Various Artists, This Bird Has Flown: A 40th Anniversary Tribute to the Beatles' Rubber Soul

Tracks & Durations

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Review

Need to be reminded just how singular a phenomenon the Beatles were? Take a listen to This Bird Has Flown, Razor & Tie's 40th anniversary indie-rock tribute to their second album of 1965, Rubber Soul. Tributes to other artists that aim to include songs as timeless as "Drive My Car," "Norwegian Wood," "Michelle," and "In My Life" typically have to cover their entire careers, and even then that's often not enough. This, however, is a one-album show, sequenced in the same order as the original, and the same thing could have been done with almost any other of the Beatles' LPs, with similar results. In some cases--the Donnas' "Drive My Car," Dar Williams's "You Won't See Me," Rhett Miller's "Girl"--the arrangements are a little too note-perfectly faithful to remain compelling. But a good number of the tracks here are sufficiently obscure to keep things interesting even if their arrangements do hew a little too closely to the originals. Into this category fall Yonder Mountain String Band's "Think for Yourself" and Mindy Smith's "The Word," two rarely covered songs it's a delight to hear recast in the Americana mold.

The best listens on This Bird Has Flown, however, are those that exhibit some of the experimentalism and innovation that was the mid-period Beatles' hallmark. On "If I Needed Someone," Nellie McKay turns George Harrison's Byrds pastiche into a breezy day at a Brazilian beach; Low strip "Nowhere Man" to its bones in a typically minimalist performance; the Fiery Furnaces recast "Norwegian Wood" as a keyboard-driven funhouse extravaganza; and Sufjan Stevens warbles "What Goes On" beyond recognition, taking it from country Ringo vehicle to jazzy woodwind spectacle. The disc closes with the Cowboy Junkies' "Run for Your Life": with murderous lead vocals and ominous, threatening instrumentation, it's a far cry from the slight number that weakly ended the original. Here's hoping there's a follow-up in 2006 for the 40th anniversary of Revolver. --Benjamin Lukoff

More Tributes of Note

Labour of Love: The Music of Nick Lowe

Caroline Now!: The Songs of Brian Wilson & the Beach Boys

This Is Where I Belong: The Songs of Ray Davies & the Kinks

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the release of the Beatles' legendary album Rubber Soul, Razor & Tie Entertainment is proud to announce This Bird Has Flown: A 40th Anniversary Tribute to the Beatles' Rubber Soul. The 14-track album mirrors the sequencing of the original UK release of Rubber Soul. This Bird Has Flown features some of today's hottest artists, including Sufjan Stevens, the Fiery Furnaces, Ben Harper, Dar Williams, Mindy Smith, the Donnas, and many more. Of the importance of Rubber Soul, Allison Robertson of the Donnas commented, "They got a little more folky, they got a little more funky and more rocking...it was so different, it was like heavy and light at the same time."

The album is produced by Jim Sampas (producer of 2002's Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska). On choosing the lineup of artists on the record, Sampas stated, "As we looked toward artists we would approach, we felt they should be kindred spirits, whose gifts for singing and arranging lend themselves to these melodies and themes. Each artist on this album brought their own fascinating interpretations and have extracted new meanings from Rubber Soul."

Originally released in the United Kingdom on December 6, 1965, the George Martin-produced Rubber Soul is considered to be an extraordinarily important album in the Beatles' catalogue, the first flowering of the complex songwriting and production techniques of their later releases. The album features the now-ubiquitous songs "Nowhere Man," "Drive My Car," "Michelle," and "In My Life," among others. It held the #1 position on the British album charts for eight weeks and remained on the chart for a total of forty-two weeks. In 1966, "Michelle" won John Lennon and Paul McCartney the Grammy for Song of the Year. To date, Rubber Soul has been certified 6x platinum.

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