All 213 Beatles Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best

[SEAWOLF97]

.
feel free to disagree ;)

http://www.vulture.com/2017/06/all-213-beatles-songs-ranked-from-worst-to-best.html

[srm51555]

Almost impossible to rank since they had such great music. Rubber Soul would be my favorite album, but favorite song, I couldn't choose one.

[Ducatista47]

In retrospect, I find the Beatles' rockers more satisfying than their much loved career as balladeers. (I know, listeners will love lyrics. I prefer music to words unless the writer is exceptional. But to paraphrase the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, music will get you through a lyrics drought better than lyrics will get you through a music drought.) So my favorite remains "Please Please Me." It's the Beatles equivalent of the Beach Boys' "I Get Around." I think that pop and Rock ballads are not a natural fit for bands capable of high energy delivery. The worst of both worlds was/is the Power Ballad. To the Fab Four's luck/credit, they did not record in that era but probably would never have indulged in it. They had great taste.

It is ludicrous to rank George's compositions with the rest of the catalogue, way too apples and oranges to have any meaning.

Full disclosure, I was a much bigger fan of the British Blues than the Pop bands. More of a Rolling Stones/(Early) Fleetwood Mac fan. I first had a huge Teeny Bopper phase - for six months - and then the spell broke. Huge Beatles fan during, but after not so much until Rubber Soul and Revolver. I still listened to the Beatles, but Sonny and Cher fell by the wayside completely. :o:

[hsosdrum]

No time at the moment to read the whole thing (it looks very well written and well reasoned), but my top 5 would be:

1. A Day In The Life
2. Strawberry Fields
3. Tomorrow Never Knows
4. She Loves You
5. Medley: Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End

Full disclosure: I've always been a huge Beatles fan. Saw them on all the Sullivan shows live , bought all the albums when they were first released (wish I still had the pristine mono copies we originally bought — I could sell them and probably retire) and just got the 50th anniversary edition of Sergeant Pepper's (which BTW, is wonderful! It's SO good to finally have a real, honest-to-goodness stereo mix of it, and of the Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane single). I even like Revolution 9 (a lot!).

[Amelia Williams]

In no particular order, these are my top 5 and on loop when working on something in my garden shed (https://goo.gl/H64UBa).

1. Nowhere Man
2. Paperback Writer
3. Penny Lane
4. The Ballad of John and Yoko
5. Don't Let Me Down <3 <3 <3 !!!

People say I'm too young to listen to the Beatles, but I have an old soul.

[hsosdrum]

People say I'm too young to listen to the Beatles, but I have an old soul.

Some friendly advice from an altacocker: Forever more ignore any advice given by people who say you're "too young" for anything — there's no such thing. (I was 12 when I started listening to the Beatles.) Revel in joy.

[SEAWOLF97]

in no particular order.

“She’s a Woman,”
“Because,”
“I Want You (She’s So Heavy),”
“Another Girl,”
“I’ll Follow the Sun,”
“I’m Looking Through You,”
“Things We Said Today,”
“I Feel Fine,”
“Help!,”
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps,”
“Day Tripper,”
“I Saw Her Standing There,”
“Here Comes the Sun,”

[hsosdrum]

in no particular order.

“She’s a Woman,”
“Because,”
“I Want You (She’s So Heavy),”
“Another Girl,”
“I’ll Follow the Sun,”
“I’m Looking Through You,”
“Things We Said Today,”
“I Feel Fine,”
“Help!,”
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps,”
“Day Tripper,”
“I Saw Her Standing There,”
“Here Comes the Sun,”

I think that "I Feel Fine"/"She's a Woman" is the Beatles' second-best double A-side single, after "Strawberry Fields"/"Penny Lane". I played the sh*t out of both sides when it first came out.

[SEAWOLF97]

I think that "I Feel Fine"/"She's a Woman" is the Beatles' second-best double A-side single, after "Strawberry Fields"/"Penny Lane". I played the sh*t out of both sides when it first came out.

