1966@50: Tomorrow DID Know
I had assumed that there was a longer lead time between the recording of a record and its release, and that the 1966 songs were penned in 1965, but The Beatles wrote, recorded and released a total of 19 songs in 1966, that were included on Yesterday and Today, Revolver, Yellow Submarine and Abbey Road--most of that attributed to the fact that the technology was still simple, with much fewer options to complicate the process.
Here are the songs that were in the pipeline in 1966, 10 in April alone:
Tomorrow Never Knows (4/6/66)
Got To Get You Into My Life
Love You To
Paperback Writer
Rain
Doctor Robert
And Your Bird Can Sing
Taxman
I'm Only Sleeping
Eleanor Rigby
May-December:
For No One
Yellow Submarine
I Want to Tell You
Good Day Sunshine
Here There and Everywhere
She Said She Said
Strawberry Fields
When I'm Sixty-Four
Penny Lane
It's interesting that the "lysergic" "Tomorrow Never Knows" (recorded 50 years ago today, and almost defined the 60s) was the first track they worked on in the studio and ended up as the last track on Side 2 of Revolver. Just a few months earlier in November 1965, they were working on the breathy "Girl" and "Michelle". They were still using the old-hat method of basing a chorus idea on a song title, a common practice in the Tin Pan Alley days. They did it to an almost absurd degree on "Michelle" ("Me-shell", the only way to sing it, paired with Moon-June rhyming and bastardized French.) Most of the songs were ditty-length, all under 3:00, with Eleanor Rigby, deceivingly (yet elegantly) short.
***
Source: The wonderful "Revolution in the Head" by Ian McDonald
Here are the songs that were in the pipeline in 1966, 10 in April alone:
Tomorrow Never Knows (4/6/66)
Got To Get You Into My Life
Love You To
Paperback Writer
Rain
Doctor Robert
And Your Bird Can Sing
Taxman
I'm Only Sleeping
Eleanor Rigby
May-December:
For No One
Yellow Submarine
I Want to Tell You
Good Day Sunshine
Here There and Everywhere
She Said She Said
Strawberry Fields
When I'm Sixty-Four
Penny Lane
It's interesting that the "lysergic" "Tomorrow Never Knows" (recorded 50 years ago today, and almost defined the 60s) was the first track they worked on in the studio and ended up as the last track on Side 2 of Revolver. Just a few months earlier in November 1965, they were working on the breathy "Girl" and "Michelle". They were still using the old-hat method of basing a chorus idea on a song title, a common practice in the Tin Pan Alley days. They did it to an almost absurd degree on "Michelle" ("Me-shell", the only way to sing it, paired with Moon-June rhyming and bastardized French.) Most of the songs were ditty-length, all under 3:00, with Eleanor Rigby, deceivingly (yet elegantly) short.
***
Source: The wonderful "Revolution in the Head" by Ian McDonald
