12 STORIES
1965 · 60S
LONDON, UK
It sounds like a wistful folk reverie about a girl and a cosy wooden room, but "Norwegian Wood" is John Lennon's deliberately coded confessi…
1965 · 60S
LONDON, UK
The most covered song in recorded history is usually heard as a breakup ballad, but its lyric never says who left, or why — and many listene…
1966 · 60S
LIVERPOOL, UK
The most famous song The Beatles ever wrote about loneliness contains no Beatles playing instruments at all — just a double string quartet s…
1967 · 60S
LONDON, UK
The closing track of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is less a song than a controlled collision of two pop fragments, a forty-piece or…
1967 · 60S
A track that crystallized the psychedelic imagination of 1967 even as its authors insisted it was nothing of the sort. Born from a child's d…
1967 · 60S
LIVERPOOL, UK
A hallucinatory dispatch from John Lennon's Liverpool childhood, "Strawberry Fields Forever" turned a Salvation Army orphanage garden into a…
1968 · 60S
: Written by Paul McCartney as a private consolation for John Lennon's young son Julian during his parents' divorce, "Hey Jude" became the l…
1968 · 60S
LONDON, UK
The most emotionally weighted guitar song in the Beatles' catalogue began as a writing exercise built on a phrase George Harrison found by o…
1969 · 60S
A swampy, slurred incantation that opens the last album The Beatles ever recorded together, "Come Together" began life as a campaign jingle …
1969 · 60S
EWHURST, SURREY, UK
The sunniest song in the Beatles' catalogue is really a truant's song: George Harrison wrote it in Eric Clapton's Surrey garden on a spring …
1969 · 60S
ABBEY ROAD STUDIOS, LONDON, UK
The most covered love song the Beatles ever recorded opens with a line George Harrison borrowed from someone else as a placeholder, was writ…
1970 · 70S
LONDON, UK
The world hears a hymn, but Paul McCartney wrote it after dreaming about his mother Mary, who had died of cancer when he was fourteen. The m…