Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles new solo live album set for 2023 release

A newly release live solo album, recorded in September 2020 at Philharmonie de Paris, will feature the pianist and composer’s interpretations of nine songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and one by George Harrison, in the form of Your Mother Should Know – Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles. Although other Beatles songs have long been staples of Mehldau’s solo and trio shows, Mehldau had not previously recorded any of the tunes on Your Mother Should Know, while the album ends with a David Bowie classic that draws a connection between The Beatles and pop songwriters who followed. 

Commenting on the album the 52-year-old pianist said: “There is an undisputed universality to The Beatles. Their music cuts across cultural and generational lines, as new listeners continue to discover it. There is an immediacy and integrity to their songs that draws everyone in. When I was getting started at the instrument, The Beatles were not on my radar yet, but a lot of the enduring piano-pop music I heard on the radio grew out of them. That music became part of my personality, and when I discovered The Beatles later, it all tied together. Their music, and its wide influence on other artists, continues to inform what I do.” 

Mehldau further considers, “In his book, The Western Canon, Harold Bloom confronted the question of what makes particular books endure: ‘The answer, more often than not, has turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.’ 

“If we look at The Beatles and the multitude of artists who have been influenced by one or another facet of their oeuvre, this paradoxical recipe for longevity is one way to consider their ongoing footprint,” Mehldau continues. “For there is a good deal of strangeness to much of their music, particularly in the series of game-changing albums that begin with Rubber Soul through the release of their final record, Let It Be.” 

Mehldau’s two recent releases on Nonesuch – LongGone with Joshua Redman, Christian McBride and Brian Blade (2022) and his prog-jazz solo work Jacob’s Ladder (2022), which featured music that reflects on scripture and the search for God through music and was inspired by the prog rock Mehldau loved as a young adolescent – both made the Jazzwise Albums of the Year Critics Poll Top 20.  

The tracklisting for Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles is as follows:  1. ‘I Am the Walrus’; 2. ‘Your Mother Should Know’; 3. ‘I Saw Her Standing There’; 4. ‘For No One’; 5. ‘Baby’s in Black’; 6. ‘She Said, She Said’; 7. ‘Here, There and Everywhere’; 8. ‘If I Needed Someone’; 9. ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’; 10. ‘Golden Slumbers’ and 11. ‘Life on Mars?’ (All songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney except ‘If I Needed Someone’ by George Harrison and ‘Life on Mars?’ by David Bowie) 

See the video below Mehldau’s version of Lennon/McCartney's ‘Your Mother Should Know’ and for more info visit bradmehldau.lnk.to/YourMotherShouldKnow