A few months ago I did a post on the origin story of Paul McCartney’s beautiful song, Eleanor Rigby, and regular commentator, Andrei, opined that McCartney is a musical genius.
The following clip, which triggered the title of this post, shows us that opinion is correct. It’s from a live concert “Chaos & Creation at Abbey Road” that was given by Paul McCartney at Abbey Road Studios, on 28 July 2005. In the clip he sings about a minute of Elvis’s famous song, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. The word “Genius” is not over-egged here.
Here’s another cover, Dolly Parton’s classic Joelene, done by “Stephanie Urbina Jones & the Honky Tonk Mariachi band”
Then there’s this one. I’m not a huge Foo Fighters fan but some of their songs are good and this… this is something. The drummer is the 16 year old son of the band’s former drummer, Taylor Hawkins, who died of a drug overdose.
The kid kills it, and you can see all the emotions pouring out of him as he does the set, plus the rest of the band so obviously being there for him.
Finally I’ll leave you with this. Yes, yes… it’s Taylor Swift, who is regularly trashed as a songwriter who has merely pushed her life and loves into her music, and yes, this is perhaps more of the same, but…. she can a tell a great story in just four minutes and as even her critics have said, the lady can write a bridge better than almost anybody alive today.
In this song she sings of a woman, Rebekah Harkness who inherited a chunk of the massive Standard Oil fortune via marriage, and then poured money into things like ballet companies (she formed one), charities, as well scandalising the Watch Hill, Rhode Island community with “Bitch Pack” friends and a decadent lifestyle.
She was a great beauty, as the picture to the right shows.
Decades later Swift bought Harkness’s old Rhode Island mansion, called Holiday House, and learned of the history. In 2020, presented with music written by one Aaron Dessner, she wrote the lyrics to The Last Great American Dynasty, in the time it took Dessner to go out for a run and return.
No Minister 
If you like Tay-tay, check out Lana Del Rey “13 Beaches” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcvz8DnuoGI
You won’t be surprised to learn that I’m a bit of a fan of Lana, ever since her breakthrough hit in 2011, Video Games, but at the same time I’ve not listened to a lot of her songs and missed that one. But it’s good.
That was’nt half bad by Swift … she is as mad as a cut snake, but can do a nice pop song reveling in her own bad behaviour…
There can be little doubt that Paul McCartney and John Lennon are the 20th centuries equivalent of Chopin.
It is the serendipity of these two guys coming together in their teens, the combination of co-operation and conflict between them along with another serendipitreeir might be something more to the Beatles than a flash in the pan pop band woth 2 singles and perhaps a shitty LP that fascinates me.
What other might have beens have gone unrealized because the stars didn’t align in the manner they did for the Beatles?
Talking about what might have been, have you seen ‘Yesterday ‘. Well worth a watch.
Only if you are into Romcoms with the mandatory diversity component.