By Jesse Bertel

Laurence Juber, the renowned guitarist and two-time Grammy winner from Paul McCartney’s Wings, invites music enthusiasts to celebrate Thanksgiving with his award-winning performance, LJ Plays The Beatles.

Presented by Sweet P Promotions and the Folk Sessions, the event takes place on Saturday, Nov. 18, in the Crystal Hall on the third floor of the Elks Performing Arts Center, 117 E. Gurley St., Prescott, with two showtimes at 4 and 7 p.m.

LJ Plays The Beatles stands as one of Acoustic Guitar Magazine’s all-time Top Ten albums. Juber spoke with Across the Street ahead of the performance.

The following interview was edited for length and clarity.

<strong>What do you like most about playing Beatles songs?</strong>

It’s great music. It’s much like how the Great American Songbook became kind of, you know, the standard canon of Gershwin and Harrell and Jerome Kern and all those great composers going back to Irving Berlin, The Beatles represent a new a new generation of standard tunes. They don’t go away. That’s the thing about it, I think the audience for that music is always going to be there. And it’s very satisfying to play and to approach these songs because of the musical integrity of them. There’s a lot of meat to squeeze onto a six-string guitar. My goal, always, is to create something that is reminiscent of what the audience remembers from The Beatles recordings but to make them work in a satisfying way as solo guitar arrangements, too. Taking a tune like “I Am The Walrus,” for example, which is complex enough, or “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and finding my path to creating a satisfying guitar performance out of them, is an artistic challenge. It’s a “guitaristic” challenge and it’s something that audiences really seem to enjoy.

<strong>How many Beatles cover songs have you recorded?</strong>

I’ve done four albums of my arrangements of Beatles songs, soon to be a fifth. The first one I did in 2000, so it’s over 20 years ago. There was kind of a demand to keep doing it. My wife, Hope, was the one who really motivated me because when I first started doing my fingerstyle guitar albums, I was strictly doing it as a composer and I hadn’t really done a lot of arranging in that context. She had asked me to do an album of Beatles and I said, “Well, I’ll do it if you produce it.” So, we started this kind of teamwork where she’d say, “I think it’s time for more Beatle tunes. The exciting thing is that last August we were in London and I spent the day in Abbey Road Studios in Studio Two, which was where The Beatles recorded most of their records. I recorded a dozen of my favorite Beatles arrangements, which I’m putting out on vinyl in February. I’m just looking at test pressings right now, which is very exciting to actually go back to doing records on vinyl.

For tickets to the performance, call 928-756-2844, or visit www.prescottelkstheatre.org.

For more information about Laurence Juber, visit laurencejuber.com.<br />

Jesse Bertel is a reporter/videographer for the Prescott News Network. Follow him on Facebook @ JesseBertel, email him at jbertel@prescottaz.com, or call 928-445-3333, ext. 2043.