100 Best Albums
- SEP 26, 1969
- 17 Songs
- Help! · 1965
- Rubber Soul · 1965
- Abbey Road (Remastered) · 1969
- Help! · 1965
- Abbey Road (Remastered) · 1969
- Past Masters, Vols. 1 & 2 · 1963
- Please Please Me · 1963
- The Beatles (The White Album) · 1968
- The Beatles (The White Album) · 1968
- Let It Be · 1970
Essential Albums
- 100 Best Albums Giles Martin, son of legendary Beatles producer George Martin, once told Apple Music that Abbey Road is the perfect gateway into the Beatles universe because it sounds so contemporary. And it’s true: While other Beatles albums conjure a specific moment frozen in amber—the matching suits and mop-tops or the mid-period mischievous experimentation with pop form or the technicolor burst into psychedelia—Abbey Road sounds like nothing more or less than four extremely gifted humans playing one indelible song after another in the same room together. The 11th and penultimate album in The Beatles’ historic catalog was the last on which all four members worked in the studio as a unit, all at the same time. And while singling out one album as their most impactful is a fool’s errand, 1969’s Abbey Road is indeed the most ageless, simply an immaculate, unmatched collection of songs by a world-changing band at their creative peak. Following the sprawl of 1968’s White Album, Abbey Road is a relatively concise representation of The Beatles’ entire deal: wholesome (“Here Comes the Sun”), a little freaky (“Come Together,” “Polythene Pam”), macabre and wholesome (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”), first-wedding-dance romantic (“Something”), whimsical (“Octopus’s Garden,” “Mean Mr. Mustard”), and, with its album-closing eight-song, 16-minute medley, playful with form. The embers of pop music’s most dynamic collaborative force were dying out, but not before yielding one final and definitive document of unmatched creativity and camaraderie.
- Beneath the white-on-white cover art, "The White Album" is an eclectic, 30-track album of largely stripped-down material, originally spread across two vinyl records. The album was a stark contrast to Sgt. Pepper in every aspect—from the cover art to the sounds within. The sheer breadth of material as well as the mixture of the loud and the soft is part of what makes "The White Album" so surprising. The heavy sounds of "Helter Skelter" and "Yer Blues" juxtapose with the gentle beauty of "Long, Long, Long" and "Julia." The cacophony of "Revolution 9" is followed by the orchestral lullaby of "Good Night." The album's extended length gave the band room in which they could explore all of their musical influences and multiple forms of popular music, while creating revolutionary sounds in the studio.
- Though wedged between the comparatively giant Sgt. Pepper’s and 1968’s White Album, Magical Mystery Tour nevertheless played a part in The Beatles' story, and put a cap on a year in which the band made yet more music nobody was totally prepared for them to make. The album was released as a companion to a meandering, band-directed movie, and its first half is probably one of the lowest-stakes sides in the band’s catalog—a relief, in a way, from how high-stakes their music had become. Still, this was The Beatles in 1967—momentum was strong. What had started out as a string of acid playground rhymes turned into Lennon’s angriest song this side of 1970 (“I Am the Walrus”), while McCartney’s simple sentimentality had taken on a quality that felt stoic, almost abstract (“The Fool on the Hill”). There was a rare instrumental (“Flying”), a foggy Harrison drone (“Blue Jay Way”), and an invocation of the past by McCartney that blurred lines between sweet and eerie (“Your Mother Should Know”). While the band had helped rechristen the album format as an artistic statement unto itself, they were still releasing singles—as in tracks that weren’t associated with any album. Designed primarily as a consumer service, the second half of Magical Mystery Tour collected what they’d offered in 1967. The yin-yang of McCartney’s “Penny Lane” and Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” (originally released on the same 7-inch record) arguably says more about what ground the band covered in seven minutes than any other two songs in their catalog—the former baroque, charming, and upbeat; the latter dense and melancholy—variations on a theme of seemingly simple pasts refracted, dreamlike, through the present. And if “I Am the Walrus” was Lennon’s dark foray into contradiction and surreality, McCartney’s “Hello, Goodbye” was its bright counterpart. “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” probably doesn’t get the credit it deserves. “All You Need Is Love,” debuted to an estimated 400 million people in the world’s first live international satellite TV production (Our World), did receive wide acclaim, and while cynicism and embarrassment about 1967’s Summer of Love would set in as soon as a few years later, it probably deserves more. As for the movie that gave the album its name, press coverage of it was so uniformly hostile (not to mention viewer feedback to the BBC switchboard so sustained) that McCartney went on the BBC the day after it first aired to defuse the tension. Asked why he thought people didn’t like it, McCartney said he wasn’t sure—he liked it fine.
