Welcome to Track Chatter, where we choose a different song
to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we
reconsider songs by The Beatles. Can anything new be said about this band or
its music? Have a look below and let us know what you think.
Aaron: As is well
known by even most casual Beatles’ fans, Abbey
Road is actually the last album the band recorded, although its release was
followed by the (mostly) previously recorded Let It Be in 1970. As this project is considering songs from album
to album, we’ll stick to release dates rather than recording dates and consider
an Abbey Road track first. However,
it’s worth mentioning the recording order if only because it was during the
recording of Let It Be that the band
reached their nadir as a functioning unit and almost broke up on several
occasions (potentially denying us Abbey
Road). The irony of the situation is that Let It Be was supposed to see the band regrouping after the
fractured recording experience of The
White Album – a back-to-basics affair via which the lads would recapture
the joy of recording and just plain rocking out. As we’ll likely discuss in our
entry on Let It Be, that’s not what
happened. The sessions were caustic, the production was a shambles, and the
music was shelved. Abbey Road instead
became the back-to-basics album that the band was after. George Martin, after
something of a hiatus during the Let It
Be sessions, only agreed to return if he could be in charge, to which the
band was happy to acquiesce. And while the entirety of the recording stretched
out between January and September of 1969, most of the album was recorded
during the month of July, with Martin and longtime engineer Geoff Emerick at
the helm and the band mostly working together again like they rarely had in
years.
The process proved fruitful and Abbey Road is generally considered one of the band’s best overall
albums. It manages to capture the sounds and vibes of the late ‘60s rock scene
while remaining undeniably a record by The Beatles. Side One is practically a
late-era Beatles’ hit parade with tracks like “Come Together,” “Something,” and
“Oh! Darling,” whereas Side Two consists mainly of the famous and famously
experimental medley – eight songs spread out over sixteen minutes, all
seamlessly interwoven (in part by some of McCartney’s most free-wheeling and .
. . imaginative bass playing). And then comes one of rock’s first “hidden
tracks,” as “Her Majesty” followed fourteen seconds of silence and was not
originally listed on the US or UK albums or album sleeves.
Choosing a track from amongst all this that would qualify as
“lesser known” proved pretty much impossible, so we decided to follow that path
that we took with Help! and pick what
is perhaps the best-known track on the album, and one of the best known from
amongst the band’s entire catalogue, George Harrison’s “Something.” It’s the
song that Frank Sinatra famously called the “best love song ever written.”
In Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald
calls it the “acme” of George Harrison’s career as a songwriter and claims of
the song, “if McCartney wasn’t jealous, he should have been.”
There’s a lot to unpack there, Lew, so I’ll just toss out a
few general questions and you can tackle them (or not) in any way you want. Is
“Something” such a great song? It’s the second most recorded Beatles’ song
after “Yesterday” – does that tell us anything about its place in the band’s
canon (or even in Harrison’s canon)? And, to return to a question we’ve revisited
throughout the series, does it hold up?
