The Beatles – Abbey Road (1969)

What a pleasure it is to return to this blog after a small pause with such a glorious album. Abbey Road is, without a doubt, one of the best albums ever made. I bought it on vinyl from my trip to Japan almost ten years ago. For some reason, these kinds of records were cheaper and more readily available in Japan than in Europe at the time. I also bought a couple of other Beatles albums. This is the only one of those albums that's not a Japan pressing. Abbey Road is the last album The Beatles ever made. Let It Be was released later on, but those songs had already been made before. Abbey Road shows the Beatles that had already decided to split up, but that came together for one last masterpiece. This album appears at the top of many lists of best albums of all times. It's quite high on my personal list as well. It includes some of the best songs The Beatles ever wrote.




This album contains songs by all four Beatles and it is already quite clear who wrote which song. In that sense this is a collection of solo projects. But there's still some great band quality as well on this album. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, none of these people managed ever to make such good music after this album. I've always felt like John Lennon was the greatest songwriter of the lot, but his solo stuff sounded a bit bland because Paul McCartney wasn't there to inspire interesting studio sounds. McCartney on the other hand never reached the songwriting quality of Lennon on his solo career even if Maybe I'm Amazed and Live and Let Die were great individual songs.

There were numerous rumours back in the day that Paul McCartney had actually died and that was one of the reasons why the band split. People saw the fact that he walks bare foot in the album cover as one of the clues. Apparently in some cultures it has that kind of meaning.

The album cover is legendary. It's just the four of them walking across a zebra crossing to the Abbey Road studios. There are still numerous tourists in the area taking pictures on that same crossing. It's probably the most visited Beatles location in London.

Even if I said that this album is more or less a collection of songs by different people, it is quite remarkable how united the sound is on this album. The second half is even composed of songs that are joined together to form one long string of songs.

Just about every song on this album is a masterpiece, but my absolute favourites are Come Together, Something, I Want You (She's So Heavy), Here Comes the Sun, Because and Golden Slumbers. This list includes two George Harrison songs, which goes to show that by this time Harrison had caught up with Lennon & McCartney and was making just as amazing songs as the duo. Ringo wasn't quite as talented, but still his Octopus's Garden is probably his best piece of work from the Beatles era.

Even if The Beatles "invented" the music video, I wasn't able to find any music videos from this album. It's probably because by the time this album came out, the band had pretty much split up.

I can't oversell this album enough to you guys, so all I'm saying is that if you haven't listened to this album from beginning to the end without any other distractions by now, do yourself a favour and do that. This is one of the best albums of all times. It has inspired a bunch of cover versions by other artists. To name a few, Ozzy Osbourne's version of Something and Elliott Smith's live version of Because are quite amazing.

Listen to the album on Spotify.