Having been a lifelong fan, I belatedly woke up to the fact that we’re in a running series of 50th anniversaries, and that Ringo and Paul are getting a little older.
I’ve been going back through the catalogue, and the re-issued and re-mastered stuff (eg the new Sgt Peppers) - I’m still stunned by how varied, great, and entertaining they are.
My faves are the latter albums. But I’m having a little bit of a time deciding which is my all out fave.
I know I should say Revolver, but there are so many songs it doesn’t have that I love!
It’s hard to pick a favorite – and it tends to ebb and flow, but an easy go-to would have to be Magical Mystery Tour LP (which I realize is kind of cheating since it’s more of an anthology than anything).
For true albums, Abbey Road would come out on top most days for many reasons:
Every single track is great (as wonderful as the White Album is, it has its fair share of garbage as well)
It was recorded later than Let it Be, but it didn’t have the same taint of that album. Their performances showed that they were enjoying themselves and actually wanted to be in the studio together.
Technologically it was leaps and bounds above their earlier albums with their use of eight-tracks, Moog synths, solid state mixers, and actual stereo sound.
To be fair, my opinions on this have changed over the years, but that’s one of the great things about their music. It can speak to you differently as you change and evolve, the same way the group did.
I think every album’s got its highs and lows, and I certainly wouldn’t call any of them perfect, but they’re always worth going back to.
I love the Beatles, but I’ve never been one to care too much for entire albums. I’ll listen to a particular Beatles track, of which I have 639 (not counting post-breakup solo stuff), or make a Beatles-heavy playlist. Still, if I was forced to choose, probably Abbey Road.
Digital. I do have Yellow Submarine on vinyl. But I gave away and donated all my CDs over a decade ago after carefully (using the LAME encoder via foobar2000) encoding everything into FLACs and 256 kbps MP3s (except my SACDs which were also turned into ISOs). That included all my own Beatles albums as well as a good friend’s Beatles Box Set with the complete official recordings (which account for about half my Beatles collection). In total my music library has over 8,000 albums (not counting my very limited vinyl collection which is a mere hundred or so LPs), roughly 3,000 of which came from my own CDs.
I’m kind of a music nerd. And yes, it’s all backed up twice over, with one copy several thousand miles away.
I didn’t actually know how many I had until I checked my library to comment in this thread. That hadn’t occurred to me.
Decades later, the 2012 remastered Magical Mystery Tour DVD entered the Billboard Top Music Video chart at number 1, while the CD album climbed to number 1 on the Billboard Catalog Album Chart, number 2 on the Billboard Soundtrack albums chart, and re-entered at number 57 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for the week ending 27 October 2012.[14] Magical Mystery Tour - Wikipedia
Seriously. Who else does anything vaguely similar?!
