It is time for Beatles Week, an annual tradition that I can not take credit for, but look forward to every year. Started by Mark Zwolanek (on a website I can no longer find) in 2008 I have done it every year since. Nobody else does this exercise as far as I know. This week of blogging helps to celebrate my favorite band as well as to keep the blog active during a traditionally slow or completely inactive time of year.
Normally Beatles Week includes eight entries (for the song “Eight Days A Week”) with posts from Christmas Day to New Year’s Day, inclusive. If interested you can visit my previous Beatles Week posts:
Beatles Week 2015
Beatles Week 2014
Beatles Week 2013
Beatles Week 2012
Beatles Week 2011
Beatles Week 2010
Beatles Week 2009
This year for Beatles Week I am doing something different, a long simmering project I had been thinking about for a while.
I will be ranking each song on each “official” Beatles album.
For this project I will be looking only at the albums that are available in the two box sets (The Beatles and The Beatles In Mono) but I will not be dissecting the various mixes and differences of each song. Instead this is a highly subjective ranking of my opinion on each song on each album.
How subjective?
The ranking has shifted multiple times over the months I have been working on each list.
Not only are the rankings themselves subjective, they are also subject to change on any given day. There are a few absolutes, but in general when I am listening to each album what will follow is my opinion of each song. Roughly.
How did I come up with this ranking?
I have listened to each album enough times over the years I know about where each song falls within the album as far as my affection for it goes. Listing each song I arranged them in order from least to most favorite, then created a playlist of the album in the new order I created. As I listened to the album playlist, from least to most favorite, I made adjustments to the list as necessary then listened again. Yes, this involved listening to a few albums multiple times, or at least various sequences of songs.
The list of albums I will be examining are as follows:
Past Masters & Mono Masters
Let It Be
Abbey Road
Yellow Submarine
The Beatles
Magical Mystery Tour
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band
Revolver
Rubber Soul
Help!
Beatles For Sale
Hard Day’s Night
With The Beatles
Please Please Me
That’s 14 albums. Within each album each song is ranked.
I will not be looking at other official releases, such as Anthology or At The BBC, so there will be a few songs not represented.
There are some duplicates, particularly with Past Masters and Mono Masters. And just because a song is ranked low within an album does not mean I don’t like it. The ranking is all relative to each other song on the specific album. There really are not that many bad Beatles songs, and only a few I actively skip over these days, mostly because I’m just tired of hearing them right now and in a couple of years that may change. Again.
It is important to remember this is not a qualitative measurement by any stretch of the imagination. I am not looking at which songs are better than others. Nor is this any sort of analysis of which version of each song is better (and if you need an explanation for that remark, then don’t worry about it).
I’m sure you have a different opinion.
Let me hear it.