The Beatles — Revolver

George Harrison's first album-opening track is a complaint about the British tax system set to the nastiest guitar tone the Beatles had recorded. The lyric names Harold Wilson and Edward Heath by name and describes a 95 percent supertax rate with the specificity of someone who had just hired an accountant. The verses are sung with clipped consonants that make the grievance sound like a demand, and the guitar solo—played by Paul McCartney, not Harrison—is a distorted snarl that owes more to Indian vocal melisma than to Chuck Berry. The count-in includes coughs and the sound of coins, a detail that seems clever until you realize it is exactly as clever as the song needs to be and no more. The track establishes that the album will not be polite.

A string octet arranged by George Martin and McCartney, recorded with close mics that made the players nervous, and not a single guitar or drumbeat. The lyric is a character study of loneliness that ends with a priest wiping dirt from his hands after burying Eleanor in a ceremony no one attended, and McCartney sings it with no vibrato or decoration, as though he is reading a news report. The octave leap on the word "nobody" is the only moment where the vocal allows itself drama, and the effect is devastating because everything around it is so controlled. The staccato string rhythm is relentless and the arrangement never resolves, leaving the song suspended in the same loneliness it describes. This is McCartney at his most ambitious and least sentimental, and the fact that it was a double A-side single with Yellow Submarine suggests the Beatles had no interest in giving the public what it expected.

Lennon's meditation on the appeal of staying in bed, recorded at a faster tempo than the final version and then slowed down to give the vocal a drowsy, drugged quality. The backward guitar solo, composed and recorded by Harrison with the tape direction in mind, is the first time a pop record used that technique as arrangement rather than accident. The song is a defense of laziness disguised as a love song to sleep, with Lennon delivering the verses in a yawn and the overdubbed harmonies answering him like a Greek chorus of enablers. The production matches the subject: every element sounds like it is half awake, from the slurred tambourine to the guitars that seem to drift in and out of focus. A small masterpiece of mood.

Harrison's Hindustani classical composition, featuring tabla player Anil Bhagwat, tambura drone and sitar, with only a faint Western rhythm section buried in the mix. The lyric dismisses material concerns and romantic games in favor of a spiritual connection, which makes it the most overtly Eastern-philosophy track the Beatles had recorded. The vocal melody follows the sitar line, and Harrison sings it with almost no dynamics, letting the arrangement do the work. The track is significant as an early example of Western rock incorporating Indian music without parody, but it plays more like a respectful exercise than a song that needed to exist. Interesting once, skippable on repeat.

McCartney's most delicate ballad since Yesterday, with a three-part harmony structure on the verses and a bridge that lifts into a major key resolution. The fingerpicked guitar and the gentle bass are the only instruments, which gives the vocal space to show off the tune's construction without overwhelming it. The lyric is a standard love song about wanting someone present in all places and times, and McCartney sings it with enough warmth to sell the sentiment without tipping into schmaltz. It is beautifully made but unremarkable within the album's context, a reminder that the band could still write a flawless conventional pop song when it chose to.

A children's song sung by Ringo Starr, with sound effects and party vocals overdubbed in a session that included Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull, and assorted friends blowing bubbles and shouting in the background. The track was a single and a hit, and it serves no purpose on an album that includes tape loop collages and Indian classical music except to prove the Beatles could write a novelty song and have it be charming rather than insufferable. It is charming. It is also filler.

Lennon's account of a bad acid trip, inspired by a comment Peter Fonda made during a group LSD session in Los Angeles. The lyric describes a conversation about death and childhood with someone who does not understand what Lennon is trying to communicate, and the frustration comes through in the vocal, which is clipped and impatient. The guitar riff shifts between time signatures without announcing it, giving the track a stumbling, disoriented feel that matches the subject. McCartney walked out during the final session for this track after a disagreement, and the song was completed without him. It is solid mid-tier Lennon, more interesting for its backstory than for the song itself, though the guitar work is strong enough to carry it.

A music hall piano vamp with McCartney's vocal double-tracked and sped up slightly to give it a cheerful, cartoonish quality. George Martin plays the honky-tonk piano, and the track builds from a simple verse-chorus structure into a brief breakdown where the vocal harmony lifts the whole arrangement into a major-key celebration. It is two minutes long, completely unpretentious, and succeeds at exactly what it attempts. A palate cleanser.

A Lennon rocker with a dual guitar riff played in harmony by Harrison and McCartney, and not much else to distinguish it. The lyric is a dismissal of someone who thinks they have everything figured out, and Lennon sings it with a sneer, but the song has no hook strong enough to justify its inclusion on an album this ambitious. Well-played filler.

McCartney's miniature about the end of a relationship, sung with almost no emotion and accompanied by clavichord, bass and a French horn solo played by Alan Civil. The horn solo is given the space usually reserved for a guitar, and Civil plays it with a classical purity that makes the song feel like a chamber piece rather than a pop ballad. The lyric describes a woman who no longer cares and a man realizing he has no leverage left, and McCartney sings it like he is observing someone else's breakup from across the room. Two minutes, no wasted notes, perfect.

Lennon's song about a doctor who dispenses pills, widely understood to be about a New York physician who provided amphetamines and other substances to celebrities. The track has a strong bass line and a call-and-response harmony vocal, but the production is flat compared to the rest of the album and the song never develops past its central riff. It is the weakest Lennon contribution and feels like it was included to fill space rather than because it earned its spot.

Harrison's third composition, a song about the frustration of being unable to articulate what you are thinking, set to a dissonant piano part that plays a flattened note against the vocal melody. The tension is deliberate and effective, giving the track an uneasy quality that matches the lyric's theme of communication breakdown. The vocal is strained in places, as though Harrison is pushing his range, but the performance adds to the sense of someone struggling to express an idea they cannot quite reach. The best of the three Harrison tracks in terms of production, though the weakest in terms of melody.

McCartney's Motown homage, recorded with a six-piece horn section arranged by Martin and McCartney and compressed into a blare that sounds nothing like the smooth Detroit productions it references. The lyric is a love song that McCartney later said was about marijuana, though nothing in the words makes that reading necessary. The horns are so loud and so insistent that they function as the lead instrument, with the vocal and guitar pushed into a supporting role. The production is aggressive in a way that contemporary soul records were not, and the result is a hybrid that borrows a template and then reimagines it with rock studio techniques. The best example on the album of the band synthesizing influences rather than imitating them.

Lennon's vocal routed through a Leslie speaker, singing a lyric adapted from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, over a single-chord drone and a backing track constructed from tape loops that McCartney and the band prepared at home and mixed live across multiple tape machines. The loops include backward guitar, sped-up laughter, distorted orchestral recordings and seagull sounds, layered into a collage that shifts throughout the track. Ringo Starr's drumming is compressed and miked so closely that it sounds like a heartbeat, and the tambura drone, played by Harrison, runs underneath the entire arrangement. The production took more hours than any other track on the album, and the result is the most fully realized piece of studio experimentation the Beatles ever recorded. The song has no precedent in pop music and no real successors, because it exists at the intersection of Indian classical music, musique concrète, and rock in a way that cannot be replicated by imitation. It is more interesting than enjoyable, which is both its achievement and its limitation. Essential to understanding what the album represents, even if it is not the track you will return to most often.