Beatles Unleashing "Love"

10/03/2006 6:43 PM, E! Online
Josh Grossberg

All you need for Love is a good computer and some classic tunes.

Coming together in ways impossible to envision four decades ago, the Beatles are back with a new album, Love, that remixes and mashes up classic Beatles tunes along with outtakes, demos and song scraps never before released by the Fab Four under the guidance of the band's legendary producer, George Martin, and his son, Giles.

The Martins began delving into the Beatles' back catalog to create a songscape for a Cirque du Soleil extravaganza also titled Love, which opened in Las Vegas in June.

The Love album was initially planned as just a soundtrack but, with the blessing of Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, the custodians of the estates of John Lennon and George Harrison, it was expanded into a "new" release.

"This music was designed for the Love show in Las Vegas but in doing so we've created a new Beatles album," George Martin said in a statement. "The Beatles always looked for other ways of expressing themselves and this is another step forward for them."

Thanks to the Martins' audio wizardry and state-of-art digital technology, Love combines snippets of more than 130 Beatles tracks with a variety of ambient noises and textures.

So don't be surprised to hear elements of "Lady Madonna" mixed in with "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," and "Why Don't We Do It In The Road?" and Eric Clapton's guitar solo from "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." There are tweaked versions of "Eleanor Rigby," "Get Back," "Octopus' Garden" and, natch, "All You Need Is Love."

"We took all the Beatles catalog from tape--the original four tracks, eight tracks and two tracks--and used this palette of sounds and music to create a sound bed," explained Giles Martin. "What people will be hearing on the album is a new experience, a way of re-living the whole Beatles musical lifespan in a very condensed period."

The Beatles canon has proven fertile fodder for unsanctioned mashups in recent years, most notably DJ Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, which combined music from the Beatles' White Album with Jay-Z's rhymes from his Black Album. Other high-profile Beatles-related mashups include Go Home Productions' "Karma in the Life," a track blending Radiohead's "Karma Police" and the Fab Four's "A Day in the Life" that got some radio airplay, and most recently, deejay-producer Clayton Counts' Sgt. Petsounds, which combined the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. Like the Danger Mouse release, Counts wound up on the wrong end of an EMI Records' nastygram threatening legal action.

Nonetheless, the surviving Beatles have seemingly embraced the mashup trend. According to the elder Martin, in fact, McCartney liked the Love tracks so much that he purportedly said, "You could be more adventurous still, y'know."

An exact release date and track listing has not yet been announced, but Love will be jointly distributed worldwide by EMI Music and Apple Corps in November.