Soundtrack Review: Yesterday

Yesterday: Motion Picture Soundtrack
mostly performed by Himesh Patel, mostly written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon

This is the soundtrack album to the film Yesterday, which came out earlier in 2019 and starred Himesh Patel, Lily James and others. The concept of the film is that a struggling British indie-folk-rock singer, Jack Malik (Patel), on the verge of giving up his musical dreams of being discovered, is in an automobile accident during a mysterious global blackout and awakens to discover that he’s the only person alive who remembers The Beatles, and their hundreds of “unforgettable” songs. In the course of the film, Jack makes the decision to recreate all those legendary songs for an audience that has never heard them before — so, from memory, he writes out the music for the classic Beatles hits, modified for a single singer — himself. The film goes into a lot more layers, and I’ll save that review for when the DVD of the movie is released (soon!), but the soundtrack album came out on CD, and has been available via the libraries’ Hoopla digital service, since the time when the film was in theaters.

The soundtrack includes 27 tracks. One is Jack Malik’s own original “The Summer Song” (a good example of why he hadn’t hit it big on his own), seven others are brief interstitial instrumental pieces from the film’s orchestral score composer Daniel Pemberton. And the remaining 19 tracks are actor Himesh Patel as Jack Malik, singing the Lennon/McCartney hits. Some are changed very little from their original versions, while others have had major alterations to them. “Yesterday”, “Let it Be”, “The Long and Winding Road” and “Hey Jude” all pack emotional punch, if you’ve seen the film and can picture their use in the context of the film’s events, but they’re also superbly done covers of the songs just in their own right. Patel has a good singing voice, and carries off the Beatles songs well, if not expertly. The CD had a “bonus” track — within the film, Ed Sheeran appears as himself, albeit in a Beatles-less universe, and advises Jack Malik during the recording of “Hey Jude”, that it would work better as “Hey Dude”. The bonus track is the full-length version of the studio recording of “Hey Dude”.

Honestly, this album works best if you’ve seen the film, Yesterday, but as a collection of “covers” of Beatles songs, its stands perfectly fine on its own. Personally, I loved the film — it’s one of my favorite films of 2019, and as such, I found this album to be tremendous. Not as good as listening to the actual, original, Beatles performing their own music. But still highly recommended as a fun album to listen to!

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try all the original Beatles albums, from whence all this beautiful music originally came.]

[ official IMdB page for Yesterday ] | [ Yesterday soundtrack track listing on Allmusic.com ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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