It's All Too Much
Album: Yellow Submarine
Written by: George
“It’s All Too Much” may be the quintessential underrated Beatles tune, if that makes any sense at all. It wasn’t a hit single and it isn’t too well known among the casual music-loving populous and yet it absolutely glows.
This six-and-a-half minute psych-rock voyage was on the band’s least decorated British release, 1969’s Yellow Submarine, which does boast “Hey Bulldog” (also underrated) but consists mostly of rereleased singles (“Yellow Submarine” and “All You Need is Love”) silly throwaways (“It’s Only a Northern Song” and “All Together Now”) and orchestral tracks for the animated feature film of the same name. I mean, it is a film soundtrack with original music by the Beatles, therefore it’s still wonderful, but it definitely lacks the mind-bending innovation present in literally all of their other releases around the same time.
This tune was recorded during the Summer of Love and it wears that fact on its sleeve. It bursts open with a blaring dose of feedback that immediately lets you know you’re entering a brand new Beatle realm, a realm of acid-rock astral projection and Hendrix-like electricity.
George brings the classical Indian influence onto this one with a little more subtlety than in some of his other tracks. The G-chord drone and organ hum suggest a meditative state is being achieved, and the lyrics seem to confirm:
Floating down the stream of time
Of life to life with me
Makes no difference where you are
Or where you’d like to be
There is certainly a fanbase for this psychedelic gem; critics and fans have praised it, noteworthy bands like the Grateful Dead and Journey have covered it, but I still feel like it lacks the credit it deserves. Perhaps it’s the admittedly wonky mix that can be off-putting if you’re not quite stoned enough or perhaps it’s the fact that the long delay between recording and release left it seeming less envelope-pushing than it actually was. By the time it was made available to the masses in January 1969, the Summer of Love had broken up and the flower power movement had already begun to wilt.
“It’s All Too Much” is nothing like any other Beatles song, making it a perfect microcosm of the very thing which makes the band so bafflingly good: they never stopped growing and changing, and they never stopped surprising the world with the things their art could do. I mean, wait a minute, the cat who wrote “You Like Me Too Much” only two years prior is the same cat who wrote this?
