Together again

It’s a telling sign of our digital-downloading times that what might turn out to be the best album of 2014 exists only in the fictional world of Richard Linklater’s new film Boyhood.

In one scene, the main character’s father, Mason Sr. (played by Ethan Hawke), gives a birthday present to his 15-year-old son, Mason Jr. The gift turns out to be a thoughtfully sequenced, three-CD package called The Black Album that compiles the best (and most mutually compatible) solo recordings from Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr in the decade immediately following The Beatles’ demise. Calling it The Black Album is Mason Sr.’s way of connecting it to The Beatles’ White Album (a.k.a., The Beatles), long regarded as the beginning of the end of the Fab Four’s ability to come together.

“Basically,” Mason Sr. says, “I’ve put the band back together for you. When you listen to too much of the solo stuff, it kind of becomes a drag, you know? But you put ’em next to each other—right?—and they start to elevate each other. And then you can hear it: Ah! It’s The Beatles!”

The scene feels believable in part because, offscreen, Ethan Hawke had already made The Black Album and given it to his real-life teenage daughter before the parallel scene in Boyhood (which was filmed in real time over 12 years) was shot. And now that he has gone public (at BuzzFeed.com) with the track list, Beatlemaniacs have begun assembling it themselves via iTunes or their own collections.

Hawke gets a lot right, from the Beatlesque contributor proportions (39 percent McCartney, 37 percent Lennon, 14 percent Harrison, 8 percent Starr) to including McCartney’s “Junk” and Harrison’s “Not Guilty,” post-Beatles tracks originally recorded during the White Album sessions. And often the sequencing does indeed have an “elevating” effect. Consecutive songs sometimes seem like a conversation (Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels,” for instance, following McCartney’s “The Back Seat of My Car”), at other times like an argument (Lennon’s “Crippled Inside” following McCartney’s “Listen to What the Man Said” following Lennon’s “God”).

Admittedly, fans have been making solo-Beatles mix tapes, mix discs, and MP3 playlists like Hawke’s for a long time. But none of those have gone viral or had similar clout. So The Black Album is already looking definitive. Whether Capitol Records or whoever owns the rights to all of the material ever issues an official version is practically moot.

Hawke’s anthology isn’t perfect. If The White Album tends to feel overlong at 30 songs, the 51-song Black Album feels “overlonger” yet. And Disc Three, which ranges from the thematically redundant to the soft-headedly sentimental, could’ve been scrapped altogether. But the “deep album” cuts on Discs One and Two belong, serving as meaningful segues when not taking on heightened significance. Imagining that there’d been no breakup still doesn’t come easy. But, thanks to Hawke, it’s easier than ever to try.

Boyhood music

Linklater’s film does have an official soundtrack. Titled Boyhood: Music from the Motion Picture (Nonesuch), it juxtaposes alternative pop-rock acts that would’ve been popular with the film’s artistically inclined, perpetually uprooted Everykid protagonist during the film’s 2000-2012 span. Even Bob Dylan’s “Beyond the Horizon” (Modern Times hit No. 1 in 2006 after all) fits.

Most impressively, the selections—especially Yo La Tengo’s “I’ll Be Around” leading into Family of the Year’s “Hero”—compress the film’s gestalt, helping them to cohere more than the selections on most other cross-marketed, various-artists albums.

One might even say that the songs elevate each other. —A.O.