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For many readers, the most ambitious literary project of the past few decades has been J.K. Rowling’s bestselling Harry Potter books. I’m here to tell you that they’re wrong. For my money, the most daring project in letters has been, hands down, Jude Southerland Kessler’s John Lennon Series. A painstaking effort to present Lennon’s life […]

The most notorious song during the Beatles’ sprawling sessions associated with The White Album was, bar none, the tension-riddled recording of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” The song would require some 42 hours to record, with Paul McCartney leading his bandmates through numerous takes of the composition in a host of different styles. The elaborate recording sessions for […]

Last summer, music fans the world over celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ groundbreaking LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This time around, we mark 50 years since the July 1968 premiere of the Beatles’ animated feature Yellow Submarine. And with Apple releasing a special picture disc of the “Yellow Submarine” single, the […]

As compilations of Paul McCartney’s work go, Wings Greatest, released in November 1978, is pretty strange. Arguably, it doesn’t even include the totality of McCartney and Wings’ greatest hits at the time, omitting the number-one 1975 single “Listen to What the Man Said,” as well as a trio of top-10 hits in Band on the […]

Last month saw the reissue of Thrillington, arguably one of the strangest episodes in Paul McCartney’s musical corpus. The Thrillington album, a collection of 11 instrumental cover versions of the original songs from McCartney’s RamLP, offers a whimsical, even ephemeral turn on the former Beatle’s gritty, homespun sophomore solo effort. At this relatively late date—nearly […]