George Harrison would have turned 80 tomorrow. Which is reason enough to nominate the Beatles’ 20 best songs, both as a band and as solo artists. Here they are, by year of release.
Yesterday
From Help!, 1965
Paul McCartney’s song (the most covered in pop history), which came to him in a dream, was initially called Scrambled Eggs – the lyrics began “Scrambled eggs, oh, my baby, how I love your legs.” It was then transformed into what he called “the most complete song I have ever written”. Yesterday was also the first Beatles song to take significant advantage of the classical string arrangements suggested by the band’s producer, George Martin. There would be no further reluctance.
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
From Rubber Soul, 1965
Regarded as the first Beatles song in which the words (mostly by John Lennon) are more important than the music, Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) is also the first Beatles song to pivot around sex and adultery. “I was trying to write about an affair without letting my wife know I was writing about an affair,” Lennon said. Inspired not only by Bob Dylan’s development of pop lyrics but also by acutely observational “story” songs by The Beatles’ UK contemporaries The Kinks and The Who, Norwegian Wood pointed the way forward.
Taxman
From Revolver, 1966
As the opening track on Revolver, George Harrison’s topical song – such high earners as The Beatles were liable for an injurious 95 per cent “supertax” introduced by the British government – was the first of his to indicate to Lennon and McCartney that he had work of substance to offer. Part written, begrudgingly, by Lennon (“I just sort of bit my tongue and said okay”), Taxman nonetheless generated a positive enough response to motivate Harrison to write more songs for subsequent albums.
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Eleanor Rigby
From Revolver, 1966
“The minimalist perfection of a Beckett story” is how the author AS Byatt described one of the many stark lyrics (“wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door”) in Eleanor Rigby. The song (written by McCartney, who reckoned it was 80 per cent his) was viewed as pivotal not only for McCartney as a songwriter but also for The Beatles, presenting – in a first for pop music of the era, surely – a pessimistic yet realistic song about loneliness and death to the public at large.
Here, There and Everywhere
From Revolver, 1966
McCartney wrote this soft-focus peach of a song at Lennon’s swimming pool while waiting for him to wake up – “By the time he’d woken up, I had pretty much written the song, so we took it indoors and finished it up.” Inspired by his then girlfriend, the actor Jane Asher, the song is the harmonic antithesis of Revolver’s final track, Tomorrow Never Knows, and deliberately so, according to George Martin: “Nothing very clever … Very simple … Very effective.”
For No One
From Revolver, 1966
Written by McCartney while on holiday in Switzerland, this time after an argument with Asher, and originally titled Why Did It Die?, this sublime end-of-a-relationship song might be delivered in a detached manner (“She says that long ago she knew someone, but now he’s gone, she doesn’t need him”), but he wasn’t fooling anyone. Arguably his most precise and perfect song, For No One has been praised since its release. Even Lennon was impressed. (“One of my favourites of his,” he said.)
Tomorrow Never Knows
From Revolver, 1966
Tomorrow Never Knows was the first song to result from Lennon’s explorations of LSD. (It was followed by Strawberry Fields Forever, A Day in the Life, and I Am the Walrus.) “I want my voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop, miles away,” Lennon said in EMI’s Abbey Road studio. With Harrison’s sitar fuzz, cut-up backward guitar solos and overdubbed tape loops, he got this and more.
A Day in the Life
From Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967
John Lennon told Rolling Stone magazine in 1970 that A Day in the Life, perhaps the definitive Lennon-McCartney collaboration, was “a peak”. Lennon wrote the main thrust of the drug-drenched song; the latter added the “woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head” segment, as well as suggesting that classical musicians convey what George Martin described as the “orchestral orgasm”.
Strawberry Fields Forever
From Magical Mystery Tour, 1967
Written by Lennon on an acoustic guitar during downtime in Spain in September 1966, while filming How I Won the War, Strawberry Fields Forever prompted “stunned silence” when he played it at Abbey Road studios for the three other Beatles, according to their engineer Geoff Emerick. Over the course of daily experimentation, the song evolved from a drug-inspired, Dylanesque ballad into an extraordinary pop song that Martin likened to “a complete tone poem – like a modern Debussy”.
Penny Lane
From Magical Mystery Tour, 1967
If Lennon could write about his childhood in Strawberry Fields Forever, McCartney decided he could do the same. Although not so much a riposte to his creative partner’s song as a collaborative, illustrative lyric, Penny Lane has one of McCartney’s most vivid melodies, as well as intricate arrangements, playful sound effects and, surely, music’s most famous piccolo trumpet solo (courtesy of the classical musician David Mason).
