All posts tagged: The Beatles

Mr. Hatch, Old Dogs and The Beatles

Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch is a favorite Valentine’s Day book in our family.  To quote from the dust jacket, In a little town on a wintery day, a postman delivers a mysterious package tied up with a big pink bow to a lonely man named Mr. Hatch.  “Somebody loves you” the note says. “Somebody loves me,” Mr. Hatch whispers as he dusts his living room.  “Somebody loves me,” Mr. Hatch whistles as he does errands in town.  “Who,” Mr. Hatch wonders, “could somebody be?” This is a wonderful children’s book that sees Mr. Hatch come alive after learning that someone loves  him, and then deflated when the postman returns weeks later to say he had delivered the package to the wrong address.  That’s not how the story ends, as you might expect.  The town discovers the reason Mr. Hatch has returned to his solitary ways and they let him know that plenty of people really do love Mr. Hatch.  We read the book aloud last evening during a family Valentine’s dinner and our kids …

Five Albums for a Desert Island – Sgt. Peppers

There’s not a lot you can add to all the words that have been written about Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  The Wikipedia entry for the album is one of those that drives people who hate crowd sourcing to rants, because it probably runs longer than the Wikipedia entry for World War II . (I haven’t actually checked that out, but it makes a good line so I’m sticking to it.)  If you want to read about the echo effects, the engineering, the late night recording sessions, even how that great, thunderous E chord at the end of A Day in the Life was produced – you’ll find it all there on Wikipedia.  And that’s just one of countless articles and books written about the Beatles and this music. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has been a source of endless fascination since it was released, and I was certainly smitten as a young teenager.  This is probably on my list as much for what it represents about my youth as for the album …