One of the last lovely-dovey Beatles singles akin to "I Want To Hold You Hand" or "Love Me Do" was For Sale's "Eight Days A Week". McCartney said that the title came from one of Ringo's malapropisms as well as a chauffeur that he had once who said that he had been working those many days a week. The song has another Beatles and possibly pop music first by fading IN instead of just out. This came to be after numerous ideas where tossed around in studio to make it stand out. The end result is a mushy love song with a great verse and chorus, as The Beatles were wont to produce.
One of the most memorable backward guitar solos can be found on Revolver's "I'm Only Sleeping". George Harrison spent close to an entire day going for a dreamy vibe while painstakingly double tracking it, one of the many great sonic moments that Revolver has. John penned the tune straightforwardly about how fun it is to lay in bed and do nothing, making it a lazy man's anthem of sorts. The entire song is slow and drony, down to the slurred vocals. It sounds as if it was written and performed whilst laying horizontal on a mattress with many pillows and blankets. Mmm...now I want to take a glorious nap.
This is another one that was originally intended for another artist, Tommy Quickly in this case. Quickly never used it, so it ended up thankfully as the opening track to Beatles For Sale. Another bitter and borderline creepy lyric from John about trying to contact a possible unfaithful ladyfriend and routinely getting "no reply", the song stands out as the only acoustic album opener in The Beatles' catalog until "Two of Us" off of the finale Let It Be. "No Reply" has one of the finest middle eight sections that the group ever did as well.
John Lennon took a tongue-in-cheek jab at Beatles fanatics whom he felt made too much out of the band's more nonsensical lyrics, with the brilliantly self-aware "Glass Onion". The third song and first to feature Ringo on drums from The Beatles (The White Album), it throws a slew of past song and lyric references in, the line "Here's another clue for you all; the Walrus was Paul", deliberately meant to confuse people even more. Though it has always amazed me that anyone would bother at all to try and make any kind of sense out of something so whimsical and absurd as "I Am the Walrus" in the first place. Apparently John agreed.
Along with "This Boy", "Yes It Is" was another b-side ballad that likewise features some of the most impressive three part harmonies on any Beatles song. George also busted out the volume pedal with some lovely guitar accents. The vocal melodies are soothing and intricate, making this easily one of the band's most lush ballads. Ringo is not given much to do but as always, he does only what is necessary, in this case with a tambourine and some brushes. The best timekeeper in rock music, once again laying back and letting the rest of his band sing their asses off.
This I am sure will be too low a ranking for most Beatles fans as I commonly see "In My Life" in the top ten of any Beatles song list. Yet just as I adore all of these songs, (plus most of the ones that did NOT make the list), "In My Life" is still perfect. The sped-up piano solo from George Martin is easily the best thing that he ever personally performed on a Beatles song. Also one could argue that John Lennon penned no finer set of lyrics while in the group, certainly in their earlier period.
For anyone who was lucky enough to stare at the Beatles from afar and listen to nothing but screaming girls while on their final tour, "Paperback Writer" would have been the "latest" song that they performed. This is noteworthy for being the first Beatles track to prominently feature the bass as a lead instrument in the mix, McCartney playing a Rickenbaker instead of his trusty Hofner, with a different mic technique used to great effect. The song also only has two chords in it, one of the band's most famous riffs, and three part harmonies inspired by the Beach Boy's Pet Sounds. All of this is a good thing.
The opener to With the Beatles is one of the many examples to be found of the band utilizing then unusual chords for an uptempo rock and roll song. A critic at the time said that they utilized Aeolian cadences in "It Won't Be Long" and apparently from there, they were no longer exclusively looked at as a British boy band by the masses, but instead as crafty songsmiths and musicians. All that aside though, "It Won't Be Long" is just a perfect example of early Beatles at their most jovial. They did not even bother releasing it as a single or playing it live since they already had a plethora of crowd-pleasing hits to hit those screaming fans with instead.
Eric Clapton enters The Beatles picture once again as a first-hand witness to George Harrison composing "Here Comes the Sun". He and Harrison were kicking it one day in the former's garden in April, acoustic guitar in hand for George when the song just came to him, mostly complete. It eventually found its home on Abbey Road and along with "Something", each represent arguably the two most successful and best songs that George had come up with to date. "Here Comes the Sun" has endured as well if not better than even the best Beatles songs, the repeated "Sun, sun, sun here it comes" part being just impossible not to smile at.
I have already had and will continue to have many examples here of John, Paul, and George utilizing three part harmonies possibly better than any three individuals ever have, and the finest example is Abbey Road's "Because". John wrote it after hearing Yoko play Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on piano, simply reversing the chords around, at which point George Martin played the opening riff on harpsichord and George Harrison added a moog synthesizer as well. It all creates a dark and haunting track that again with unison vocals of the highest order.
The most drugged-out song lyrically in The Beatles canon is "I Am the Walrus". As I said a few entries ago, to decipher its lyrics is an act of futility. It is just a glorious gobbledy gook, intentionally so. John Lennon needed to come up with a song for the Magical Mystery Tour film, and as said project was ill-advised and on all the drugs from the get-go, something like "I Am the Walrus" not only HAS to be there, but also ended up being the whole project's most memorable moment. It is possibly the best song which makes no sense that has ever been recorded.