OK, time I guess to lay bare my soul (or at least pref Beatles songs) :crying:

out of that list, the 3 that get me going are :

“Another Girl,”
“Things We Said Today,”
“I Saw Her Standing There,”

yup, none of them very deep or musical. Guess I prefer the earlier stuff :dont-know:

[hsosdrum]

It's all about what we make an emotional connection with. I still get chills whenever I hear "She Loves You". It was the first Beatle song I ever heard when I was 11. Ringo's opening tom-tom riff signaled the changing of my world.

[Fritz The Cat]

The Beatles' track i'd rather would like to be erased is "Revolution No 9". This is no fun at all definitively.....

[Ducatista47]

The Beatles' track i'd rather would like to be erased is "Revolution No 9". This is no fun at all definitively.....

Well... I was the guy that had a Dual manual 1009 turntable when it came out so I was tapped to spin it backwards. Then we knew why the repeating "Number Nine" rising inflection sounded so strange. It is a perfectly spoken - no sort of or I think I hear BS - "Turn me on, Dead man!". Sure it's a crap song, but nice Easter Egg.

[hsosdrum]

The "Number nine" that is heard repeatedly throughout Revolution 9 was dubbed from recordings of B.B.C. test announcements (which included the same announcer saying other numbers with the same inflection) that Lennon found in the EMI Studios tape library. Its existence at the studio pre-dated the recording sessions for The Beatles (white album) by years. When played backwards, any resemblance to "turn me on dead man", regardless of how perfect it sounds, is 100% coincidental. The phrase was NOT intentionally put there by Lennon to be played backwards and decoded as some secret message; he included it because its sound quality was so pristine and its delivery was so mechanical that he thought it provided a striking contrast to all the other sounds on the track, which were taken from off-the-air recordings of radio programs, "white album" session outtakes, snippets of conversation and other bits and pieces found in EMI's extensive tape library. Like the P.A. system announcements in the film M.A.S.H., the repetitive "Number nine" statements are what ties together and provides context to what would otherwise be a disparate collection of sonic elements.

BTW, the phrase near the end of the fade-out of Strawberry Fields Forever that we all heard as "I buried Paul" is in fact, Lennon saying "cranberry sauce". This is much easier to hear on the 2017 multi-track mix of the song than it is on the mono mix that went on the 45rpm single back in early 1967.

All of the Beatle's EMI Studios recording sessions have been fastidiously and exhaustively researched by Mark Lewisohn in his book.

[SEAWOLF97]

The Beatles' track i'd rather would like to be erased is "Revolution No 9". This is no fun at all definitively.....

I accidentally put it on my Nano once. After hearing, it was the first thing erased when I got home. :eek:

[Ducatista47]

All of the Beatle's EMI Studios recording sessions have been fastidiously and exhaustively researched by Mark Lewisohn in his book.
No doubt. Due to the enormous popularity of the band, culturally and musically, they have been researched ad nauseum. When I was living in my college town and the disk came out, theories and rumors abounded and we had some fun with it. I suppose it is a case of "never let the truth get in the way of a good story", but since Lennon famously told an interviewer he was a complete liar, and he had at least to that point stuck with his story that Lucy In The Sky (With Diamonds) had nothing to do with LSD (which Paul said he had eaten like candy) and that had never occurred to him when he wrote it, I and we would have been disinclined to believe his explanation about just about anything. So we had fun with it.

[LowPhreak]

The mainstream press were fairly daft back in those days, making a huge deal out of John's "we're more popular than Jesus" thing, and Rev. #9 like it was some kind of secret "devil music". But so much was unexplored territory in the 60s, maybe they just didn't know what to think about so many of the groups.

I'm 56 and it's still fun to piss off the Establishment. ;) Sue me.

