Hacker News Reader

Comment by lowercased | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. It was really the combination of two or three talented people feeding off each others' creativity. John/Paul each 'only' had to write 3-5 songs per album, with George filling in some extras. I'm not saying it's easy to write 3-5 good songs, but they had a knack already. One person trying to write 12-14 good songs per album is facing an impossibility - and we can see that with their solo albums. Most of them have a handful of good/great songs, and then... relative filler.

Each Beatle album getting the 'best' of a group of talented writers was the magic sauce, imo.

But even then, the pace was still... insane. Tour in the 1965 summer time, come back to UK, start writing an album in October, work for a month, and put out Rubber Soul, nearly all of which was written and recorded in that single month. That is possibly the most creative/productive single month in their career.

View on HN

Songwriting is my hobby. Good songs are rare. Beatles wrote 229 songs and only a small percentage of those are hits or "good songs" as I would call them (20 Top 1 hits and 34 Top 10 hits). Most people in the world wouldn't recognize most of Beatles songs, but just about everybody knows "Yesterday".

My understanding that back in the day this neck breaking pace was rather common, often because of pressure from the record labels and contracts that bands were forced to sign with them.

Absolute majority of known bands out there are "one song marvels" and those that are not are rare, well know worldwide superstars.

> and only a small percentage of those are hits or "good songs" as I would call them (20 Top 1 hits and 34 Top 10 hits)

You may need to clarify your criteria there a bit more for "good song". Just chart position? Memorability? Lyrics? Catchiness?

I'm a bit of a Beatles nut, so this is obviously biased, but I reckon I'd go close to naming around 100 Beatles songs that I regard as "good songs", and be able to give you musicological reasons as to why I considered them as such.

The only composers in history that I'd compare that track record to would probably be Mozart and J.S.Bach. Admittedly both Mozart and Bach were individually creating those pieces, but the Beatles were a very rare meeting of musical minds. I even rate some of Ringo's tracks as being good compared to the average song writing of the last few centuries.

But, as I said, I'm far from unbiased here!

Based on the quality of songs on All Things Must Pass, George could have filled in a few more songs. A widely accepted theory is Paul/John limited him a fair bit.

Actually, I had heard before that George first wasn't satisfied with his own songs and he wanted them to be as good as the John/Paul ones before they appear on their records, which he managed beautifully: in a way, it was the same kind of motivation that was between John and Paul that existed also between he and Paul/John, which helped him progress. I had heard also that as he was singing some of the songs, he told the others that he wanted to sing his own.

Competition brings out the best in people. I know it does for me. After the Beatles broke up, they weren't competing with each other anymore, and, well, that was about it for the great songs.

There's also the Paul showing his music to John, and John telling him it was crap and to do better. And vice versa. After the breakup, who is going to have the nerve to tell Paul that his latest creation is crap?

I only recently learned that 'Art of Dying' was written (or started?) in 1966 during Revolver. I now try to picture/hear a Martin-produced version with Revolver-era sound and how it would have fit on that album. Tomorrow Never Knows was fairly radical but Art of Dying would have been just as radical, imo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com