By: Max Jarck
If you have spent anytime around me you probably know that I love The Beatles. They are easily my favorite musical act ever and I have read an almost embarrassing amount about them. So to see the song ‘You’ll Be Back’ compared to The Beatles excited me. But before I even saw/heard this comparison I liked the song enough to save it on my phone. For me that’s more than a coincidence; it seems like evidence that it actually does contain elements of The Beatles in it.
The one Beatles song that seems most like ‘You’ll Be Back’ is probably ‘Penny Lane’. The basslines seem very similar as is the tempo and beat of both songs. To me the overall aesthetic of the songs is similar.
‘You’ll Be Back’ would be considered baroque pop and The Beatles had many songs in this style. The Harpsichord in ‘You’ll Be Back’ is very baroque and while the harpsichord never appears in a Beatles song the sped-up piano in “In My Life” has a similar sound. There is an electric guitar part in the third chorus which sounds just like the prominent guitar in ‘Getting Better’ from the masterpiece album ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’.
A song that sounds like combination 60s hits seems out of place in a soundtrack dominated by hip hop. This is where I was blown away by the thought put into this play. ‘You’ll Be Back’ sounds like an older song because the King is stuck in the past while the revolutionary colonists are singing in the much cooler and newer hip hop style. The difference in styles adds more depth and meaning to the play by showing the contrast between the two groups. I can’t remember if we talked about this in lecture but this idea has stuck with me as a really neat feature of the play.