Riley on Peter Jackson’s Beatles Doc: The Conversation, NPR, Switched-On Pop Podcast

Associate professor, Journalism graduate program director, and Beatles expert Tim Riley contributed to a variety of media regarding the late November release of filmmaker Peter Jackson’s new documentary on the Beatles’ creation of their 1970 album Let It Be.

From the Switched-On Pop music podcast, Riley weighed in on the group’s decision to return to a more stripped-down recording:

It’s kind of an aesthetic challenge they place [for] themselves when they say, ‘Let’s not do any overdubbing on this.’ They wanted to make it a mission statement, they kind of wanted to see, ‘Well, we’ve done all this elaborate stuff, now let’s see if we can just get back to the basics.’

On the Beatles playing a lot of oldies in rehearsals (most didn’t make the album):

[Their thinking was] ’We do love playing together, but we’re way too sick of each other… maybe if we play a bunch of rock and roll oldies, we can find a spark.’ The oldies kind of led them down the right path.

Read The Conversation piece and listen to the NPR interview.

Riley also wrote a piece about the documentary for Copper Magazine.