If you dig The Beatles you’ve most certainly been asked to name your favorite album. It can be an impossibly subjective question and I have been a little non-committal on the topic … until now. The real question isn’t one of favorites, it’s a measure of best – what’s the best album by the best band ever. I came up with a formula to figure it out.
Your favorite Beatles record could be the one you got first or the one with the grooviest cover or maybe the one you were listening to when got your hand down Tracey’s pants in the seventh grade. But the best Fab disc can only mean one thing – it’s the one with the best songs. I took my own biased inventory of the songs on every Beatles album and have tallied the results for you here on this one-sided, ever-so-biased blog.
There are a few ground rules. By Beatles albums I mean the thirteen studio albums released in the United Kingdom. These have become the defacto standard of Beatles recordings. The American version of these albums (and all of the other US Beatles releases for that matter) are generally considered bastardized hack jobs assembled without knowledge of or endorsement by John, Paul, George and Ringo. Of course, there are countless Beatles recordings beyond the primary thirteen but to include them in this ranking seemed like a random journey down a rabbit hole I was afraid of.
Like any music artist with a large song catalog, The Beatles songs on these albums range widely from epic to ordinary. What I did was examine each record to identify two types of songs: Classic Songs (damn good songs) and Cornerstone Songs (among the best songs The Beatles ever recorded). These are my personal designations and the songs that fit into these two buckets aren’t necessarily the ones that are on traditional lists or the ones some other fuckin’ expert likes. Once I had the select songs from each album I spun those songs into a power ranking for each album (something like giving each Classic and Cornerstone song a value and then viewing it as a percentage of the overall number of songs on the record).
So what can we learn here? Well, that the best Beatles records might not be the same ones you call favorites and, as The Beatles evolved and experimented and found themselves as people, they were still Fab, but they didn’t produce the high-volume of great songs they produced when they were young lads fresh out of Liverpool.
Here’s how the albums stack up.
- A Hard Day’s Night
Power Ranking = 100
Cornerstone Songs: “I Should Have Known Better”; “If I Fell”; “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You”; “You Can’t Do That” - With The Beatles
Power Ranking = 85
Cornerstone Songs: “It Won’t Be Long”; “All I’ve Got To Do”; “Don’t Bother Me”; “Till There Was You”; “Devil In Her Heart”; “Not A Second Time” - Abbey Road
Power Ranking = 82
Cornerstone Songs: “Golden Slumbers”; “Because”; “Sun King” - The Beatles (White Album)
Power Ranking = 73
Cornerstone Songs: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”; “Good Night”; “I’m So Tired”; “I Will”; “Julia”; “Blackbird”; “Piggies”; “Mother Nature’s Son” - Help
Power Ranking = 71
Cornerstone Songs: “Act Naturally”; “You’re Going To Lose That Girl”; “I’ve Just Seen A Face” - Revolver
Power Ranking = 64
Cornerstone Songs: “Eleanor Rigby”; “And Your Bird Can Sing”; “I’m Only Sleeping” - Magical Mystery Tour
Power Ranking = 63
Cornerstone Songs: “Penny Lane”; “Hello Goodbye” - Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Power Ranking: 61
Cornerstone Songs: “When I’m Sixty-Four”; “A Day In The Life” - Rubber Soul
Power Ranking = 57
Cornerstone Songs: “Nowhere Man”; “In My Life”; “If I Needed Someone” - Please Please Me
Power Ranking = 57
Cornerstone Songs” “I Saw Her Standing There” - Beatles For Sale
Power Ranking = 50
Cornerstone Songs: “No Reply” - Let It Be
Power Ranking = 41
Cornerstone Songs: “Dig A Pony”; “Across The Universe” - Yellow Submarine
Power Ranking = 0
Cornerstone Songs: N/A