One of the vague missions of this series is to examine and uplift the album tracks by artists who are maybe only respected for their singles and aren't considered to have any classic albums. But as the series has gone on and on for dozens of installments, I don't feel as compelled to avoid the canonical 'album artists' that I tried to sidestep early on. But The Beatles always seemed vaguely off-limits just because their music wasn't on Spotify or other streaming services and, for a while, seemed like they never would be. So when The Beatles catalog finally hit Spotify in December, it became irresistible to not dig into the riches of their catalog.

The Beatles Deep Album Cuts (Spotify playlist): 

1. Misery
2. It Won't Be Long
3. Don't Bother Me
4. I Call Your Name
5. Any Time At All
6. I'm A Loser
7. I've Just Seen A Face
8. Wait
9. You Won't See Me
10. If I Needed Someone
11. She Said She Said
12. And Your Bird Can Sing
13. Good Day Sunshine
14. Good Morning Good Morning
15. Fixing A Hole
16. She's Leaving Home
17. Within You Without You
18. Your Mother Should Know
19. Dear Prudence
20. Glass Onion
21. Savoy Truffle
22. Wild Honey Pie
23. Rocky Raccoon
24. Oh! Darling
25. You Never Give Me Your Money
26. I Want You (She's So Heavy)
27. Dig It
28. Two Of Us

Track 1 from Please Please Me (1963)
Tracks 2 and 3 from With The Beatles (1963)
Track 4 from Long Tall Sally EP (1964)
Track 5 from A Hard Day's Night (1964)
Track 6 from Beatles For Sale (1964)
Track 7 from Help! (1965)
Tracks 8, 9 and 10 from Rubber Soul (1965)
Tracks 11, 12 and 13 from Revolver (1966)
Tracks 14, 15, 16 and 17 from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
Track 18 from Magical Mystery Tour (1967)
Tracks 19, 20, 21, 22 and 23 from The Beatles (1968)
Tracks 24, 25 and 26 from Abbey Road (1969)
Tracks 27 and 28 from Let It Be (1970)

It's hard to call any song that appeared on any Beatles album "obscure," and a lot of songs that I would now consider their most famous works were never released as an A side on a single. So, as with some previous entries like Jay-Z, I kinda tried to avoid some of the album tracks that would probably be considered hits by any reasonable measure (and still, of course, there are some songs that you might consider to famous to be here, but it is what it is).

I grew up steeped in classic rock, but my '50s baby parents always had pretty '70s-heavy record collections, and I heard fairly little in the way of Beatles albums growing up, even if I obviously heard The Beatles about as much as can be expected in late 20th century America. What was nice about that is that in my late teens and twenties, I got to check out the albums on my own and kind of come into Beatles fandom and stop hearing them as pop culture wallpaper. The summer I was 19, I lived with a buddy who had The White Album on vinyl, and I remember putting on side A and just having my mind blown by "Dear Prudence" and "Glass Onion," just finally feeling excited about The Beatles in a way I hadn't been before, and that album remains one of my favorites of all time. So basically, these are mostly songs that won me over as a Beatles agnostic, and these are songs that I would play to try and shake a Beatles agnostic out of their indifference to the band.

I tend to look at Lennon/McCartney as one of the greatest songwriting teams ever instead of getting too caught up in taking sides or building one of them up to tear the other down. That said, I have little use for the way Lennon has been posthumously romanticized and think of him as a huge asshole whose post-Beatles work is a lot weaker than McCartney's. Within the Beatles, though, I think they were well matched talents and Lennon wrote a lot of brilliant songs. So while I picked songs for this without too much of a thought to who wrote what, I ended up with a little more John than Paul, particularly on the early albums. And of course there's a lot of George Harrison, who, aside from "Something," was pretty much always consigned to deep cuts -- here, I included "Don't Bother Me," "If I Needed Someone," "Within You Without You," and "Savoy Truffle" (things like "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Here Comes The Sun" were in that category of album tracks that felt too famous to include here).

Previous playlists in the Deep Album Cuts series:
Vol. 1: Brandy
Vol. 2: Whitney Houston
Vol. 3: Madonna
Vol. 4: My Chemical Romance
Vol. 5: Brad Paisley
Vol. 6: George Jones
Vol. 7: The Doors
Vol. 8: Jay-Z
Vol. 9: Robin Thicke
Vol. 10: R. Kelly
Vol. 11: Fall Out Boy
Vol. 12: TLC
Vol. 13: Pink
Vol. 14: Queen
Vol. 15: Steely Dan
Vol. 16: Trick Daddy
Vol. 17: Paramore
Vol. 18: Elton John
Vol. 19: Missy Elliott
Vol. 20: Mariah Carey
Vol. 21: The Pretenders
Vol. 22: "Weird Al" Yankovic
Vol. 23: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Vol. 24: Foo Fighters
Vol. 25: Counting Crows
Vol. 26: T.I.
Vol. 27: Jackson Browne
Vol. 28: Usher
Vol. 29: Mary J. Blige
Vol. 30: The Black Crowes
Vol. 31: Ne-Yo
Vol. 32: Blink-182
Vol. 33: One Direction
Vol. 34: Kelly Clarkson
Vol. 35: The B-52's
Vol. 36: Ludacris
Vol. 37: They Might Be Giants
Vol. 38: T-Pain
Vol. 39: Snoop Dogg
Vol. 40: Ciara
Vol. 41: Creedence Clearwater Revival
Vol. 42: Dwight Yoakam
Vol. 43: Demi Lovato
Vol. 44: Prince
Vol. 45: Duran Duran
Vol. 46: Rihanna
Vol. 47: Janet Jackson
Vol. 48: Sara Bareilles
Vol. 49: Motley Crue
Vol. 50: The Who
Vol. 51: Coldplay
Vol. 52: Alicia Keys
Vol. 53: Stone Temple Pilots
Vol. 54: David Bowie
Vol. 55: The Eagles

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10, 2016 at 11:22 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.