Beatles – Anthology 3

I’d like to give a shout-out to the Toronto Maple Leafs for winning their first game of the 2020-2021 season last night, beating Montreal 5-4 in overtime. Go Leafs!

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Here’s the third rarities and alternative takes 2CD set in this series, companion to the TV special. This one covers from the initial sessions for The Beatles (the White Album) through to the last sessions of Let It Be and Abbey Road. 

As with the other two sets, there was to be one new Lennon song here, Now And Then, but Harrison strongly disliked the track. Instead, a George Martin instrumental called A Beginning is here (originally intended as an intro to Don’t Pass Me By on the White Album). It sounds like Disney backing music, and it’s less than a minute long. You can see the rest of the track listing and notes here.

I’ll post the same thing on all three of these in the series: I acknowledge that this is hallowed ground, but this is not for day-to-day listening, unless you’re deeply into the band, and truly invested in having every single thing they ever recorded in your collection.

Not gonna lie, this has been a lot of Beatles to get through, and while I’d thought I’d begun to lose interest in hearing all this a while ago, I’m truly getting to the end of my time with this band now. Luckily, there are only two more albums here in my collection (one I like, and one I don’t remember liking), and then I can move on.