Books by Thomas MacFarlane

This work analyzes each of Joel's albums, laying out their appeal to musicians and non-musicians alike while exploring the production styles that have characterized Joel's development in the recording studio. MacFarlane outlines how Billy Joel's recorded works as a whole serve as the foundation for a complex and enduring musical legacy.

In September 1969, the Beatles released their final recorded work, Abbey Road, using a variety of progressive musical ideas that expressed the group's approach to multi-track recording and offering songs that constituted a highpoint in the Beatles' musical corpus. Of particular interest is the concluding sequence of songs (tracks 8-17): seemingly unrelated fragments woven together into a musical form that has thus far defied attempts at categorization. The Beatles' Abbey Road Medley: Extended Forms in Popular Music offers an analysis of these fragments, commonly known as the Abbey Road Medley, in order to understand and explain the emergent musical form and to clarify the relationships between music recording and music composition.Thomas MacFarlane provides an overview of the Beatles-their history and their music-within the context of popular music and culture between 1962 and 1970, paying particular attention to the production of the album Abbey Road and the pivotal role of producer George Martin on the Abbey Road Medley. After explaining his method of analysis, MacFarlane applies it to the recording and transcription of the Abbey Road Medley, examining the implications of the work's structure and demonstrating how the Beatles expanded the parameters of the popular music form by incorporating recording technology directly into the compositional process. Drawing conclusions about musical form and practice in the recording process of the 1970s and beyond, MacFarlane also suggests other examples of rock music that were influenced by Abbey Road. An appendix transcribing the author's interview with the Beatles' de facto manager Peter Brown, a selected discography, a bibliography, and a selection of photos conclude the book, which will be of particular interest to musicians and Beatles fans alike.

In the 1960s, The Beatles would address like no other musical act a radical shift in the cultural mindset of the late twentieth century. Through tools of ';electric technology,' this shift encompassed the decline of visual modes of perception and the emergence of a ';way-of-knowing' based increasingly on sound. In this respect, the musical works of The Beatles would come to resonate with and ultimately reflect Marshall McLuhan's ideas on the transition into a culture of ';all-at-once-ness': a simultaneous world in which immersion in vibrant global community increasingly trumps the fixed viewpoint of the individual.By engaging with recording technologies in a way that no popular act had before, The Beatles opened up for exploration the acoustical space precipitated by this shift. In The Beatles and McLuhan: Understanding the Electric Age, scholar and musician Thomas MacFarlane examines how the incorporation of electric technology in The Beatles' art would enhance their musical impact. MacFarlane surveys the relationship between McLuhans ideas on the nature and effects of electric technology and The Beatles own engagement of that technology; offers analyses of key works from The Beatles studio years, with particular attention paid to the presence of cultural metaphors embedded in the medium of multi-track recording; and collates these data to offer stunning conclusions about The Beatles' creative process in the recording studio and its cultural implications. This work also features the first published transcriptions ever of the complete filmed conversation between John Lennon and Marshall McLuhan on their respective ideas, as well as an interview between MacFarlane and McLuhan's son and executor, Michael McLuhan, on his father's and the Beatles' legacy.The Beatles and McLuhan will interest scholars and students of music and music history, recording technology, media studies, communications, and popular culture.