My favorite "Re-meet the Beatles" channel: covers and nothing but.
If you are a cultural curmudgeon like me, you’ll doubtless respond to any mention of “Beatlemania” with the sign of the cross. But seconds after I went over to Accu Radio’s Re-meet the Beatles streaming radio page, I was won over by what I heard. “A lot of this music will be brand new for some listeners,” AccuRadio Programming Veep Paul Maloney commented in a statement he sent us. “Especially the crazy, off-the-edge material we’ve uncovered.”
No kidding, as I write this I’m listening to Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour’s cover of John Lennon’s Jealous Guy. Who knew?
Three channels plus three
Re-meet the Beatles celebrates EMI’s long awaited release on September 9 of remastered versions of the entire Beatles opus along with the new video game “The Beatles: Rock Band.” The new sound offering includes a dozen Beatles albums, all in stereo. But I’ve got to stop for a second and listen. . . . Ray Charles did a cover of “Long and Winding Road?” I guess he did. It’s quite lovely too.
The Accu Radio Re-meet the Beatles page has six channels: “Beatles Plus”—all 13 UK albums and various rarities; “Beatles and Friends”—remastered tracks and the musicians who influenced the band; and “Just Covers,” which is, well, just that: covers. There are also three channels that seem sort of thrown in, but they’re fun as well: a “classic rock” channel, a 60s/70s/80s stream, and an “oldies” song fest, all with Beatles tunes weaved in.
But as you’ve already guessed, I’m won over by the cover channel. Right now it’s finishing all-genres guitar master Wayne Brasel doing a version of “Strawberry Fields,” and, wait, Anne Murray did a cover of “Happy to Dance With You”? It’s beautiful.
As we’ve reported earlier, Accu Radio also runs a very nice site called Future Perfect Radio, which is pretty much an Indie Rock service. Looks like the browser of choice for the Beatles site is Internet Explorer, but I fired it up with Firefox, no trouble at all, and am happily listening to Spyro Gyra do “In My Life.”
