The Beatles’ 1963 debut album, Please Please Me, couldn’t been recorded more simply. The band laid down the basic tracks to most of the songs live in the studio in one 10-hour session. Overdubs were added to two tunes nine days later.
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By the mid-1960s, though, the Fab Four had started experimenting with more layered and complex productions. The groundbreaking 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is perhaps the best example of the height of The Beatles’ experimental phase.
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That being said, even after The Beatles had begun to focus on expanding their sonic boundaries, they also recorded some sparsely arranged, stripped-down gems that show that they were sometimes at their best when they kept things simple in the studio.
Here then are four songs from middle and latter part of The Beatles’ career that prove that simpler can sometimes be better:
“Yesterday” (1965)
“Yesterday” is arguably one of The Beatles’ most famous and popular tunes, and has been named the most covered song ever by the Guinness Book of Records. Paul McCartney wrote the song in its entirety.
Paul claimed the melody came to him in a dream, and when he woke up, he thought it was a song he’d heard by another artist. McCartney’s initial lyrics for the tune were “Scrambled eggs / Oh my baby, how I love your legs.”
He eventually wrote the melancholy song about a broken romance. When Paul tried recording “Yesterday” with The Beatles, the other band members felt like they couldn’t add anything to the tune.
Producer George Martin then suggested McCartney just sing and play the song on acoustic guitar, and that a backing string quartet would sound nice. “Yesterday” became the first Beatles song to feature strings, and the first tune by the band to only feature one member.
In the U.K., “Yesterday” was released on The Beatles’ Help! album in August 1965. The band members decided not to put the ballad out as a single in their home country, though, because they worried it didn’t fit their image as a rock band. In the U.S., it was released as a single in September 1965, and became a huge hit. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 for four straight weeks the following month.
“Blackbird” (1968)
“Blackbird” is another classic Beatles song that mainly features just McCartney on vocals and acoustic guitar. Paul wrote the song at his then recently acquired farm in Scotland shortly after The Beatles had returned from their famous stay at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s spiritual retreat in Rishikesh, India.
McCartney has said that the music for “Blackbird” was developed from a classical-influenced piece he and George Harrison used to play at parties when they were younger that was inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Bouree in E minor.”
The lyrics were inspired by the civil-rights movement, with the blackbird representing a young Black woman facing oppression in the U.S.
The “Blackbird” recording only features McCartney’s double-tracked vocals, acoustic guitar, and the tapping of Paul’s feet as he kept time. It also includes added sound effects of birds chirping and fluttering wings.
“Blackbird” was released in November 1968 on The Beatles’ self-titled double album, a.k.a. “The White Album.”
“I Will” (1968)
“I Will” is a sweet acoustic love song McCartney began writing while in Rishikesh. In his 2021 book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul explained that the tune “finds me in my troubadour mode.”
The track features just McCartney on vocals and guitar, John Lennon on percussion, and Ringo Starr on maracas, bongos, and cymbals.
“I Will” is another song that appears on “The White Album.”
“Julia” (1968)
“Julia” is a dreamy, melancholy song Lennon wrote about his late mother, who was killed in traffic accident when John was 17. It also was partly inspired by his then-new girlfriend and future wife, Yoko Ono.
As Lennon explained in a 1980 Playboy interview conducted by journalist David Sheff, “Julia was my mother. But [the song] was sort of a combination of Yoko and my mother blended into one.”
Lennon wrote the music for “Julia” in Rishikesh. It uses a finger-picking pattern shown to him by folk-rock singer Donovan, who also was attending the retreat.
The track just features Lennon on vocals and acoustic guitar. It’s the only Beatles song to feature just John.
“Julia” is another song featured on “The White Album.”
(Photo by John Downing/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
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