- For better and worse, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band helped set the precedent that rock bands could (and should) do more or less whatever they wanted. Songs got longer, albums grew concepts, and the idea of the LP as a concise product meant to showcase a performer’s talents gave way to the suspicion that commercial concerns ultimately only served The Man. A few months before The Beatles were set to record Sgt. Pepper’s, Bob Dylan had released Blonde on Blonde, an album so expansive it had to literally be pressed onto two records, while The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds stretched the dimensions and possibilities of the three-minute pop song. McCartney in particular had been fascinated by things like Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention’s 1966 debut, Freak Out!, a double album whose hodgepodge of songs, noise, skits, and sound gags mirrored conceptual art’s breaking of the painterly frame. Where The Beatles had once sought to distill and consolidate, now they were looking to expand. McCartney had even come up with an alter ego and pseudo-unifying backstory—a move Lennon later said only worked because the band said it worked. In other words, they didn’t want to just exorcise the group that made “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” they wanted to smother them with a pillow. Vacationing in France just before recording had started, McCartney slicked his hair back with Vaseline and wandered the streets in a fake mustache and clear-lens glasses, an experience he called “quite liberating.” For all its experiments (“A Day in the Life”) and invocations of the counterculture (“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”), it’s probably the band’s most conservative album: the beer hall sing-alongs of the title track and “With a Little Help From My Friends,” the old-timey entertainments of “Being for the Benefit of Mister Kite!,” the domestic contentment of “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Like The Kinks circa “Waterloo Sunset” and The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and The Beach Boys of Smiley Smile, Sgt. Pepper’s is an album that looked toward the past instead of the future, the work of guys in their late twenties starting to wonder if they’d been too eager to break from the old world—or at least might have lost something along the way. (Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever,” recorded around the same time, covered similar themes; that the band was all taking acid—a drug that has a way of flattening geologic time—probably didn’t hurt either.) Even Lennon’s lyric on “A Day in the Life”—“I read the news today, oh boy”—rang with a cosmic quaintness, an image not of young radicals on the loose but of the aging souls of “Eleanor Rigby,” finding infinite richness in a narrow life. A couple of months after the album was released, the band—along with partners, children, and business infrastructure—traveled to Greece with the vague intention of buying an island for everyone to live on, but eventually managed to think better of it.
- 100 Best Albums One of the great, possibly true stories about 1966’s Revolver concerns an exchange between Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan at London’s Mayfair Hotel about what they were currently working on. (In Dylan’s case, it was Blonde on Blonde.) On hearing the tape loops and death poetry of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” Dylan allegedly said to McCartney, “Oh, I get it. You don’t want to be cute anymore.” It’s not entirely true. Part of what makes Revolver appealing is that it’s as much “Yellow Submarine” and the domestic sweetness of “Here, There and Everywhere” as it is “She Said She Said” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” But Dylan’s point was well-taken: For a band that put out “I Want to Hold Your Hand” less than three years earlier, the relative complexity of Revolver—in both sound and subject matter—not only challenged The Beatles’ image as the pop band the whole family could agree on (as opposed to, say, The Rolling Stones), but it also put pop on a course toward unfamiliar horizons. Not only were The Beatles able to bridge their interest in the relatively uncommercial worlds of psychedelia, experimental, and Indian classical music with Motown (“Got to Get You Into My Life”) and what we now think of as classically Beatlesque pop (“Good Day Sunshine”), but they also gave us a template for the pop album as the kaleidoscopically varied studio construction we think of it as today. Cute, but more. On the occasion of the album’s 2022 Super Deluxe reissue—which, in addition to a new mix in Spatial Audio by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, features some extraordinary rehearsals, outtakes, and demos—we’re taking a look back at what shaped Revolver and what Revolver shaped in turn. Before: The R&B Backbeat Revolver is the last Beatles album where you can really hear the influence of American soul and R&B. “Taxman” is obvious, as is “Got to Get You Into My Life,” which John called “our Tamla-Motown bit.” But you can also hear it in “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Love You To,” whose Indian influence is anchored by a beat heavy enough to drive a dance floor regardless of the continent it’s on. And where the beat of “Tomorrow Never Knows” is rightly cited as a precursor