"I Call Your Name" was written for another group and actually got released as a b-side, (along with another Lennon-McCartney on the A), by fellow Liverpool and George Martin produced group The Dakotas. Lennon apparently was not thrilled with said band's rendition and got his own group to record it, finding a home on The Beatles Second Album and the Long Tall Sally EP, both from 1964. It has still remained an under the radar Beatles tune all these decades later and as you can see, I adore it. The swinging time signature change during the solo is a splendid touch, as is the cowbell of course, but the vocal melody is rare for not being harmonized and still being as good as anything else this band put out.
John Lennon has committed a good number of biting lyrics to paper, (or wood in this case), and "Sexy Sadie" is one of the best examples. A rumor circulated near the end of the group's stay at their Maharishi Mahesh Yogi retreat in Rishikesh, India that the Yogi had been womanizing during the whole time, and this sat not at all well with Mr. Lennon. Most likely no truth belonged to said rumor, but thankfully John caught wind of it just the same and "Sexy Sadie" was birthed. Originally and simply called "Maharishi" as to leave nothing to the imagination, George insisted the title be changed as he was still fond of the giggling Indian guru and his peaceful ways.
The second and best song about lying in bed that John Lennon threw on a Beatles album was "I'm So Tired" from (The White Album). Again written in India during the Maharishi pilgrimage, Lennon was homesick from Yoko Ono and suffering insomnia when exhaustion became his muse. More directly inspired by lying awake all night than wanting to be lazy on a mattress, (see Revolver's "I'm Only Sleeping"), John still slumberly sings the verses, yet comes alive near the end with the phenomenal "I give you everything I got for a little piece of mind" section, definitely ranking as one of my all time favorite Beatles moments.
It is obvious to most that the superior in the double a-side single of "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" is the former, but that does not mean that the latter is any slouch. Just as John had been inspired by nostalgia for "Fields", Paul went even further with this one, loading it with direct Liverpool references and keeping the melody and music more on the upbeat and cheerful side. The results are exquisite, to put it mildly. In many ways, this is a definitive Paul song; a perfectly crafted, polished, poetic pop gem that is impossible to get sick of. It also has possibly the best, (Only?), piccolo trumpet solo in rock music.
Right before The Beatles headed off to learn how to meditate from the Maharishi, they quickly cut and released the "Lady Madonna" single, their last on the Parlophone label in their native U.K, "Hey Jude" showing up next and acting as their own Apple Records debut. Whether the composition or unveiling of it was rushed fails to matter as it rocks all the same, especially for a piano song. McCartney's bass is massive sounding, plus the horn section and sax solo are flawless. Paul wrote this deliberately to sound like a boogie-woogie Fats Domino song, and Fat's himself later covered it, thus bringing everything full circle.
One of the more hilarious inspirations for a Beatles lyric was Peter Fonda Debbie-Downering everybody at a party in August of 1965. Apparently The Beatles or at least John was tripping balls and enjoying himself while watching a bunch of hot girls dance around. At this point, Fonda of all people kept coming over and talking about a near fatal gun-shot would incident that he had and that he "knew what it was like to be dead". Lennon essentially told him to fuck off and stop ruining his buzz, but thankfully he was not too high to forgot the indecent. Thus, snippets of their conversation made their way into Revolver's "She Said She Said". Musically this is a siege of three different things that Lennon was working on at the time, George helping out with the arrangement.
One of my favorite things about Paul McCartney is that given the opportunity, he will give The Beatles credit for inventing anything that he possibly can. Whether or not "I Feel Fine" was the first deliberate use of feedback on a recording and Jimi Hendrix upon hearing it came up with his whole shtick as Paul would suggest is besides the point. What is the point is that "I Feel Fine" is awesome. The song was rare in that it was based on a riff, one that John Lennon came up with that was inspired by a Bobby Parker song called "Watch Your Step". Lennon ran off and finished the song in a day, birthing their eighth A-side single in the process. Ringo also once again knocks it out of the park here, which is icing on the cake.
Without realizing it, I put "I'm A Loser", (the song that almost got released as a single until John wrote "I Feel Fine" to dethrone its place), right after it on this list. Bob Dylan-inspired folk with the most self depreciating lyrics to date on a Beatles song, "I'm A Loser" was the second acoustically-driven song on Beatles For Sale. It is also the better one. The harmonica solo is excellent as is the near a capella opening harmonies. It is the album's high-water mark and one of the first and best "serious" songs in The Beatles catalog that was not just about holding hands and buying diamond rings. There were many more to come of course.
Possibly pissed off at critics, (and maybe even John), who routinely accused him of only writing pretty ballads, Paul McCartney came up with the proto-headbanger "Helter Skelter", which was also an attempt to one-up The Who's "I Can See for Miles" in sheer velocity and volume. Easily the most unhinged Beatles song, (How else does one explain Ringo's blisters on his fingers?), as well as the only bit of hard rock about a playground slide, "Skelter" has been covered by many a band that uses heavy guitars, and it is almost too easy of a choice for a metal act to take for the obligatory Fab Four song to tackle. I will just keep listening to the original and appreciating the innovation thank you very much.
