Everyday Chemistry is a remix album that was made available as a free digital download on 9 September 2009. The album was released along with a story of anonymous authorship.[1] It mashes up various songs from the Beatles' individual solo careers, including tracks from 27 albums. The album portrays itself as being taken from an alternative universe in which the Beatles had not broken up.[2][3]
Context
On 9 September 2009, a website with the URL thebeatlesneverbrokeup.com was created. This date was very notable, as an official Beatles anniversary campaign was going on at this time, which included the 2009 remasters box set, an Apple-shaped USB drive containing the remasters, and The Beatles: Rock Band.[4] The website includes a download link to the entire album on MP3.
The website was accompanied by a fictional short story (purporting to be true) written by an anonymous person under the pen name "James Richards" (a pseudonym drawn from the legal first names of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the two surviving Beatles, who were born James Paul McCartney and Richard Starkey respectively).
In the story, Richards describes driving through the Del Puerto Canyon road in California, when he had to pull over to let his dog use the restroom. The dog begins to chase a rabbit, leading to Richards knocking himself unconscious after tripping into a rabbit hole.
He wakes up with a bandage on his head in the home of a man named Jonas. Jonas tells Richards that he found him 20 feet away (despite the location being bare beforehand), and Richards realises he has woken up in a parallel universe. In this universe, ketchup is purple, cassette tapes are more common than the compact disc, and the Beatles never broke up. Jonas shows Richards his tape collection, with most of them being ones he recorded. Some of them are tapes of new Beatles albums, with one of them being Everyday Chemistry.
Jonas and Richards both discuss their enjoyment of the Beatles, and just before leaving the parallel universe and travelling back to his own, Richards steals the tape of Everyday Chemistry, despite being told by Jonas to never take anything from another dimension.[5]
Richards explains why the album sounds like mashups of the Beatles' solo work, stating that "even though in the alternate universe The Beatles hadn't broken up, that didn't mean their future music ideas disappeared".[6]
The website also included photographs of the cassette tape and the location in which Richards claimed to have gone unconscious.
Album artwork
Everyday Chemistry was not given official artwork. Instead, photographs of the cassette tape were used for the cover. The first photograph (which appears on the main page of the website) includes the cassette's case, with the album title & track list being written on ruled paper. The other photograph (which has been used on the MP3 download of the album) is the tape itself, which is a General Electric 60-minute cassette tape. This photograph is unique as it doesn't match with the photographs that appear on the website.
Because of the lack of an official album artwork, fans would take it upon themselves to create their own. The most popular interpretation would include an art piece created in circa 1968 by an unknown artist of what the Beatles would look like at the age of 64, an art piece inspired from the song "When I'm Sixty Four".
Critical reception
The album was received well by listeners. On Rate Your Music, which assigns a rating out of 5 to reviews from users, the album has a score of 3.34, based on 195 reviews.[7] Despite the criticism of Richards' story, Everyday Chemistry has been met with praise for its mixing, production and mashup choices.[8]
