Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

i'm looking through you

So I discovered The Beatles’ Rubber Soul yesterday. I don’t know what rock I’ve been living under that I hadn’t heard the album before. It’s fantastic, and quite possibly my new favorite Beatles album.

This all came about when, catching up on my podcast queue, I was listening to a really interesting April podcast from NPR’s All Songs Considered about the early Beatles catalogue and all the differences between the American and British releases (and even mono and stereo releases). I was grooving along until they played a snippet of “I’m Looking through You.”

I was only vaguely familiar with the song, but hearing the opening chimes made me stop short, realizing that Belle and Sebastian’s “Me and the Major,” another song I recently redescovered (there’s an awesome live version from a recent performance at the 9:30 Club), borrows pretty heavily from the earlier Beatles tune.

So I played that snippet over and over again, then played the podcast through to the end, when they played another song from Rubber Soul that enchanted me.

I picked up the album at Olsson’s as soon as I got off work. As I listened to the album at home, “Nowhere Man” was a wonderful surprise. I knew the opening verse (“He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land…”), but I’d completely forgotten how beautiful the bridge is. (And I think the chorus to Pete Yorn’s “Strange Condition” owes a debt to it.)

This is probably going to be on heavy rotation for the next couple weeks.