Beatles News
There’s a best and worst song on virtually every album out there. But picking the best and worst from a band like The Beatles is no easy task. If you don’t agree with my rankings of songs from the Fab Four’s “Beatlemania” era, you’re probably not alone. This list is extremely subjective to taste, forewarning!
Best Song on ‘Please Please Me’ (1963) — “I Saw Her Standing There”
This song is still so gorgeous after all these years. It’s pretty shocking that Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote this rock and roll banger at such a young age. “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was just on the cusp of taking this spot, but I had to go with the former for nostalgia’s sake.
Worst Song on ‘Please Please Me’ (1963) — “There’s A Place”
This was an easy entry, considering how many people really don’t like this particular track. Lennon’s harmonica is just too shrill for me, personally.
Best Song on ‘With The Beatles’ (1963) — “All My Loving”
An obvious choice! “All My Loving” is an example of one of McCartney’s best early-career songwriting efforts. Even Lennon said the song was “a damn good piece of work” in his 1980 Playboy interview.
Worst Song on ‘With The Beatles’ (1963) — “Devil In Her Heart”
With The Beatles really did have a ton of great songs, so picking the worst came down to selecting the one song I completely forgot about from that album.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Em Casalena
The Beatles released the 1963 hit song “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which not only became one of the band’s defining songs but was also ranked among Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
Based on the ranking released by the publication, the list celebrates songs widely regarded for their lasting impact and influence on music.
With this, The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” ranked at No. 15, which the publication described as “an irresistibly erotic come-on framed as a chaste, bashful request.”
Continuing the song’s legacy, Rolling Stone later released a separate list highlighting the 100 Greatest Beatles Songs, with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” landing at No. 2.
Written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the duo created what would become one of the band’s most iconic songs at Jane Asher’s house, where McCartney’s then-girlfriend lived.
“We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball,” the late John Lennon told Playboy magazine in 1980, as cited by Performing Songwriter, adding, “Like in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ I remember when we got the chord that made the song.”
Source: parade.com/Geca Flores
I like how completely baffled John Lennon is by the rules of American football here. It doesn’t make any sense to me either, and I’m American.
On December 9th, 1974, Lennon somehow found himself at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum watching the Los Angeles Rams play the Washington Redskins in front of something like 87,000 people. He hadn’t planned some grand promotional appearance, but Frank Gifford had bumped into him earlier that day at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, offered him tickets to the game and, much to Gifford’s surprise, Lennon actually showed up.
This being Monday Night Football in the 1970s, there were celebrities everywhere. California governor and future president Ronald Reagan was there too, and in one of those wonderfully strange combinations of famous people that could only have happened in the ’70s, Reagan apparently spent part of the evening explaining the rules of football to John Lennon.
I’d have paid good money to listen in on that conversation.
Eventually, Lennon was persuaded into the ABC commentary booth for a quick chat with Howard Cosell, whom he’d already met during a lengthy radio interview a couple of months earlier. Cosell asks him for his first impressions of the spectacle and Lennon seems genuinely blown away by the whole thing.
“It’s an amazing event and sight,” he tells him. “It makes rock concerts look like tea parties.”
The game itself? Not quite so straightforward.
Lennon admits he’s been trying to follow what’s happening but can’t understand “why half the team was off and half the team was on”, which seems a perfectly reasonable question to me. Cosell asks him to compare it with soccer and rugby, and Lennon decides rugby is probably the closest relative, although he’s disappointed by the lack of a proper scrum where, as he puts it, “both teams really punch each other”.
Source: dangerousminds.net/Richard Metzger
Although Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s most famous collaboration was the 1982 transatlantic #1 hit “Ebony and Ivory,” the relationship between two of music’s greatest ever minds spans nearly the entirety the length of their careers.
In February 1966, a 15-year-old Wonder, transitioning from the child prodigy label of “Little Stevie Wonder” to one of Motown’s most exciting pop acts, told NME that meeting McCartney, then a 23-year-old bassist and co-lead vocalist and songwriter for The Beatles, two years into the Fab Four’s cultural dominance of American and global music, was one of the highlights of his young career.
