Ranking all the albums of the Beatles from worst to best

11. Help! (1965)

Help! was the Beatles’ second feature film and fifth UK album release. By this point, the band had cut way back on the covers (there are only two of them), and was digging into more complex subjects than the early love swooners. The title track kicks things off immediately, commenting directly on the pitfalls of success.

Both lyrically and musically, the band was beginning to go through massive growth. “The Night Before” and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” are first-rate songs about heartbreak, the former showing off Paul’s lovely pop sensibilities, while the latter getting at John’s particular brand of pop cynicism.

The rest of the album is filled with an equal balance of high-energy rock (“Ticket to Ride, “ “I’ve Just Seen a Face”) and sentiment, climaxing with Paul’s towering “Yesterday,” which features Paul alone backed by a string quartet. The Beatles may not have been the first rock band to play with classical arrangements and instrumentation. But they were the ones who proved that doing so could result in a massive pop hit.

Best Tracks: “Help!,” “Ticket to Ride,” “Yesterday”

10. Hey Jude (1970, US release; 1979, UK release)

OK, I’m going to pause for a moment to allow all the purists to curse me and then maybe calm down a bit. Hey Jude is not exactly a lauded album in the discography of the Beatles. As a coherent album, it is a mess. It is in fact, a compilation, and I said I wasn’t considering compilations. But this is a somewhat different kind of compilation.

The Beatles released a lot of very popular songs as singles in the UK, and some of those songs did not make it onto albums in the American market. So when new pseudo-manager Allen Klein (boo, hiss) worked out a new contract for the band, one of his first ideas was to package a bunch of those singles onto an album and make a boatload of money on old hits.

The album was to be called The Beatles Again, but the name was changed at the last minute to get an extra bump from the popular title track. That resulted in some labelling snafus and you can still find the original name on some of the vinyl labels. The first two songs were actually already on an original UK album from 1964, but the others were a bit more recent and not available on albums in the US at the time. It has the hard-rock version of “Revolution,” George’s slinky “Old Brown Shoe,” and Ringo’s best drumming on “Rain,” in addition to the title track.

Despite the obvious cash grab, many of the songs got appropriate stereo remixes for the release. It’s a bit of a mishmash, and I don’t know a single Beatles expert who doesn’t lament the exclusion of George’s  “The Inner Light” which would have been a much better fit than “I Should Have Known Better.” But it is still a remarkable collection of songs.

Best Tracks: “Rain,” Revolution,” “Hey Jude”