No order, but how can you pick just 5?:

- "Cry Baby Cry"
- "Eight Days A Week" - (pure sing-along pop happiness)
- "Norwegian Wood"
- "I Am The Walrus"
- "I've Got A Feeling"

[Fritz The Cat]

Listen to the bass/drums-intro of "Come together". This tune, this rhythm, this nonchalance were pure magic for me in 1969. How was this strange kind of music possible to be produced? I have listened to that intro a hundred times or more since the last 48 years, but every time it sounds a little bit different to me. Listen to the humorous version of take 1 on Anthology Vol.3.
Hey, these 4 guys had big fun in the studio!
This intro is an icon for the music of my youth....

[SEAWOLF97]

.
watched the DVD of The Beatles Anthology

couple of tidbits;

about the time of the "With The Beatles" album, George Martin in an interview says "they still wrote songs for singles, that was their focus. The better tunes were released as singles and the rest were thrown together on an album"

Also : On their Paris concerts (just before the first trip to the USA) , they were used to almost exclusively female audiences, in France it was about the opposite, mostly males :blink:

[SEAWOLF97]

got about half way through .It Was Fifty Years Ago Today! The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper .. https://www.netflix.com/title/80190838 last night.

long film concentrates most on SPLHCB.

one interesting blurb among many was : G Martin considered “Within You Without You” so poor that he positioned it as first track on side 2 so it would be easy to skip it and start with track 2.

that list does not agree.

52. “Within You Without You,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967): A slight song that finds enormous force in Indian song stylings and a powerful production schema. The drones, the sitar lines that follow Harrison’s voice, and the vast centuries of composition undergirding the backing track make this one of the most distinctive major songs of the 1960s. Two quibbles: Leaving aside the line that includes the title words, the lyrics are quite lame. And whether it belongs on Sgt. Pepper’s — supposed to be a suite of songs by the psychedelically uniformed and happily oompah-ing Lonely Hearts Club Band — is another question. Harrison was a little checked-out in ’67; could the Pepper sessions have produced an appropriately meta way to handle “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”?

of course the phrase for the song title was "borrowed" from someone else's book..

Did NOT know about the problems in the Manilla concert or how the "more popular than Jesus" brouhaha was setup.

[Fritz The Cat]

Looking back after all these years: what will be the position in this ranking for "Free as a bird" on Anthology 1? From a 1977 John Lennon demo (mono cassette), it was completed in the first session since 1970 by Paul, George & Ringo in early 1994. Listen to George's solo guitar playing.
A simple beauty, isn't it?

[Fritz The Cat]

From 2013 triple LP "Beatles on air, Vol.2."
14. July 1964, Live at BBC: their broadcast-version of "And i love her" D5 in mono. George didn't play the nylon strings guitar as in original version. So we are amazed at the wonderful twang of his "Rickenbacker". And i love (her) this guitar....

[SEAWOLF97]

Legendary record producer Quincy Jones has described the Beatles as “the worst musicians in the world” as he recalled meeting the band for the first time during an interview to promote a new Netflix documentary and US television special.

In the new interview with New York Magazine, he discussed his first impressions of the Beatles in unsparing terms. “They were the worst musicians in the world,” he told interviewer David Marchese. “They were no-playing motherfuckers. Paul [McCartney] was the worst bass player I ever heard.”

Drummer Ringo Starr came in for particular opprobrium: “And Ringo? Don’t even talk about it.”

Jones recalled arranging Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing for Starr’s 1970 debut solo album Sentimental Journey.

“Ringo had taken three hours for a four-bar thing he was trying to fix on a song. He couldn’t get it. We said: ‘Mate, why don’t you get some lager and lime, some shepherd’s pie, and take an hour-and-a-half and relax a little bit.’”

In the interim, Jones called English jazz drummer Ronnie Verrell into the studio.

“Ronnie came in for 15 minutes and tore it up. Ringo comes back and says: ‘George [Martin], can you play it back for me one more time?’

