The Beatles – 1967-1970 (1973)

Where the previous compilation album of The Beatles' early songs was interesting mainly historically as a collection of hit songs, this second compilation of their later songs is actually an amazing compilation of pop music's history's greatest songs. Of course there are still some amazing songs missing from this compilation and there are some that I would've definitely left out, this gives a great glimpse into varied works of the greatest band of all times. In this period, The Beatles had stopped touring and they only focused on writing albums. This approach changed the world, as the recordings were so complicated for that time's studio techniques that music was changed forever. Some of these songs couldn't even have been performed live maintaining the sound. The orchestration in these songs is quite amazing and a lot of the credit goes to the so called fifth Beatle, George Martin.



In this era, The Beatles kind of stopped being a band in the traditional sense of the word, and it became a collective of amazing musicians playing music together. In this era, it's fairly clear, who wrote which song. In most cases, whoever's singing the lead, wrote the song. It's quite easy for a Beatle fan to spot the characteristics of a Lennon song or a McCartney song. However, there was one key element that made The Beatles as a band more important than the sum of its people. Lennon was undoubtedly the most gifted songwriter, but Paul McCartney was the one who really wanted to experiment with sounds. This dynamic is missing from the post-Beatle solo albums. The Beatles were always the best Beatles when Lennon wrote the song and McCartney added his psychedelic spices to the mix through studio technique and sounds.

Talking about just Lennon and McCartney is not that fair though, because in this era, George Harrison also started writing amazing songs, such as While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Here Comes the Sun and Something. Even if Ringo's songs weren't that great, he added his own trademark style of playing drums with lots of toms, which gave The Beatles a very distinctive sound together with McCartney's amazing melodic bass lines.

Some of my favourite Beatles songs, such as Happiness Is a Warm Gun and Because are missing from this album, but it does have some of my all time favourite songs by any band as well. A Day In the Life, Strawberry Fields Forever, Come Together, Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds, I Am the Walrus, Here Comes the Sun and Across the Universe are all amazing songs. The only song on this album that I think really shouldn't be there is the awful Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. This song became really popular and it's one of the reasons why people who don't really know The Beatles keep mocking them.

As I already mentioned in my previous post, The Beatles basically invented the modern music video. Some of these videos are quite amazing. As an example, here is a great, yet short, video of Strawberry Fields Forever.

This compilation album also features some songs that never ended up on the actual Beatles albums, such as Hey Jude, Lady Madonna, The Ballad of John and Yoko and Old Brown Shoe. Some of these songs are among the most well-known Beatles songs and this goes on to proof that in that time, single was still a very important way of getting music out there. In the 70's, albums took over as a concept and you couldn't leave singles out of the albums anymore in the same way. Now, decades later, we seem to be in a situation where a lot of people don't care about albums anymore. I personally see this as a tragedy.

I can't wait to write more about great individual songs by the Beatles and about the albums when I go through the actual albums in more detail, but it was nice already to write something in general about the best band that ever existed.

Listen to the album on Spotify.