3 of The Beatles’ Best Movie Soundtrack Songs

The Beatles put out a series of films from 1964 to 1968, during the peak of their fame. Here are a few songs that were either written for one of these films or contributed to a movie after being released.

“Yellow Submarine”

“Yellow Submarine” would first appear on Revolver and later in The Beatles’ animated movie Yellow Submarine in 1968. Fun fact, this song was also Ringo’s first lead vocal moment on a Beatles’ single. McCartney described Ringo as being “good with children” in The Beatles Anthology, which is why he wrote this song the way he did.

“I was thinking of it as a song for Ringo, which it eventually turned out to be, so I wrote it as not too rangey in the vocal,” McCartney told Barry Miles. “I just made up a little tune in my head, then started making a story, sort of an ancient mariner, telling the young kids where he’d lived and how there’d been a place where he had a yellow submarine.”

“Ticket To Ride”

“Ticket To Ride” was originally released on the Help! album and also used in the film of the same name. According to Lennon, the song was kind of ahead of its time, rock-wise.

“‘Ticket To Ride’ was slightly a new sound at the time,” Lennon told The Anthology. “It was pretty f*****g heavy for then, if you go and look in the charts for what other music people were making. You hear it now, and it doesn’t sound too bad; but it’d make me cringe.”

“A Hard Day’s Night”

This one’s pretty fun. After being asked to write a song for their film, A Hard Day’s Night, McCartney and Lennon wrote this one. The 1964 film was The Beatles’ first movie together, so they’d never written something like that before.

“Usually, John and I would sit down and if we thought of something we’d write a song about it,” McCartney explained to The Beatles Anthology. “But Walter Shenson asked John and me if we’d write a song specially for the opening and closing credits.”

At first, the title “A Hard Day’s Night” felt a little silly to McCartney and Lennon.

“It sounded funny at the time, but after a bit we got the idea of saying it had been a hard day’s night and we’d been working all the days,” McCartney continued. “And get back to a girl and everything’s fine… And we turned it into one of those songs.”

Photo by: Daily Herald Archive/National Science & Media Museum/SSPL via Getty Images