the beatles | The Smart Set

A Year that Defined a Lifetime

Blake Maddux — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Any given year of one’s time roaming the earth unavoidably has some effect on who they are as a person. It is perhaps especially so when a person has just turned 14, been forced the previous year to swap daily life with his family for the company of strangers and is on the cusp of […]

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Arthur Alexander and the Art of Listening

Colin Fleming — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Have you ever learned about a set of recordings and thought, “I would like to love those?” There’s an embedded knowledge you pick up on — a kind of reader’s contact high — that the recordings would match well with who you are, who you wish to be, how you’d like to think of yourself. […]

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more than a door

Colin Fleming — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 13:25:57 +0000

Is there a form of album in all of popular music more useful, more misunderstood, and then most often discarded as the greatest hits record? If you love music, you’re certain to have had a relationship with them, though I’d wager they’ve been akin to an old flame for a long time now, warmly remembered, […]

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Loving You More

Colin Fleming — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 12:33:00 +0000

As a burgeoning, avid collector of Beatles bootlegs, there was one record at the top of my wish list that I couldn’t wait to lay my teenage mitts upon. Rounding up unreleased music was no small effort at the time. One did not enter the name of whatever one wished to hear into the YouTube […]

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Restoration

Colin Fleming — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 14:53:20 +0000

Like many high school swains — or would-be swains — I was accustomed to being jolted in affairs of the heart. Allowing that we have not experienced parental or sibling death, substance abuse, abandonment — which is to say, tragedy — by that point, these teenage blows are often when life starts to discomfit us. They make us […]

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