THE BEATLES

I love the music of the Beatles! This page lists the Beatles songs I've sung so far. I'll be adding (perhaps many) more over time.

Singing the songs of the Beatles (including all their harmonies) is a great way to get to know their music from the inside-out. I now have a much better understanding of why so many people — from contemporary music makers (like Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys upon hearing their first Beatles song, I Want To Hold Your Hand: "I flipped. It was like a shock went through my system ... I immediately knew that everything had changed"), or future music makers (like Sting: "The reason I’m a musician is because of the Beatles", or Billy Joel: "[The Beatles performance on the Ed Sullivan Show] changed my life. Up to that moment, I’d never considered playing rock as a career”), or just the average listener to radio or 45's (like myself at 7 years old) were blown away by the music of Beatles, the first time they heard it — whether that first time was listening to She Loves You in the UK in late 1963, or listening to I Want To Hold Your Hand on the Ed Sullivan Show in the United States on February 9, 1964. These two songs, together, launched Beatlemania — first She Loves You in the UK, and then I Want To Hold Your Hand in the United States, and from there, the world.

A good way to understand Beatlemania is to look at music before the Beatles. The music prior to rock-and-roll was dominated by songwriters like Cole Porter, George Gershwin, etc., singers like Frank Sinatra, and bands like the "big bands" of Benny Goodman. The sensibility was primarily jazz. There was a sophistication to the best of this music: clever lyrics, sophisticated chord progressions, etc. But (with a few exceptions like Goodman's Sing, Sing, Sing) the energy of the songs was suave (not primal).

Then rock-and-roll exploded on the scene in the early 1950's. The big innovation of rock-and-roll was its explosive, primal energy. In contrast, the music of early rock-and-roll was relatively unsophisticated.

Let's look at a few rock-and-roll milestones prior to the Beatles. Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock was released in 1954. Like so many early rock-and-roll songs, it had three chords, organized in a 12-bar blues format: very simple. But it had energetic electric guitars belting out the chords. Elvis Presley's Hound Dog (July 1956) was another simple three-chord, 12-bar blues song. But it included a very energetic drum roll, and Elvis's accompanying body movements when he performed the song on stage provided a visual metaphor for the energy that listeners were feeling through the song. While still a three-chord song, Chuck Berry's 1958 hit, Johnny B. Goode increased the speed, increased the energy, and made the sound of fast electric guitar riffs an essential part of hard-core rock and roll.

The Beatles cut their teeth on hundreds of hours of performances of the early rock-and-roll songs that preceded them and were impressing them, like so many other young people. And so long as they simply re-created that three-chord, twelve-bar blues format, they would not stand out from the rest of the pack. You can hear many recordings of their early performances: they are competent, but they don't stand out; they are not recognizable and distinctive as "the Beatles sound". A representative example (of many) is their cover of the 1953 (12-bar blues) song, I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You).

But, in having to perform eight-hour stints in dive bars in Hamburg, Germany, they needed a much broader pallette of music to fill that incredible length of time, night after night. So they included anything and everything in their musical pallette. And they got really good at all kinds of other genres of music that pre-dated rock-n-roll, from Broadway show tunes to British variety artists. Song examples included Besame Mucho, Till There Was You, etc..

The great innovation of the Beatles' music occurred when they started creating songs that combined the primal energy of rock-and-roll with the musical sophistication of the pre-rock-and-roll era. Rather than a jazz format, they expressed the same musically sophisticated ideas over a rock rhythm/groove. The first song that helped launch Beatlemania, She Loves You, perfectly exemplified this: incredibly high energy (at the level of Hound Dog or Johnny B. Goode) but incredible musical sophistication (at the level of Gerswhin and Porter), far beyond the three-chord, 12-bar blues: from the explosive "call and response" opening (with Ringo's drum roll), to musical bursts and explosions throughout, to sudden stops, to shifts between minor and major keys, to constant shifts in speed, and use of the blues scale here and there. . . the song is nothing if not dramatic (including the story in the lyrics) and at the same time is a non-stop flow of raw energy throughout its brief journey of a little over two minutes.

There truly had not been anything before — like this combination of primal energy with musical sophistication — in the history of popular music! (The young Brian Wilson’s impression in 1964 bears repeating: "I immediately knew that everything had changed".) Not surprisingly, it instigated a musical revolution, one that we are still engaged in — which is a major reason why the Beatles remain so popular and interesting today. Music listeners continue to appreciate the music of the Beatles. But — equally importantly — musical creators want to know every detail of how the Beatles created their revolutionary music. Hence the popularity of such series as Peter Jackson's Get Back documentary series, which drops us into the Abbey Road Studio with the Beatles for an extended period of time, where we get to see their actual creative process at work.

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The page begins with a YouTube Playlist Player you can use to play all the songs, one by one. Below that are summaries for each of the songs I've released, and links to full-page presentations for each.