“When on tour, I have to write essays about the places I visit,” the teenage Wonder told the publication (via Beatle Radio). “In the essay I’ll be writing when I get back I’ll certainly include my meeting with Paul McCartney. I met him in the Scotch Of St James club. He’s a really swinging guy, the only Beatle I’ve met.”
For McCartney, the feeling was very much reciprocated, with a History article writing that during his time as a Beatle, and likely prior, and all the way through his early post-breakup career as the frontman for his semi-solo project, Paul McCartney and Wings, McCartney “had been a fan of Stevie Wonder’s for many years before they first met.”
Source: mensjournal.com/Bethany Gemmell
The Beatles have unveiled a previously unheard alternate take of “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”.
Released today by UMG and Apple Corps Ltd., “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (Second Version – Take 2)” features on the forthcoming expanded edition of the band’s 1965 album Rubber Soul, due on October 2.
The first version of what was then called ‘This Bird Has Flown’ was recorded during the first day of sessions for Rubber Soul and featured George Harrison’s new discovery, the sitar. The band were not happy with this version, so nine days later they taped three more performances.
On take two, track one featured John Lennon’s acoustic guitar, Paul McCartney’s bass, Ringo Starr on drums and George playing drone notes on sitar. George added more sitar on tracks two and three, with John and Paul’s vocals also recorded on track three. Rather than starting with an instrumental version of the verse melody, as the final version does, this arrangement opens with double-tracked sitar playing the tune of the bridge section.
The release follows the recent unveiling of “Michelle (Take 1)” and “Day Tripper (Songwriting Work Tape)”.
The collection will be available in a range of formats, including standard 1CD and 1LP editions, 2CD and 2LP deluxe editions, 4CD and 5LP Super Deluxe box sets and a Blu-ray edition featuring the new Dolby Atmos mix, high-resolution stereo audio and promotional films for “Day Tripper” and “We Can Work It Out”. Limited-edition orange vinyl and Zoetrope vinyl editions will also be available.V
Source: uncut.co.uk/Michael Bonner
The Beatles were professional music-makers, well-seasoned by the time they started making 1965's Rubber Soul, but they were also something simpler: boys who enjoyed being silly from time to time.
Especially at that time, when the Beatles were moving full steam ahead and continuing to work hard at their craft, it was fun to loosen up a little in the studio as they were recording the song "Girl."
"It was always amusing to see if we could get a naughty word on the record: 'fish and finger pie,' 'prick teaser,' 'tit tit tit tit,'" Paul McCartney recalled in Many Years From Now. "The Beach Boys had a song out where they'd done 'la la la la' and we loved the innocence of that and wanted to copy it, but not use the same phrase.
So we were looking around for another phrase, so it was 'dit dit dit dit,' which we decided to change in our waggishness to 'tit tit tit tit,' which is virtually indistinguishable from 'dit dit dit dit.' And it gave us a laugh. It was to get some light relief in the middle of this real big career that we were forging. If we could put in something that was a little bit subversive then we would. George Martin might say, 'Was that 'dit dit' or 'tit tit' you were singing?' 'Oh, 'dit dit,' George, but it does sound a bit like that, doesn't it?' Then we'd get in the car and break down laughing."
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com/Allison Rapp
A seminal track from arguably the best rock band – if not the best band period – of all time included just one of the four Hall of Fame members.
The Beatles released “Yesterday” on this day 61 years ago, but it featured only Paul McCartney and a string quartet. The song was the first of its kind for the band as a solo performance, but sparked the “most covered” song of all time.
Eva Cassidy, Marvin Gaye, Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra all covered the song, which the Guinness Book of World Records claims has been covered over 4,000 times.
McCartney revealed the Beatles were “a little embarrassed about” the song because of their rock roots. The track initially came to the Beatles star upon waking one morning and he hammered it out over the piano where he wondered where he’d heard the song before.
