Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day, But These 3 Classic Albums Were

Some artists take years to record an album, but some only need one day and a lot of determination. And probably caffeine. Or—well, you get the idea. Here are just a few offerings that were recorded in one day, eventually becoming beloved classic albums.

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[RELATED: The Black Sabbath Song Recorded at John Lennon’s Home]

Black Sabbath Only Had Two Days to Record Their Self-Titled Debut

Black Sabbath‘s debut self-titled album came out in 1970 and is retrospectively praised despite garnering overwhelmingly negative reviews when it first came out. The incredible aspect of Black Sabbath is that it was made in only one day. The band actually had two days available in the studio, but only used one to complete the album.

“We had two days to do it, but we didn’t know any better,” Geezer Butler told Guitar World in 2015, per a report from Loudwire. “We just went in there and recorded it like a live gig.” According to Butler, the band skipped the mixing of the eventual classic album because they had a show scheduled on their second recording day. Black Sabbath recorded their second album, Paranoid, the same year in a similar fashion. Although this time, they took a few days to cut the final album instead of just one.

Bob Dylan Spent a Total of One Day on Another Side of Bob Dylan

Another Side of Bob Dylan was Dylan’s August 1964 follow-up to February’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, and it did exactly what he said it would—showed another side of Bob Dylan. This album deviated from the socially conscious, protest-heavy content of the previous, and while the audience at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 enjoyed the new material, critics weren’t as keen.

Even though it was considered a “failure of taste and self-critical awareness,” according to Sing Out! journalist Irwin Silber at the time, it’s worth noting that the album has an impressive legacy for only taking a day to complete. There was only one recording session on June 9 that took three hours. During those three hours, Dylan recorded 14 original songs, three of which were scrapped. The recording session finally ended around 1:30 in the morning, according to a 1964 description of the session from New Yorker writer Nat Hentoff, and soon after, the album was cut.

The Beatles Recorded Please Please Me in A Handful of Hours

In 1962, the Beatles recorded Please Please Me in a single session. It was producer George Martin’s idea to record in one day, recording live to recreate the energy of a show. However, the band showed up late to the studio, and to top it all off, John Lennon had a cold. The session was rushed and everyone was on edge, but they ran through four original songs and six covers in one day, starting around 10 a.m.

The Beatles worked all day with two official 90-minute breaks, one for lunch and one for dinner. They stayed until the studio closed at 10 p.m., channeling the pre-fame sound of their late-night Liverpool shows. As Lennon recalled a decade later, “[Please Please Me is] the nearest you can get to knowing what we sounded like before we became the ‘clever’ Beatles,” as quoted in a retrospective in Rolling Stone. The result of one full day of recording became a classic album in the Beatles oeuvre.

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