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
From The Beatles/White Album, 1968
“I worked on that song with John, Paul and Ringo one day, and they were not interested in it at all,” said Harrison (whose material, as the Beatles engineer Glynn Johns pointed out, “wasn’t really paid that much attention to”). Written as an exercise in uncertainty, and inspired by the I Ching – he picked up a book at random and turned to a page where he read the words “gently weeps” – the song focused on his isolation within the group. Harrison had good cause, as the song was released as the B-side to Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, one of McCartney’s most unimaginative songs.
Something
From Abbey Road, 1969
Aside from Yesterday, this is the most covered Beatles song. To think it started out as a hesitant offering from Harrison, with a Hey Jude-like prolonged fade-out making it more than eight minutes long. Tweaked by McCartney and Ringo Starr, the song’s guitar solo proved to be the romantic cherry on the cake. “If McCartney wasn’t jealous,” Ian MacDonald writes in Revolution in the Head (one of the best books ever written on Beatles recordings), “he should have been.”
Here Comes the Sun
From Abbey Road, 1969
Along with Something, Here Comes the Sun shone further light on Harrison’s songwriting capabilities, somewhat loosening the ego-driven Lennon-McCartney grip. “This year,” McCartney noted, perhaps reluctantly, “his songs are at least as good as ours.” The passing of time seems to have proved this, as the song is now edging close to a billion plays on Spotify, making it the streaming service’s most popular Beatles tune.
Abbey Road Medley
From Abbey Road, 1969
This 16-minute segue from a band now made up of mature, confident musicians includes the slight tracks Mean Mr Mustard and Polythene Pam (dismissed by Lennon, in the overall concept of the medley, as junk) and the harmonic luxuries of Sun King, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, Golden Slumbers (for which McCartney flagrantly nicked lyrics from Cradle Song, a nursery rhyme by the Elizabethan-era poet and playwright Thomas Dekker) and The End.
Maybe I’m Amazed
By Paul McCartney, from McCartney, 1970
Who said there are no second acts in show business? Written in 1969, shortly after The Beatles split up, and recorded at Abbey Road (to give it the anti-DIY treatment the rest of the songs had on McCartney, his first solo album), Maybe I’m Amazed is a remarkable if unassuming start to an enduring solo career. This song, McCartney has said, is the one he would like to be remembered for.
All Things Must Pass
By George Harrison, from All Things Must Pass, 1970
Rehearsed in 1969 by The Beatles but not included on Let It Be, their final album, from 1970, this song is considered Harrison’s finest; the late Beatles expert Ian MacDonald described it as “the wisest song never recorded by The Beatles”. Influenced musically by The Band (Harrison said the starting point was their song The Weight) and lyrically by the similarly named poem All Things Pass, from Timothy Leary’s 1966 Psychedelic Prayers after the Tao Te Ching, the song was tellingly performed by McCartney at the 2002 tribute show Concert for George.
Another Day
By Paul McCartney, 1971
McCartney’s debut single as a solo artist, released in early 1971, was originally played to his former bandmates during the Let It Be sessions, two years earlier. Expectations were so high that it was originally viewed as a slight, overly simple song, but it has stood the test of time as a delicate, detailed, classic McCartney observation of a lonely woman leading a below-average life.
Gimme Some Truth
By John Lennon, from Imagine, 1971
Lacing messages with drops of honey is how Lennon once described his more overtly political songs, such as Give Peace a Chance and Power to the People, but with Gimme Some Truth there was no sweetness to balance out the hostility of the lyrics. Helped somewhat by a guitar-shredding solo by his former bandmate Harrison, the song’s narrative urgency (the likes of “I’m sick to death of seeing things from tight-lipped, condescending mama’s little chauvinists” remains ever relevant) was initially forged in 1969, during the recording of Let It Be.
Riding to Vanity Fair
By Paul McCartney, from Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, 2005
So many of McCartney’s latter-day solo albums have been overlooked in the anticipation of a masterwork, but tone down that sense of expectation and you might just be surprised by a gem or three. One such is Riding to Vanity Fair, which (from an album produced by Nigel Godrich, who is mostly associated with Radiohead) is a gentle psychedelic ballad with surprisingly cutting lyrics about certain (unnamed) people whom McCartney intensely dislikes: “You’re not aware of what you put me through, and now the feeling’s gone. But I don’t mind, do what you have to do, you don’t fool anyone.”
Early Days
By Paul McCartney, from New, 2013
Another much-underrated beaut of McCartney’s reflectiveness, this is as plain-spoken and effortless a folksy pop song as you can imagine. It’s a tad nostalgic, too, as it considers the bond between two likely Liverpool lads who went on to change pop culture forever: “Hair slicked back with Vaseline, like the pictures on the wall of the local record shop. Hearing noises we were destined to remember, we willed the thrill to never stop.”
