As an avid Beatles fan, I love everything about them. I think that there were three main ingredients, which led to their amazing success: the quality of the songwriting, the strong vocals and the musical experimentation. Their development was fascinating to observe. The Beatles songs began as catchy tunes with a few soulful ballads. It was almost unheard of in the early 1960s for pop groups to write their own compositions. Lennon and McCartney were unusual in that regard and wrote songs for other people too, such as the Rolling Stones.
The lyrics started to go beyond the conventional boy meets girl scenario. The group were fans of Bob Dylan and were influenced by his lyrics that were full of imagery and metaphor. John Lennon said later that he thought that pop songs and poetry had to be two separate things until Dylan showed that they could be combined. Hallucinogenic drugs also became an influence in Beatles songs, although some words were cited as drug references when that wasn’t the case. Equally, some drug references got through unnoticed. In the heady days of 1967, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds from Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was said to be about a drug experience. In fact, the title was taken from a school painting that John’s young son had done and the lyrics were inspired by Alice in Wonderland, which John re-read every year.
The Beatles evolved musically too and this was aided by the creative partnership with their record producer, George Martin. Martin was a classically trained musician and he was able to interpret the ideas that the group had and the sounds that they wanted. Beatles songs were the first mainstream songs to use tape loops, backward tapes and alternating the speed of tapes. They recorded in the Abbey Road studios belonging to EMI, where many orchestras made their records. This was significant as there would be instruments lying around that weren’t usually used for pop music. The Beatles and Martin made clever use of them.
Striving for an unusual sound was always important to the Beatles. The haunting opening bars of Strawberry Fields Forever is played on a theramin. The invention of the moog synthesizer also made a contribution, able to electronically simulate virtually any sound e.g. the barrel organ on For the Benefit of Mr. Kite. George Harrison introduced pop music to the wonderful Indian sitar on Norwegian Wood and Within You, Without You. The Beatles songs led the way and proved that critical and commercial success could be combined. Discover more of the background behind Beatles songs from: A Hard Day’s Write, 3e: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Song
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Latest Comments
RSS