The Other "Let It Be" Turns 40

An ode to the greatest band you've never heard of and the greatest album you've never heard

One rule of thumb I usually follow is that if Phoebe Bridgers posts a song to her Instagram Story, you had better listen to said song because it might just be the best thing you hear all week. In August 2022, Phoebe posted “Unsatisfied” by the Replacements to her story. Hearing it for the first time felt like divine intervention. I immediately fell in love with Paul Westerberg’s grease fire of a voice, how he howled the word “unsatisfied” until he couldn’t anymore, how visceral and raw he sounded when he sang, “Everything you dream of / Is right in front of you / And everything’s a lie / Look me in the eye and tell me that I’m satisfied.” I also became smitten with the way he looked weary and yet self-assured on the Let It Be album cover. And I was struck by the song’s atypical and unfinished structure, managing to make its iconic 12-string intro—which felt taken straight out of Pete Townshend’s playbook and yet also uniquely original—bleed into a blend of rage and emotion that was actually quite satisfying after all.

I fell asleep that night to “Unsatisfied,” reassured knowing there was someone out there who understood how I felt, whose voice I could feel, really feel, through my tinny iPhone’s speakers. But before that I also took a peek at the band’s Spotify page and realized hey, I know these guys! They were behind “Swingin’ Party” and “Here Comes A Regular,” two insanely pretty, well-structured, well-written, absolute classics. How had I not encountered the rest of their discography?

But the timing of me finding the ‘Mats and Let It Be couldn’t have been better. I moved away from my childhood home not even a week later after that initial discovery. My core memory from moving day? Blasting the jangle-pop gem of an opener, “I Will Dare,” to keep myself awake at five in the morning. I felt awful having to move away from my boyfriend who wasn’t even a boyfriend, and then “Answering Machine” found me. And as I struggled to mentally move on from high school and start university, “Sixteen Blue” was exactly the balm I needed.

Now, of course the Mats have other incredible, perfect songs across their six other albums (I will also acknowledge their 1982 EP Stink here as well since “Kids Don’t Follow” and “Go” are on it). I could totally choose to give you a spiel on the history of the band and go really in-depth as to why Let It Be works the way that it does. I also def write you an additional 2,000 words on Tim and Pleased To Meet Me. I could absolutely dive into Paul Westerberg’s far less known and yet equally as compelling solo career. But that’s not what we’re celebrating today. Let It Be, this godly 33-minute grab bag for growing up, turns 40 tomorrow.

And yeah yeah yeah I am painfully aware that writing a thousand words on a 40-year-old power-pop album from a not-very-commercially-successful power-pop band makes me incredibly uncool to much of my generation. But hearing Let It Be all the way through for the first time that week in August changed my life, and I need you to know that. I also feel the need to remind myself of that once in a while. I mentioned this late last week in my last post that I have kinda been in an up-and-down mental state since, like, May. I say this not solely to promote said last post (ha!) but also to set up the fact that, like, Otters, I was in a really bad mental spot that summer. It was really hard on my entire family with all this change and personal stuff happening. Music was maybe the only thing that kept me alive that summer. You might remember this. I wrote about it, and also about a different band, in one of my favourite essays I’ve ever written.

Perhaps you could’ve thrown almost any given album at me in August 2022 and somehow manage to convince me, in my dishevelled 80s mullet of a mental state, to love that album as much as I love Let It Be. But I also think of Let It Be as such a perfectly distilled concoction of the Mats. Its combination of punk snarl with Paul Westerberg songwriting was so potent that not only did it quite literally replace everything I was listening to at the time, I fully believe that it could’ve done that for me at any time in my life. Today, tomorrow, another 40 years from now.

My dad, the Gen X, 80s music-loving sicko that he is—I’ve never asked him about the Replacements. I feel like he totally knows who they are but I’ve never heard him play any of their stuff in the car. I kinda want them to remain my little musical secret. Because Let It Be isn’t just a nostalgia album that reminds me of that desperate, searching time in my life (which, now that I realize, wasn’t even that long ago, good gracious). It’s not just an album for teens. It’s not just an album for people who were teens in the Twin Cities during the mid-’80s. It’s also an album for teens at heart. An album for the Dicks and Janes whom Westerberg writes a paean to in “Androgynous,” Let It Be’s fifth track. An album for misunderstood misfits everywhere.

Honestly, part of Let It Be’s magic is you can quite literally just… let it be. Silly stuff like “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out” can cheer you up and make you laugh. “Seen Your Video” can make you wanna fight the powers that be. Hell, there’s a Kiss cover on here, and it rules. This is an album whose sense of heart hasn’t diminished in the slightest. Like the best rock music, it has one helluva pulse. “I never thought of rock & roll as this big cultural thing and worried about the state of it and all,” Westerberg said once. “It’s like, just plug that guitar in and give me a backbeat, and it lives.”