“It was like a jazz melody,” he said. “My dad used to know a lot of old jazz tunes. I thought maybe I’d just remembered it from the past.”
Yesterday’ Named One of the Greatest Songs of All Time
Rolling Stone named “Yesterday” as the No. 13 greatest song of all time, which was the second-highest song by the Beatles on the list behind only “Hey Jude” which came in at No. 8.
Source: mensjournal.com/Andrew McCarty
Mr. Moonlight: Brian Epstein and the Making of the Beatles by Philip Norman
Phillip Norman captures the zeitgeist and provides a compelling portrait ... This illuminating work ... brings to life the turbulent and exciting times of the 1960s, when uncommonly inspired innovation seemed commonplace, and nothing felt totally outside the realm of possibility.
Mr. Moonlight: Brian Epstein and the Making of the Beatles is the brainchild of columnist Philip Norman, former rock music critic for The Times and noted biographer of numerous acclaimed musicians and other public figures. Lauded for his first book, Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation, published in 1981, his current book is a comprehensive biography of the man often referred to as “the fifth Beatle” for discovering the rock band then known as The Quarrymen.
Playing a lunchtime gig on November 9, 1961, at Liverpool’s Cavern Club, a small subterranean venue, the band had returned to Liverpool from working club gigs in Hamburg. Spruced up and renamed The Beatles, they signed a five-year management contract with Brian Epstein in October 1962. His determination, discipline and positive influence transmuted the regional favorite — four lads still living at home, playing covers and barely making beer and gas money — into the world’s most popular band whose renown has not diminished in more than 60 years.
Source: booktrib.com/Linda Hitchcock
During their time together, the Beatles released over 200 studio-recorded songs. Out of all of those, Ringo Starr was officially credited with helping to write just five of them.
"I started writing songs and I would, like, tell John [Lennon] and Paul [McCartney] and George [Harrison], 'I've got this song I've written,'" Starr recalled in a 2025 interview for SiriusXM. "And they'd be rolling on the floor laughing because — I didn't know I was doing it — I would just rewrite someone else's song."
That's not to say the others didn't want to include Starr at all — in fact, Lennon and McCartney wrote several songs over the years meant specifically for Starr to sing, and the drummer had at least one lead vocal on most of their albums.
“When you think about it, how many people in rock and roll can sing?" McCartney said to Rolling Stone in 2015. "But Ringo can deliver a song.”
Starr had to start somewhere as far as songwriting went. The very first Beatles song he landed a composition credit on was "What Goes On," which appeared on 1965's Rubber Soul.
The Earlier Origins of 'What Goes On'
"What Goes On" actually dated back a few years in the Beatles' recording career.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com/Allison Rapp
John Lennon once called the Beatles' Ticket to Ride "one of the earliest heavy metal records made."
Try to imagine that song pumping through the house speakers before a Morbid Angel show, and you might conclude that Lennon's statement was a bit of a stretch. Still, the song's lumbering groove and droning riff were unusually heavy for 1965, especially within a pop landscape dominated by tracks like Wooly Bully and Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter.
Ticket to Ride was groundbreaking for another reason, though; It was the first Beatles record to feature Paul McCartney on lead guitar. He'd quietly slipped some gentle acoustic strumming into I'll Follow the Sun the previous year, but Ticket to Ride was different.
His electric leads enthusiastically leaped across the divides between the song's bridges and verses, then returned to playfully bob and weave throughout the outro, introducing listeners to a side of McCartney most fans barely realized existed.
"I guess I think of myself as a guitar player, really," he said in 1990. "If I couldn't have any other instrument, I would have to have an acoustic guitar.
"To the general public, McCartney is, of course, all about that bass. Publications from Rolling Stone to Bass Player have routinely ranked him as one of the greatest bassists ever, and four-string giants like Flea, Geddy Lee, John Paul Jones, Chris Squire and Sting have extolled his inventive, melodic approach to the instrument.
Source: yahoo.com/Damon Orion
