Saturday, June 25, 2011

Words of Love

Today's song, "Words of Love", is a cover of a song by Buddy Holly and features some twangy guitar work (no doubt George's doing). Since John and Paul were great fans of Holly's original, they stuck as close as possible with their harmonies and musical style. Wikipedia tells us that since McCartney actually owns the rights to this song (as well as Holly's entire catalog), it's the only song on Beatles for Sale owned by a Beatle. 

[Note: Who actually owns The Beatles' music is rather confusing, so I looked it up. There's a difference between publishing rights and songwriting rights; Michael Jackson and Sony owned most of the publishing rights (MJ owned most of it at one point, purchasing the rights for $47 million and "trumping a joint bid by McCartney and Yoko Ono", but sold it to Sony to finance his ruinous lifestyle). EMI (The Beatles' distributor) and Apple Corps, Ltd. (The Beatles' own company) own the actual recordings. The guys (or whoever owns/controls their estates) own songwriting rights to the music and are compensated whenever a song is licensed--about 50% of the profit. Also, some individual songs are owned by the Beatle that wrote them; for example, George owned "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and Ringo owns "Don't Pass Me By" through his company, Startling Music. See? Very confusing. That's just the short version. You can check out the long version here, under "Song Catalog".]

Back to the song... "Words of Love" is a good contrast to the previous song, "Eight Days a Week". They're both love songs, but they exist in entirely different realms. "Words of Love" is ironically quite concise--there are only two verses, with no real chorus to speak of--unless you want to consider the verses as choruses, in which case there are two repetitions of the chorus and no verses. Either way, it's short. 

My favorite part is the clapping sound, which was actually Ringo playing a packing case to more closely mimic the sound of Holly's original. I actually listened to the original, to see how close the guys got--I think it's spot on. I think for this cover, they weren't trying to exert their own musical influence so much as pay homage to Buddy Holly's. In that light, it's a job very well done. :)

That's all for today. Hope you enjoyed the song! See you guys tomorrow.


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Heard It Tally: 8
Songs Completed: 61

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