The Beatles' New Love Album Contains More Than 130 Separate Songs

It may not be like Tom Hanks running through The Louvre searching for secret messages, but Beatles obsessives now have their own Da Vinci Code to crack.

Tuesday's release of Love, the soundtrack to Cirque Du Soleil's Beatles-inspired Las Vegas show of the same name, will surely send Fab Four clue collectors to their turntables and CD players to try and unravel all the pieces of the new album.

Love, produced largely by Gilles Martin, the son of Beatles collaborator and producer Sir George Martin, features 26 tracks made up of 37 separate songs. Within, without and all around those songs, however, is a swirling sonic collage made up of other musical moments from the band's catalogue.

"It's about 130 songs or something like that," says Gilles Martin, attempting to break down the source material. "There's about 250 songs in the Beatles catalogue.

"I did count them and I can't remember what it [the exact number] was. It would be a good competition to find out. A lot of people wouldn't get certain bits, even the bass lines. There's a bass line from the beginning of 'Here Comes The Sun' which I don't think people will get. But I know what it's from.

"It's kind of fun in a way. I'm taking whole chunks, there's no sampled snare drum or bass drum or things, because you're taking a whole bass line or backing vocal or whatever. It does feel like The Beatles are playing.

"A lot of it isn't really mashed up. The whole thought process behind it was to honestly try to stick as much Beatles on one record as possible. It's not meant to be some quiz in any way."

Right. So knowing that the transition between track two, "Get Back," and track three, "Glass Onion," contains 13 separate songs shouldn't have any value. Nor should it matter that although Martin almost exclusively used the original Beatles source material (Sir George added new strings to "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"), there will be many new and found sounds to Beatlemaniac ears.

"There's elements on the master-master tracks that people don't hear," says Martin. "It's funny, and I didn't know this because I didn't listen to the originals when I was actually doing it.

"First, because I'm lazy. And second, because I was being asked to do something different from the originals, so I didn't want to get trapped in that mode of, 'Oh, this is so good,' and being scared by that.

"So I listened to the multi-tracks and someone'd be, 'Where's that organ solo from on 'She's So Heavy?' Where's that from?' And I'd go, 'It's from 'I Want You (She's So Heavy).' And they're like, 'I don't know about that.' And they're Beatles nuts and I'm not. I'm terrible. The same guy comes back to me and goes, 'I checked. It's not on the original. It's not there.'

"I'm like, 'It was on the tape. I guess they didn't push the fader up.' But I think it's cool, so I pushed the fader up. So there's things on the multi-tracks, like on 'Lady Madonna' there's them laughing, talking about doing a video. I think they were a bit worse for wear. I think they were a bit wrecked."

Martin may have unearthed sounds that had been buried on the original commercial recordings, but he was stricter when it came to tampering with the meat of the main songs on the soundtrack.

"Things like, if the song is the main song, it's generally untouched," he says."So 'Get Back' is the performance on the roof of 'Get Back.' That's it. And the same with 'Kite.' It's 'Mr. Kite.' 'She's So Heavy' is 'She's So Heavy.' And then the other rule was whatever song is in charge, I could edit stuff to that song. And the other rule was that vocals can't be moved around or detuned if they're the lead vocal.

"I'm not going to try anything like try to recreate a song out of two different songs by mashing them up. You have to be very careful with these things... with The Beatles, you can't go, 'I'm gonna put a beat in it and then it'll all be fine.' Cuz we're not doing that."

Still, Martin concedes that one track is nominally a mash-up. But that's because Beatles fans did a lot of trill screaming back in the day.

"'I Want To Hold Your Hand' is the [live] Hollywood Bowl version," he says. "It is a mash-up, funny enough.

"It was the Hollywood Bowl three-track, the American three-track, very rare, and the four-track from the original, then put it together. And we did that with 'Can't Buy Me Love' and 'Twist And Shout' and all the early Hollywood Bowl performances to create how it was seeing The Beatles play live, and that's how it was. The screams are genuine and it's pretty unpleasant.

"There's nothing you can do about that. The Hollywood Bowl tapes... they're terrible to listen to. It's all just screaming. If you think about it, what you're hearing is the four-track with no screams and the three-track with screams, and even then the screams are loud. That's why we put that in there."

The screams Martin was most expecting were the outcries from Beatles fans who felt he "raped" (his words) the band's sacred catalogue. He says he constantly thought that he was going to be fired the whole seven months of working on the album and, fearing that Love would never see the light of day, he spent a good deal of time cataloguing and backing up all the original recordings from the Apple vault. He needn't have worried, though. The main Beatles players firmly dug Love.

"They were delighted," says Martin. "Ringo came in actually with a whole lot of notes of the album and I was thinking, 'He doesn't want me to remix the bloody thing, does he?'

"Cuz I was about to master it. And he came in and it was, 'I Am The Walrus,' 'just mad,' 'Here Comes The Sun,' 'really great bass line.' He was like, 'I think it's great to hear us playing as a really good band. I think we're brilliant.' He was great.

"For me, my job was to entertain them and my dad cuz I thought I was going to get crucified for this anyway. That was my premise. That Paul can sit down and go, 'I really enjoyed listening to this. I think it's great to hear us play. It's just fine.' For me, I just went and got hammered."