Recess! Media

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That’s a little from the title song for a new CD of Beatles classics from “Music for Little People.” October is full of Beatles anniversaries, like the release of “Abbey Road,” in 1969. Several of the songs from that hit album are on this disc– that little miracle, “Here Comes the Sun,” and that incomparable wish of a song, “The Octopus’s Garden.” And there are other so familiar it seems as though we’ve always been sailing along with them:

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This isn’t the first compilation of Beatles songs for children, but it is, by far and away, the best — it mixed children’s and adults’ voices, kids and adult instruments, holding on to the original arrangements of songs and, most importantly, preserving the giddy, playful spirit of those originals:

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I’m sure some purists (and I must confess I’m usually one of them) may object to any kind of liberties being taken with Beatles music, despite the many transformations of their work the Beatles have themselves allowed. But one has to admit that these songs are so adaptable, so resilient, and so much a part of what has become our understanding of what it means to be young and bursting with visions, to be endlessly inventive and forgiving, to be full of feeling and yet unperplexed — that we can hardly begrudge other people (especially children) wanting to sing them, wanting to participate in their magic, wanting to make them their own. For these songs will drive the blues away, they will freshen a day and ripple it with laughter; they will carry you, smiling or tearful, into forgetting, and they will make you always remember.

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