“So George did, and Ringo says: ‘That didn’t sound so bad.’ And I said: ‘Yeah, motherfucker because it ain’t you.’ Great guy, though.”

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/feb/07/quincy-jones-the-beatles-were-the-worst-musicians-in-the-world

[Fritz The Cat]

Legendary record producer Quincy Jones has described the Beatles as “the worst musicians in the world” as he recalled meeting the band for the first time during an interview to promote a new Netflix documentary and US television special.

In the new interview with New York Magazine, he discussed his first impressions of the Beatles in unsparing terms. “They were the worst musicians in the world,” he told interviewer David Marchese. “They were no-playing motherfuckers. Paul [McCartney] was the worst bass player I ever heard.”

Drummer Ringo Starr came in for particular opprobrium: “And Ringo? Don’t even talk about it.”

Jones recalled arranging Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing for Starr’s 1970 debut solo album Sentimental Journey.

“Ringo had taken three hours for a four-bar thing he was trying to fix on a song. He couldn’t get it. We said: ‘Mate, why don’t you get some lager and lime, some shepherd’s pie, and take an hour-and-a-half and relax a little bit.’”

In the interim, Jones called English jazz drummer Ronnie Verrell into the studio.

“Ronnie came in for 15 minutes and tore it up. Ringo comes back and says: ‘George [Martin], can you play it back for me one more time?’

“So George did, and Ringo says: ‘That didn’t sound so bad.’ And I said: ‘Yeah, motherfucker because it ain’t you.’ Great guy, though.”

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/feb/07/quincy-jones-the-beatles-were-the-worst-musicians-in-the-world


The magic of the Beatles: indeed they were not the best musicians. But as a team, they were invincible.
Quincy Jones was a great producer and musician. But where are his songs?

[Ed Zeppeli]

The magic of the Beatles: indeed they were not the best musicians. But as a team, they were invincible.
Quincy Jones was a great producer and musician. But where are his songs?


This is in direct contradiction to Quincy's statement that "the song is everything". The Beatles were so damn prolific that they blasted out double A sides to satiate their fan-base while making albums. Anyway, I realize his commentary was directed at their musicianship - which I also disagree with, Malcolm Gladwell, Star Club etc... -but he is way off base here. He basically dishes on everyone if you read the entire interview.

[SEAWOLF97]

He basically dishes on everyone if you read the entire interview.

and yet ..

Jones, 84, reserved praise for Eric Clapton’s Cream, the guitar skills of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen

:blink: :eek:

But perhaps the most surprising statement Jones made in the Q&A is the following claim: that Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen can sing and play guitar "just like" rock legend Jimi Hendrix.

After calling The Beatles "the worst musicians in the world" in an extended response, Jones singled out Eric Clapton's band 1960s band Cream as a band "that could play."

"But you know who sings and plays just like [Jimi] Hendrix?," Jones continued. "Paul Allen."

"Stop it. The Microsoft guy?," Vulture's David Marchese replied.

"Yeah, man. I went on a trip on his yacht, and he had David Crosby, Joe Walsh, Sean Lennon — all those crazy motherf-----s," Jones said. "Then on the last two days, Stevie Wonder came on with his band and made Paul come up and play with him — he’s good, man."

http://www.businessinsider.com/quincy-jones-microsofts-paul-allen-can-play-guitar-just-like-jimi-hendrix-2018-2

[hsosdrum]

McCartney's "the worst bass player [Quincy Jones] had ever heard"?

Just goes to show you that gold records don't work as an enema, because that guy's full of shit.

[SEAWOLF97]

.
https://www.netflix.com/title/80195654

How the Beatles Changed the World | Netflix

Interviews and rare archival footage illuminate how the Beatles' influence over music and culture continues to be felt around the world.

