My Top 1000 Songs #877: Two Of Us
[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]
For much of my musical life, The Beatles' final LP (in terms of release date, not recording date), 1970's Let It Be, was kind of an after-thought. That run from 1966-1969 remains the greatest series of records ever released, bar none, from the psychedelic wonders of Revolver/Sgt. Pepper/Magical Mystery Tour through the sprawling strangeness of the White Album through the sheer perfection of Abbey Road. Let It Be, with its stripped down music and far humbler objectives, felt a little under-cooked to me. I mean, sure, any record with "Let It Be" and "Across The Universe" and "I've Got A Feeling" is gonna wind up among the greatest rock & roll albums of all time, but when I was in a Beatles mood, this was rarely the one I reached for.
That's changed dramatically over the past decade or so. 2003's Let It Be... Naked remix stripped out some of the Phil Spector production flourishes and tweaked the playlist, feeling far more organic than the posthumous hodge-podge of the original; the recent documentary about the album's recording sessions was thrilling for any Beatles fan, adding shades of wonder to the songs; and the digital age gave me an opportunity to create my own personal Let It Be, swapping in preferred song versions and contemporaneous outtakes, a new-ish record I find far more worthy of repeat listens.
And across these more recent re-discoveries of the record, "The Two Of Us" emerged as a new Beatles favorite. Maybe it's the sentimentality that comes with age; maybe it's the low-key McCartney melodicism, freed of the prior records' grandiosity; maybe it's the song's ability to thrive as a stand-alone track rather than preferably within the context of the LP, making it one of the few Beatles songs I still regularly throw onto playlists. In any event, I've come to treasure the track, which, given my lack of attachment to the album for so many years, still feels surprisingly fresh to me.
The song has also benefited from some terrific covers. My personal favorite is from Aimee Mann & Michael Penn, on the respectable Beatles-tribute soundtrack of 2001's otherwise icky I Am Sam. Here they are playing it live in 2002:That same soundtrack featured an alternate version of the track, from Split Enz/Crowded House's Neil Finn (with his son Liam):Solo Paul, 2008:
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