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THE PLAYLIST: REVISITING THE BEATLES

The Beatles are back, on Rock Band and remastered CDs. Laura Barton picks their best album tracks to download to your iPod ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2009

Choosing favourite Beatles tracks is a bit like deciding which members of your family to rescue from a sinking ship; every one seems to gaze imploringly at you. I’ve plumped for songs that are not too well-worn, that can still surprise, that are inventive, impulsive and downright irresistible.

NORWEGIAN WOOD  (RUBBER SOUL, 1965)
The comeliness of the song belies its bitterness—George Harrison’s delicate sitar masking the story of a woman who leads our hero on, told in vaguely baffling images. This discrepancy echoes the tale itself; lovely as it first seems, it leads nowhere.

DRIVE MY CAR  (RUBBER SOUL, 1965)
The Beatles’ garage-pop past meets their urge to innovate, with bursts of jazz piano, Otis Redding bass and a neat gender reversal. It nods to the tradition of singing about cars when you’re talking about sex, with a girl who looks for a chauffeur, only to reveal she doesn’t own a car. Beep-beep, yeah!

I'M ONLY SLEEPING  (REVOLVER, 1966)
The drowsy, dreamy feel might seem effortless, but much of it was calculated: a Harrison guitar solo played backwards, harmonies that sound like alarm clocks, different recording speeds and even a yawn all added to the glorious syrupy texture.

LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS  (SGT PEPPER, 1967)
The musical complexity—odd metres and key changes, tambouras, Lowrey organs, trumpets and zithers—is perfectly balanced by childlike lyrics. Was it inspired by LSD, or a nursery-school painting by Julian Lennon? Whichever, it makes a fantastic world: newspaper taxis, tangerine trees...

A DAY IN THE LIFE  (SGT PEPPER, 1967)
Lennon begins with the man who blew his mind out in a car, and ends with 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, his voice dusty and distant, as if gazing through a bus window. Plum in the middle sits Paul McCartney’s affable morning routine blurring into a dream. A beautiful mix of the mundane and the extraordinary.

DEAR PRUDENCE  (THE WHITE ALBUM, 1968)
The Beatles had a gift for prettiness that never cloys; it’s there on “Here Comes the Sun”, “Blackbird” and “Strawberry Fields”. This song, inspired by Mia Farrow’s sister, is as pretty as any. Led by a fingerpicked guitar, it billows into handclaps, voices and flugelhorn. It’s psychedelic but sweet.

HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN  (THE WHITE ALBUM, 1968)
From the lilting opening through to its sludgy, fix-needing belly, and right down to its doo-woppy end, this is a bizarre song, yet irresistible. Whether it’s about firearms, drugs or Yoko, it’s both dirty and delightful.

I WANT YOU  (ABBEY ROAD, 1969)
Sexiness in Beatles songs often amounts to a certain simplicity—witness “Why Don’t We Do It In the Road”. This song is eight minutes long and lyrically sparse, propelled only by a repetitive guitar figure, sluggish organ and Lennon’s bluesy rasp, before ending in a rush of white noise. Loin-quivering stuff.
 

(Laura Barton is a feature writer and columnist at The Guardian.)