to techno and drum ’n’ bass, it’s also a take on the syncopations of James Brown drummer Clyde Stubblefield, who said he got his style, in part, from listening to washing machines and trains—the funk of daily life. Their growing conceptual interests didn’t get in the way of their roots as a bar-and-dance band, and their ability to bridge the two—or, more importantly, to dissolve the distinction between them—is part of what makes Revolver Revolver. Four people, one room. Before: British Humor and the Surrealism of Daily Life For however mystical Revolver can seem, squint and you hear an album mostly about ordinary life. “Eleanor Rigby,” “Doctor Robert,” the “Taxman,” the lovebirds of “Here, There and Everywhere,” and the eccentric of “I’m Only Sleeping”: these are the people in your neighborhood, and if they’re stranger than you remember, it might be because you never really looked. The Kinks were experts in this field. And John, in particular, was a fan of the Scottish singer Ivor Cutler, whose novelty songs masked a sense of surrealism that pointed toward more cosmic realms. The point isn’t just that Revolver was strange, but that it located its strangeness in places easily dismissed as familiar. So, while John borrowed the first line of “Tomorrow Never Knows” from a book connecting LSD with The Tibetan Book of the Dead, its title came from a more historically modest source: Ringo Starr. Before: Power of the Experiment Given their cultural stature, it’s easy to forget that The Beatles didn’t really know what they were doing at the time. So, while Revolver’s experimental qualities—the tape loops of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the dislocated horn sections of “Got to Get You Into My Life”—could seem pretentious or alienating, they’re better understood as an embrace of the same unknowns that led to “Yesterday” or “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).” Namely, can this be done? Though the band’s interest in avant-garde composers like John Cage or Luciano Berio wasn’t always obvious in their sound, it spoke to a sense of experimentation and open-mindedness that spurred them on when they could’ve easily and comfortably stayed in the same place. Before: Pop as Art Part of The Beatles’ story is that of pop’s transformation into something like art. Not that Revolver was without precedent. Frank Sinatra’s serial-like string of albums in the ’50s (In the Wee Small Hours, Only the Lonely, No One Cares), Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, the sound sculptures of producers like Phil Spector and Joe Meek, the arrangements of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds—all undoubtedly pop music. But they’re also examples of artists stretching pop to accommodate a sense of depth and conceptual ambition that hadn’t been there before. As George said around the time of Revolver’s release, selling a lot of records was nice. Now the point was to make them better. After: Psychedelia for the Mainstream The real psychedelic quality of Revolver wasn’t its sound but its subject. Time, memory, the inevitability of death: With the exception of Bob Dylan and The Byrds, no mid-’60s pop artists were wading as deeply into inner space as The Beatles. And because, in George’s words, they’d “had a few hits,” their ideas landed on audiences that probably wouldn’t have encountered them otherwise, or at least ones that might’ve been more hesitant to hear them out. The effect was to expand our sense of the terrain that pop music could cover and introduce a sense of headiness and ambiguity that gave way to everything from Jimi Hendrix and Prince to the inward-facing stance of alternative rock. Revolver tried to touch what can’t be touched. After: The Studio as Instrument Before Revolver, the studio was, by and large, a place where bands went to record music they’d already worked out. After Revolver, it became a kind of instrument of its own. It wasn’t just the unprecedented amount of time The Beatles spent making it (220 hours to Rubber Soul’s 80) or their experiments with new technology; it was the way they opened their process to the concept of music being less a set of notes than a sequence of sounds—an attitude that evolved into everything from dub to shoegaze to hip-hop. Paul remembers meeting with producer George Martin before they went into the studio to play him what they’d been writing. When they got to “Tomorrow Never Knows,” Martin was curious but puzzled: there were no chord changes, no verses, no chorus. In other words, it wasn’t a song. The blueprint was in the band’s collective head, but you couldn’t make sense of it until the work was done. After: Pop as Playground Revolver helped define the pop album as a loose, collagelike space where you could get any number of sounds and moods thrown at you. Paul’s sweetness, John’s cynicism, the experimental and the straightforward, Western R&B and Eastern classical—and each of them somehow as much a part of the band’s identity as the others. Not only was the shift an important step toward understanding artists as people who curate and arrange the world rather than creating it out of thin air, but it also gave us a template you can still hear in everything from Thriller to Purple Rain, M.I.A.’s Kala, and Frank Ocean’s Blonde. Revolver wasn’t just a marketing tool; it was an experience. And the band’s eclecticism wasn’t a lack of commitment—it was liberation.
