The Rubber Soul Remix Is All About the Bass

G iles Martin, son of the Beatles’ celebrated producer, George Martin, has remixed Rubber Soul. The result, which follows similar work done on Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road, the “White Album,” Let It Be, and Revolver, is titled Rubber Soul (2026 Mix), but it might more appropriately be titled The Paul McCartney Restoration Project. As with Giles Martin’s other work, the primary benefit of his efforts is to take the original Beatles recordings and to make them sound terrific on modern audio equipment. Highlights this time around include the sitar on “Norwegian Wood,” which now escapes the surly bonds of earth and sounds as if it’s there in the room with you; a clearer delivery of the gorgeous harmonies on “Nowhere Man” and “Think for Yourself”; and a greater prominence for John Lennon’s magical countermelodies on “You Won’t See Me” (“No I wouldn’t / No I wouldn’t”) — but above all else, the improvement is in the bass, which, at long last, sounds as the group wanted it to back in 1965.

Rubber Soul was more folk-inspired than any other Beatles record, but in “Drive My Car” and “The Word,” it features a couple of songs that were taken straight from American Motown, and which the band explicitly wanted to sound like American Motown. In this, however, they were thwarted. In his autobiography, Here, There, and Everywhere, the Beatles’ longtime engineer, Geoff Emerick, recalls that Lennon and McCartney were perpetually disappointed by the lack of punch in the drums and the bass that they heard on their commercially released records, and that they were frustrated to the point of insubordination by EMI’s insistence that if they were allowed produce their masters in the style favored by American artists such as Wilson Pickett, they ran the risk of making their listeners’ record-player needles jump out of the grooves. Eventually, the duo got their own way, with “Paperback Writer” (1966) marking the transition. But this was too late for Rubber Soul, which, despite its invention and remarkable sophistication, was one of those “early” records about which McCartney had long complained that “the drums and bass were really mixed towards the back.”

This was an enormous shame, because Paul McCartney is one hell of a bass player, and because, on pretty much every recording the group ever made, he provides the crucial context for everything else that’s going on. After he left the Beatles, George Harrison famously complained that McCartney’s playing was “a bit overpowering at times.” But George Harrison was wrong. As with Ringo’s drumming — which also shines on this reworking — McCartney’s great genius was to use his bass guitar as another melodic instrument, rather than as mere filler to round out the sound. As a kid, I liked to put on my dad’s Beatles records, turn up the volume, and listen in the next room through the wall. From doing this, I got a keen insight into McCartney’s brain. There have been lots of great bassists in the history of popular music, and many of them have been more technically proficient than Paul McCartney. But nobody in the history of popular music has such an elegantly orchestral conception of the instrument’s role. Try to imagine “You Won’t See Me” or “Nowhere Man” or “In My Life” without those highly intelligent lines. You can’t. Now, instead of turning them off, try turning them down. When you do that, something important is lost. Thanks to Giles Martin, that something has been restored.

There are those who believe that the Beatles’ work ought to be left alone. I disagree. Were Giles Martin rerecording the player’s parts, or choosing different takes, or fundamentally altering the products that the band signed off on, I would be outraged. But he is not doing any of those things. Rather, he is paying attention to the stereo mixes in a way that, for rational reasons (most people didn’t have stereo equipment), his father did not, and he is using modern technology to make sure that all of those wonderful performances can be heard as cleanly and as excitingly as possible in the current era. In consequence, I would compare his efforts to those of an archivist taking a movie that was released on film and scanning it into 4K, or of a restorationist cleaning up Michelangelo’s work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I do not listen to the Beatles on the original 1960s vinyl records, on original 1960s equipment; I listen to them in my office and in my car and on my modern headphones. The experience of doing so is considerably improved by these rereleases, and I can only hope that Rubber Soul will be followed with the remaining five albums — lest I be stuck forever staring at a tantalizing archaeological site that was abandoned halfway through.