7. Magical Mystery Tour (1967, US release)
The film Magical Mystery Tour was a negligible movie. The album that resulted from it contains some of the Beatles' greatest individual songs. The tricky thing about ranking it comes from its status as both an original album and a compilation.
Here, we are just talking about the American release. Along with the already-discussed Hey Jude, this is the only time I will be ranking an American release. There was a UK release of Magical Mystery Tour, but it was a double EP. It had six songs and ran a total of 20 minutes.
One of those six songs is the forgettable instrumental “Flying.” Another is the sweet, redundant “Your Mother Should Know.” And a third is George’s moody “Blue Jay Way,” which I think is far better than its reputation would have you believe. Still, that’s three songs that don’t score particularly high in Beatles lore.
The other three songs – the title track, and the twin poles of John’s “I Am the Walrus” and Paul’s “Fool on the Hill,” are magnificent. As an EP, it’s uneven but has enough quality to score well. Then you flip the American full LP over and you get five more singles, ranging from the fairly good “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” and “Hello, Goodbye” (again John and Paul mirroring each other right down to sticking commas in the titles) to the mountaintop with “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.”
There are plenty of song rankings that consider those two songs – originally released as a double-sided single – to be John’s and Paul’s best songs ever. As with Hey Jude, the American album release of Magical Mystery Tour is a bit of a mess, and many audiophiles complain about some lazy mixing, but its heights remain extraordinary.
Best Tracks: “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane,” “I Am the Walrus”
6. Abbey Road (1969)
Though it was not the final album released by the Beatles before their dissolution, this was their artistic swansong. Most of Let It Be was written and recorded prior to Abbey Road. The band had gone through massive experimentation and growth in the years before calling it quits, and on their last few albums, they returned to a more simplified style of production.
The slinky “Come Together” which opens Abbey Road, shows a band fully in control of its sound. It doesn’t need to show off with lots of bells and whistles. It just has to fall back on a brilliant song cycle. That collection is abetted by two of George’s loveliest songs, “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun,” and Ringo’s gloriously childlike “Octopus’s Garden,” (which Ringo has said he wants to be played at this funeral).
And then, just after the spacy “Because” on side two, we get one of the most ambitious creations the Beatles attempted – the eight-song Abbey Road Medley that cycles through a series of musical fragments and ideas and somehow manages to seem unified. It begins with “You Never Give Your Money” and it ends with “The End.” Then, like the cherry on top, we get Paul singing the absurdly sweet 25-second “Her Majesty.”
Best Tracks: “Come Together,” Octopus’s Garden,” “Abbey Road Medley”