- It wasn’t just that Rubber Soul was sonically groundbreaking (it was), or that Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting had reached new heights of maturity and ambiguity (okay), but that it was the first Beatles album where each song seemed to exist unto itself and yet worked in alchemical harmony with everything around it: the emergence of the pop album as creative kaleidoscope. McCartney had told the New Musical Express that the band was banking on comedy being the next big thing after protest music—a reflection, possibly, of the existential irreverence one feels on acid, their growing insularity from (and reluctance toward) the culture at large, a philosophical commitment to enjoying the ride, or some giddy mix of all three. Whatever the case, Rubber Soul is a deeply funny album: the gender play of “Drive My Car” (and the beep-beep backing vocals), the cabaret of “Michelle” (because nothing warms up the object of one’s desire like French), the way Lennon sucks deeply through his teeth before oozing the chorus to “Girl.” Even the album’s most earnest songs (“Nowhere Man,” “In My Life”) were touched by a nursery-rhyme gentleness that made their themes (psychic alienation, the astonishing continuity of past and present) go down easily. As for “Norwegian Wood,” what can you really do with the suggestion that the narrator burns the girl’s house down but shrug in uncertainty? This is how the album unfolds: colorful, dreamy, and delirious on the surface, with shadows swimming underneath. The overall feeling is one of liberation: In getting a little chemical-assisted distance from their egos, the band was able to explore style in ways that felt fluid and radical, changing costumes from song to song instead of locking themselves continuously into being The Beatles—a channel-changing approach that only became more pronounced as their career wound on (especially on the White Album and Abbey Road), not to mention set a new precedent for the diversity of modes and expressions pop artists were suddenly allowed to explore. As for the title, McCartney had remembered something an old bluesman said about Mick Jagger—that he was “plastic soul.” In the original iteration, it was a diss; in The Beatles’ version, it was a statement of liberation: In embracing artifice, you free yourself from the confines of the real.
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About The Beatles
One thing you have to remember about The Beatles is that there was no Beatles before The Beatles. No model for a white band that credibly mixed early rock with real R&B. No model for performers who wrote their own material instead of vocalizing others’. No model for a band that could be both popular and truly progressive, whose new releases weren’t just products but evolutionary leaps in what the form was capable of. Before The Beatles, you had pop music and you had art; after The Beatles, the idea that you could get both in a single three-minute shot—a mirror of a similar shift in painting and visual art—became commonplace, even expected. If “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Please Please Me” made the competition look quaint, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” made it look obsolete, stone bowls in an era of cupped hands. They were around for 10 years, and the culture has been reeling ever since. Formed in Liverpool, England, in 1960, the band—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr (the replacement for Pete Best)—didn’t have big plans at first. In 1962, they were still ducking beer bottles at late-night shows in Hamburg; six months later, “Beatlemania“ was a safety concern. How the band found time to grow is hard to fathom: Listen back to that opening chord on “A Hard Day’s Night” or the proto-psychedelic vibe of “Ticket to Ride,” and you can already hear them pushing against the confines of pop’s sound and form. By the mid-’60s, they’d become ambassadors for the counterculture, tackling subjects—drugs, Eastern spirituality, the limits of consciousness—nobody had bothered thinking about in the mainstream before. In the hands of producer George Martin, they also became one of the first bands to use the studio as an instrument, creating works whose density and complexity (revisit anything from 1966’s Revolver to 1968’s “The White Album”) couldn’t be replicated onstage—innovations that, incidentally, coincided with the band’s retirement from touring. Late Beatles albums—Abbey Road and the “posthumous” Let It Be—were lived-in, almost folksy affairs, the loose victory laps of a band with nothing left to prove. Given the pressure and intensity that surrounded them, it’s almost amazing they lasted as long as they did. They played their final show on the rooftop of the building for their multimedia company, Apple Corps, in January 1969, ending with Lennon’s famous parting words: “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we’ve passed the audition.”
- ORIGIN
- Liverpool, England
- FORMED
- 1960
- GENRE
- Rock