In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.
Burt Bacharach, who along with his writing partner Hal David embodied the sophisticated pop sounds of the 1960s, died of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles on February 8. He was 94 years old.
Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.
“Eleanor Rigby,” the second track on the Beatles’ Revolver album, may be the most atypical Beatles single. No Beatle played a note on it; instead, they were backed by a small string ensemble. Released as a single, it was the flip side of “Yellow Submarine,” and could not have been more diametrically opposed to that children’s song. It was a song not of love, but of loneliness and death, one that ran counter to their Fab-Four-moptop image. To quote Alan W. Pollack, a musicologist who gave close readings of all the Beatles’ songs, “As one of the most ‘serious’ pieces of the entire Beatles’ canon, this song straight-facedly vaporized several commonly supposed limitations of what the two-minute AM-radio pop/rock musical genre might be capable of including within its purview and power of expression. Pigeon-hole terms, such as Crossover, Fusion, or Hybrid, somehow don’t seem to do it justice.”
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