Songs on the compilation albums “Rock ‘n’ Roll Music” and “Love Songs” are presented with left and right channels reversed from original releases.
Is that worth a listen?

NEW

I listened to this and forgot to post about it! I actually really enjoyed it. There’s a great balance here of McCartney trying some new things and delivering the familiar, sometimes all together. I recall really liking Save Us, Alligator, New, Everybody Out There, and Road.

Egypt Station

This one is a bit less enjoyable for me than NEW. It’s really the first for me where it feels like an overly deliberate attempt to sound fresh and it doesn’t feel organically McCartney. It sounds like a Beatle trying sound like he’s in Imagine Dragons or something in different spots. The start is pretty good with I Don’t Know and Come On to Me, but then it just sort of fizzles out with non-experimental experimentation - ham fisted efforts at being current instead of being himself. As a result, this is really the first album that feels old mannish.

Edit- actually Despite Repeated Warnings and Hunt You Down… are also quite good.

New is good. Released the same week as Lightning Bolt. Hosanna is a stand out.

Yeah, I should have included that song among the highlights.

McCartney III

Whatever ailed McCartney on Egypt Station was more than fixed on this one. Holy smokes this was great. Here he plays around and experiments a bit, but none of it feels forced. And hot damn when the guy gives himself some space on a record, he can really build out a sound. Long Tailed Winter Bird, Deep Deep Feeling, and Slidin’ are really fabulous examples of this. There’s also good space for more traditional sounds like Find My Way. Seize the Day, Deep Down…it pretty much all works here. Probably my favorite since Driving Rain or Flaming Pie, and likely even further back than that…maybe since McCartney II?

“Nothing’s gonna change my world” feels like one of the most relevant lines in popular music history.

McCartney 3 is way better than it has any right of being for a guy 60 years in.

True

60 years ago today, since The Beatles released their first single, Love Me Do.

That is frightening. I can remember joking about aging rock stars as long as I can remember. The Rolling Stones touring as geezers. That was nearly 30 years ago, and now the bands I grew up with (mostly Pearl Jam at this point) have been touring as long as or longer than those bands back then.

The fact that the Beatles music hit 60 is just crazy.

Wow, the Special Edition of Revolver is a such beauty. So many highlights.

Just finally listened to this. Incredible. This new mix really does it for me.

I’ve not heard any of the recent remixes. What’s the general critical consensus? I could see Let It Be and Sgt Pep maybe improving but otherwise I can’t imagine Revolver is somehow going to sound any better

So far all I've heard are critics raving about it. The new AI technique they used to isolate and re-mix all the individual parts is mind-blowing (at least to me). The thing has so much space and depth to it.

I mean, it's Revolver. The album has never suffered for sound quality. Like you said, no one was clamoring for a "better" mix of the thing. But there's just a lot of clarity and space to the new mix. You can hear each individual piece of Ringo's kit. You can hear all the subtle touches, the harmonies, the finger snaps, all of that. Things that never bothered me before now sound buried in the OG mix when I compare them. I don't have the proper language for it really, but the general consensus I've heard is that it's great.

But the best thing about is the outtakes. And you also get the OG mono mix on the deluxe to compare. So you can decide for yourself.

Thanks for that! Intriguing. I’ll definitely check it out, though I’m more here for the new mix than the outtakes.

Oh totally!

I'm just a weirdo, very amateur, Beatles "historian" (read: idiot fanboi). So learning that Yellow Submarine actually started as a Lennon song is wild to me! Because like nobody knew that. The story of how that song was written has been told over and over and no one ever mentioned that it's based on a Lennon song (original opening lines: "In the town where I was born / no one cared, no cared").

That kind of shit thrills me. Also, hearing Rain at full speed! Just some fantastic stuff that I didn't know I was missing.

That real speed Rain is really amazing, chills inducing. And yeah, Paul is a liar.

Every single Beatle attributed Submarine to Paul, including John in his famous Playboy interview, so it seems more like “we were writing and rewriting so often, and we were so damn high at the time…who can say what happened?”

Yeah, the 2022 mix is super cool to me. It’s a great addition to, rather than a replacement of, the album as released.

It also feels much more respectful of and locked in to the original intentions and aesthetics of the band and production team, rather than something that makes changes to justify itself or feel clever.