[SEAWOLF97]

100 Greatest Beatles Songs

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-beatles-songs-20110919/yes-it-is-19691231

The Beatles' Marathon 'Please Please Me' Session, Hour by Hour

We break down the epic studio day that yielded the bulk of the band's debut LP, from "I Saw Her Standing There" to a cathartic "Twist and Shout"

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/beatles-please-please-me-session-hour-by-hour-w517921

[SEAWOLF97]

.

Long story short, the 20th Century's most widely-known British non-commissioned officer was real. Only his name wasn't Pepper, it was Babington. And he was a Lieutenant General.

Paul McCartney chose the image of Gen. Sir James Melville Babington as the real-life visage of the fictional Sgt. Pepper for the Beatles 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. For most people, being on a Beatles album would be the highlight of their life. Not so for one of the British Empire's decorated officers.

-more- >>>https://www.wearethemighty.com/james-melvin-babington

[gasfan]

How far back in history must you go to duplicate the prodigious accumulation of hits and great tunes the Fab Four came up with during their short tenure as undisputed greatest of all time? Count em and compare. Their musicality/musicianship is second to none.

This so called ranking is a bit of a troll btw. 'Good Day Sunshine' the worst? Really? 'A Day In The Life' the best? Really?

I remember years ago 'Stairway To Heaven' being ranked the greatest tune of all time. Really?

I think Eric Clapton was declared the best guitarist in the world among his contemporaries at one time ie: SRV, Jimmy Page, Kieth Richards among others. Really?

[SEAWOLF97]

The Beatles' Revelatory White Album Demos: A Complete Guide

We delve deep into the 1968 home recordings that planted the seeds for the band's classic self-titled double LP

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/beatles-esher-demos-for-white-album-a-complete-guide-w520624

[Ed Zeppeli]

How far back in history must you go to duplicate the prodigious accumulation of hits and great tunes the Fab Four came up with during their short tenure as undisputed greatest of all time? Count em and compare. Their musicality/musicianship is second to none.

This so called ranking is a bit of a troll btw. 'Good Day Sunshine' the worst? Really? 'A Day In The Life' the best? Really?

I remember years ago 'Stairway To Heaven' being ranked the greatest tune of all time. Really?

I think Eric Clapton was declared the best guitarist in the world among his contemporaries at one time ie: SRV, Jimmy Page, Kieth Richards among others. Really?


Something like the Beatles phenomenon will never happen again. Yes, they were prodigious and incredible but they were also a product of their time.

[gasfan]

Something like the Beatles phenomenon will never happen again. Yes, they were prodigious and incredible but they were also a product of their time.

Yes exactly!! Awesome isn't it? It's what the 'new' music advocates just don't get simply because them being a product of their time doesn't amount to much. We will be remembered.

as Mozart is

[SEAWOLF97]

.
Have never heard OF most of these :blink:

http://ultimateclassicrock.com/beatles-solo-albums-ranked/

[gasfan]

Even Mozart had his limitations :)

[Fritz The Cat]

Even Mozart had his limitations :)

Mozart was misused as a dancing bear by Leopold and Constanze.
The Beatles stopped being misused as dancing bears.

[SEAWOLF97]

How ‘Yellow Submarine’ Made The Beatles ‘Lovable’ Again

https://www.thewrap.com/how-yellow-submarine-made-the-beatles-lovable-again/

[SEAWOLF97]

.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2018/07/10/50-beatles-facts-you-may-not-know/772281002/

[SEAWOLF97]

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From the Archives: The Original Review of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/arts/music/archives-beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-review.html

[SEAWOLF97]

The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ Declared Top Album in UK History

https://ktla.com/2018/10/13/the-beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-declared-top-album-in-uk-history/

[SEAWOLF97]

Hear Beatles’ Previously Unreleased, Acoustic ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’

“Acoustic Version — Take 2” with just George Harrison on guitar and Paul McCartney on harmonium taken from upcoming, revelatory White Album box set

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/beatles-while-my-guitar-gently-weeps-739393/