The Beatles made so much music that it’s hard to love every single thing they did. They were always trying new ideas and surprising people with their songs. Even the albums that some fans don’t like as much still have something special about them, so it’s tough to say any of their work is really bad.
Their music can be split into two big parts. First, they were cute pop stars with short hair, singing fun songs. Then, they changed into something wilder, adding bright, colorful sounds to their rock music. This switch happened around 1965 when they tried a drug called LSD, which made them think in bigger, more creative ways.
George Harrison, one of the Beatles, said in a 1977 interview, “I liked when we got into Rubber Soul and Revolver—each album had something good and kept getting better.” Rubber Soul came out in 1965, and after that, they made amazing albums like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, and one called The White Album. These albums kept pushing what rock music could be.
But George didn’t love every album they made during this time. He thought some went too far and got messy. He wasn’t a fan of Yellow Submarine, for example. He said, “There were albums which weren’t any good as far as I was concerned, like Yellow Submarine.” He also explained that in America, their albums were different. In England, they put 14 songs on an album, but in the U.S., people took off some songs, added singles, and mixed everything up. George didn’t like albums like Yesterday and Today because they felt like a mess to him.
George also wasn’t super excited about their early music. Back then, they recorded songs in a simple way called mono, which means the sound wasn’t split into two sides like stereo. He said, “Those old records weren’t really stereo. They were mono records and they were rechanneled.” When they made their first album, Please Please Me, they used a machine with just two tracks. Later, when people tried to make it stereo, it sounded weird because all the music was on one side.
George noticed little problems in their work because he cared so much about making music. That’s part of why The Beatles were so great—they always looked ahead and tried new things. Even their simple early songs from Please Please Me show how talented and full of ideas they were, just like their wilder songs later on. They helped make the idea of a studio album something really important in music.
