Reviewed by Emily Marcroft for Coverville.com
It often seems as though the same 20 Beatles songs are covered over and over again, particularly the later, more mature works. Wonderfully, Let It Be Roberta: Roberta Flack Sings The Beatles takes a liberal journey through both the depth of the Beatles catalog and the development of their songwriting. Of course, Yesterday, Let It Be, and In My Life are here, but so are Oh Darling, I Should Have Known Better, And I Love Her, and I’m Looking Through You. Rules of the canon are also somewhat broken – Isn’t It A Pity is from George Harrison’s first post-Beatles record All Things Must Pass, though to be fair, it was written in 1966 and mystifyingly was never deemed strong enough to release on a Beatles album or even as a b-side.
While Flack’s Come Together and Let It Be are very faithful to the originals, quite a few tracks go to interesting new places. Vocally, Oh Darling wouldn’t sound out of place in the bluesiest of blues clubs, in stark contrast to the almost religious Little Richard-like fervor of the classic recording.
“Another lover down” sings Flack in I Should Have Known Better, purposely changing the lyrical direction of the song from one of realization of new love to that of cynical resignation at yet another ending. Use of samples, a complimentary backing vocal, and a disco beat complete the utter transformation of an early Beatles pop ditty to a post-modern R&B jam.
Flack infuses Here, There and Everywhere with new detail and warmth; as a concert recording with only piano and gentle drum accompaniment, it’s easy to imagine the performance occurring in an old-fashioned nightclub setting, a spotlight starkly illuminating a glamorous Flack as she deftly maneuvers the song to its high point.
In a way, Flack interprets Hey Jude in a more authentic style than the original version – Flack doesn’t go in for any boisterous na-na-na-nana-na sing-a-longs, she brings the song back down to the personal, encouraging conversation Paul McCartney imagined having with Julian Lennon (or John himself, depending on how it’s interpreted) when he wrote it.
Despite Flack being a singer-with-a-capital-S, other performers are allowed to get some good licks in. The guitar work on both We Can Work It Out and The Long and Winding Road is quite appealing, the latter approximating a sitar in a nice sixties reference. Room is also made for some great backing singers on the aforementioned We Can Work It Out and a well-executed R&B duet on The Long and Winding Road.
Thought clearly went into the song choices on Let It Be and craft went into creating these songs, avoiding the commonly encountered Beatles-cover pitfalls of excess reverence or unimaginative interpretations. If R&B-based pop and the Beatles intersect in your musical life, this album won’t disappoint. 4 out of 5.
Glad to hear it. It’s on my Amazon wish list.
First off I’m a huge Beatles fan, and have not only studied them and their music, I’ve seen them perform ‘live’. That being said, I wish to review this recording by Roberta Flack of her attempt to sing and record Beatles songs in an album CD format.
Roberta Flack, does an injustice to the Beatles, lays down tracks that show no concept of the musicality of the Beatles, as in Hey Jude, and I’m not talking about the missing Na,Na, Na part of it either, there’s no build up or accentuation it’s plain flat with no color at all to it. Almost each and every song is untruthful to the sound and quality of the Beatles, in lyrical phrasing and the very essence of their musical arrangement. It’s a shameful work, and destructive at best, no attempt to capture the emotive nature of their song crafting, only pure distortion, for distortion = so called jazz sake, and even no evidence of that either I’m sad to say. Normally I would give it a pass, but in this case there’s no way, that I can accept this as being a sincere effort at representing these classical songs. Ms Flack does an injustice to the Beatles repertoire, by sloughing off what they worked so hard to create.
The only song that Ms Flack ever did justice to was ‘A Bridge Over Troubled Waters’ by Simon and Garfunkel, other than that this effort was a disappointment.
Sorry, Randy, the Beatles aren’t a piece of museum art that is never to be experienced, but only looked at behind a distant velvet rope. If all you ever want to hear is what the Beatles recorded, that’s fine, but you’re going to be poorer for it. Art is meant to be interpreted and reinterpreted at will, experienced, not merely observed from a safe distance where no one can feel it.
The album is imperfect, as most tributes can be, but Ms. Flack hits it out of the part more than most. What’s more, she’s not afraid of it, treating the Beatles as artists to be re-examined, not as artifacts that need to be kept under glass.
This album is Roberta Flack at her best! Paul and John were truly gifts from the almighty God! Their song writing continues to moves me to my very core! I lost my husband suddenly a few months ago and to hear Roberta singing “A Long and Winding Road”…need I say more! Thank You…Paul, Roberta, and the Beatles!!