Every time I try to make a top 20 Beatles list, it quickly ends in disaster. The songs are just so varied that there just isn't a pinnacle song for them. So instead, here's my lifetime Beatles journey.
My mom had the Sgt. Peppers tape in her car when she took me to Kindergarten. I recall vividly because I'd race into the car so I could dig through her audio tape bag just to find that tape (ok, 8-track) and slam it in the car deck before she could say no. Loved it from beginning to end, but because 8-track had the equivalent to CD track skip, I believe my favorite from that at the time was Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. But the Bee Gees/Frampton had a Sgt. Peppers movie and Get Back was the big ending, so of course I loved that being a kid. My father had the rest of the library and would blast the Beatles and many other classics on the weekends. So the melodies are like breathing to me.
Jr. High to most of High School, I viewed the Beatles as "baby stuff" because for me, it literally was.
I started to rediscover them when I picked up guitar in high school due to guitar idol interviews. But they didn't make a full recovery until an early 90s Lynch Mob concert. The concerts would start with the lights going down and the Beatles "Tomorrow Never Knows" as the warm up / intro track. At concert volumes, it was nirvana to me. Obviously, I recognized it as the Beatles, but I didn't know the name of the song because that wasn't one that either my mom or dad played in my formative years. It instantly became my favorite Beatles song. It was beyond cool.
So Revolver was then my favorite album. Now I'm at Musicians Institute and my MI band needed a cover song (and two originals) to compete in the battle of the bands. Clearly TNK was going to be ridiculously difficult to make "your own" while not totally destroying the song. So I created our version of Eleanor Rigby. Mostly orchestration for drums, bass, two guitars and synth.
I even still have the orchestration I presented to the other guys
Eleanor Rigby soundcloudKeep in mind, this was 1993. Guitar synth patches were horrendous and the synths were "multi-timbral", but not in a good way. So I just used a staccato string for guitars and keys, the drum machine bass for bass guitar and of course the drum machine for drums to represent what we'd be playing as a sketch. I recorded the whole thing and just their *stem* track and had to hand write out their parts (just print out the MIDI to staff, in 1993? Easier and cheaper to just break out the mechanical pencil and staff paper). Then we took that sketch to get the core down and then branched out in practice. I still wish I recorded the actual band rehearsals, but we figured we'd have time later (which never happens). Oh, and our recording device was usually a $30 tape recorder that made everything sound awful. And I probably pick up my guitar less than an hour a year these days, so the opportunity has passed.
Mid to late 90s, suddenly everybody was covering Eleanor Rigby, so that went into the dust bin. But it was really fun back in 1993.
So LSD to Get Back to Tomorrow Never Knows to Eleanor Rigby. I think my favorite song now is A Day in the Life, but tomorrow it could be Strawberry Fields Forever, then Because, Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight, or Come Together. They easily have more than 20 "this is the best song ever" songs.