

Another source of tension between Paul and John was the addition of sarcastic lines between and before certain songs. All the stuff about "Doris getting her oats" and the spoken stuff before "Let It Be," infuriated Paul as he always kind of saw it as demeaning to the songs that he wrote.

So the new album is going to be just the basic songs. "Dig It" and "Maggie Mae" have been removed from the track list, and "Don't Let Me Down" has been added. The orchestrations have been removed. The remarks between songs by John Lennon have been removed. So all that's going to be there is the basic album that they set out to creat originally.

It also comes with a fly on the wall cd/dvd of them performing the sessions for "Let It Be."

I can't wait until it comes out. It's going to go right up into my collection.

matt out