Songs
Although most of the songs on any given Beatles album are usually credited to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting team, that description is often misleading, and rarely more so than on The Beatles. With this album, each of the four band members began to showcase the range and depth of his individual songwriting talents, and to display styles that would be carried over to his eventual solo career. Indeed, some songs that the individual Beatles were working on during this period eventually were released on solo albums. According to the bootlegged album of the songs recorded at Kinfauns, George Harrison's Esher home, these include Lennon's "Look at Me" and "Child of Nature", eventually reworked as "Jealous Guy"; McCartney's "Junk" and "Teddy Boy"; and Harrison's "Not Guilty" and "Circles."
Many of the songs on the album display experimentation with unlikely musical genres, borrowing directly from such sources as 1930s dance-hall music (in "Honey Pie"), classical chamber music (in "Piggies"), the avant-garde sensibilities of Yoko Ono and John Cage (in "Revolution 9"), country-style music (Ringo Starr's "Don't Pass Me By"), a western-style saloon ballad ("Rocky Raccoon"), and the lush sentimentality of Henry Mancini's film scores (in "Good Night"). Such diversity was largely unprecedented in global pop music in 1968, and the album’s sprawling approach provoked (and continues to provoke) both praise and criticism from observers. "Revolution 9", in particular, a densely layered eight-minute-and-thirteen-second sound collage, has attracted both interest and disapproval from fans and music critics over the years.
The only western instrument available to the group during their Indian visit was the acoustic guitar, and thus most of the songs on The Beatles were written and first performed on that instrument. Some of these songs remained acoustic on The Beatles (notably "Rocky Raccoon", "Blackbird", "Julia", "Cry Baby Cry", "I Will" and "Mother Nature's Son") and were recorded in the studio either solo, or by only part of the group.
Read more about this topic: The Beatles (album)
Famous quotes containing the word songs:
“When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget.”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)
“Dylan is to me the perfect symbol of the anti-artist in our society. He is against everything—the last resort of someone who doesn’t really want to change the world.... Dylan’s songs accept the world as it is.”
—Ewan MacColl (1915–1989)
“How learned he bitter songs of lost Iambe,
Or that a cup-shaped breast is nothing vile?”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)