Yesterday (soundtrack)

Yesterday (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the soundtrack to the 2019 film Yesterday. Released through Capitol Records on 21 June 2019, the soundtrack consisted of 27 tracks, mostly covers of the Beatles' songs performed in the film by Himesh Patel and Lily James, and cues from the incidental music underscored by Daniel Pemberton.

Background
The film featured several Beatles songs performed by Patel, with Adem Ilhan as the film's music supervisor. For licensing the Beatles' discography, the producers nearly spent $10 million to acquire the rights from the band's music label Apple Records and Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which owned its music catalogue.

Daniel Pemberton underscored the incidental music, in his second collaboration with Boyle after Steve Jobs (2015). Pemberton recorded the music for 3–4 weeks during mid-2018, simultaneously with that of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The recording held at the Abbey Road Studios (where Beatles had recorded most of the songs) and by mimicking the musical style of the band, Pemberton used the Mrs. Mills' piano which the band utilised it for the song "Lady Madonna" (1968) and placed tea towels over drums "to give them Ringo’s very distinctive dampened sound".

According to Pemberton, "The idea was to get him comfortable with the songs and getting him to the stage where basically he could play Wembley Stadium." He worked with Patel to perform the covers of each song in a unique, as Boyle liked the "very raw, human performances" and refrained from over-produced sounds. Hence, he built Himesh a band for rehearsals so that he would be confident to play with other musicians and also perform in street corners to get into the character. Pemberton also recorded "Hey Dude" (Ed Sheeran's cover of "Hey Jude") for the film, though he was against doing so; he utilized the chorus of the original cover and used it in this song as well.

On 14 June 2019, Capitol Records unveiled the track list of the film's soundtrack that had featured 27 songs, along with a live studio performance of Patel recording the vocals for "Yesterday". The soundtrack was released the following week, in music streaming platforms and a 180-gram double LP vinyl record was unveiled on July 12.

Reception
Marcy Donelson of AllMusic wrote "For the most part, Patel and the music department accomplish what they set out to do here, but in a world where the Beatles recordings do exist, nearly an hour of middle-of-the-road Beatles covers is the domain of die-hard Patel fans." Celine Teo-Blockey of Under the Radar assigned 5/10 to the album and wrote "when one gets home from the movie theatre, surely it’s the original Fab Four that’s going on the stereo or streaming device and not this soundtrack." Megan Sagar of Umusic called it as "a delightful tribute to The Beatles discography".