Tag: white album
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164: Glass Onion
Glass Onion is one of John Lennon’s songs from the White Album. It’s superficially in the same psychedelic vein as Strawberry Fields Forever, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and I Am The Walrus. This period and these songs were amongst my favourites when I first got into the Beatles, but I never liked Glass…
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182: Mother Nature’s Son
This gentle acoustic song beautifully captures that feeling of enjoying the countryside on a sunny day. It’s not just the lyrics – the music has that sense of breathing in and taking the scenery.I like the sustained brass band style notes, but – if I am being picky – I am less enthusiastic about the…
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185: Yer Blues
Yer Blues is a Lennon composed song from the White Album. As the title suggests it is the Beatles doing a kind of blues (something they didn’t really attempt elsewhere). Some sources seem to say it is a parody, but I am not sure what the evidence for that is. At the time there was…
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193: The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill
This is another song from the White Album. The sequence of Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, Wild Honey Pie and Bungalow Bill is quite off-putting and probably my least favourite section on any Beatles album. George Martin is quoted (in Anthology) as saying: “I thought we should probably have made a very, very good single album rather than…
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197: Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da
Perhaps I have a been a bit unfair to this upbeat, light-hearted Paul McCartney song from the White Album. The sax part is very nice. It’s a cheery song that ought to be uplifting, but to me it feels out of place on the White Album. It is intended to be ska/Caribbean flavoured, but to…
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202: Honey Pie
Having listened again carefully, and after all I said about Rocky Racoon, I feel a bit churlish having ranked this as low as 202.On re-listening it is a charming pastiche, and George Martin’s woodwind band arrangement seems really authentic. Everything has been done carefully, and it sounds as if the Beatles had fun with it.…
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204: Rocky Racoon
Rocky Racoon is another sort of comedy song/pastiche type of thing and from the White Album. It’s a fully developed song – not a fragment. It has some interesting ideas and paints a vivid picture of characters in a Western saloon. Not my cup of tea, really, but as I get older I increasingly realize…
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The White Album
I’ve picked 4 songs in a row from the White Album (properly called “The Beatles”), and even taking into account the quirks of my ranking system and the sheer craziness of attempting to rank art at all, I can’t deny that it is far from my favourite Beatles album. And yet it is very popular,…
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210: Why Don’t We Do It In The Road
This is a short and simple song that seems promising but unfinished. [It’s worth reading the Beatles Bible entries (like the one embedded above) for each song: lots of interesting quotes and background as well as linking to the recordings.] Like the preceding tracks in this run of four from the White Album it is…
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211: Don’t Pass Me By
Don’t Pass Me By is unusual in being written by Ringo (there is only one other Starkey song in my list, plus a few more where he is credited as co-writer or arranger). It’s another song on the White Album that IMO would not have made it past quality control in the earlier stages of…
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212: Revolution 9
Another experimental piece from the White Album. Not so much a song but more of a sound collage. Maybe it really is a purposeful work of art connecting with Yoko Ono’s visual work and avant garde composers like Stockhausen, but if so Revolution 9 doesn’t really connect with me, although I admit it does have…
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213: Wild Honey Pie
According to my informal rating algorithm, this is my least favourite Beatles song. Wild Honey Pie is one of a few fragments and (charitably) “experiments” found on the White Album that escaped the Beatles’ normally rigorous quality control. A symptom of the way, by 1968, they were increasingly working independently of one another and producer…