It’s funny, because I didn’t foresee this back when I made the first poll, but what we have now is an “album” of sorts. It’s like a sampling of the best songs from a wide range of time - if you were to just vote on all the Beatles songs at once, the top few would probably be mainly later songs. This way, there’s a “representative” of many phases. Anyway . . .
Brandishes large pair of scissors and dramatically cuts red ribbon
This breaks my brain. It’s too hard to vote. However, I snuck a peak at the current tally and am pleased to see Strawberry Fields ahead 3 votes to nothing for any of the others.
I don’t see a very hard choice at all here. The hard choices have already been made (with lots of songs better than many of those on this list having been eliminated). The competition here is between “A Day in the Life” and “Strawberry Fields,” and just maybe “Eleanor Rigby” or (for some people, but not really for me) “Yesterday”. I am going for “A Day in the Life” (as I knew I would at the start of the whole exercise). As compared to “Strawberry Fields”, Lennon’s vocal seems more poignant here, we have the exquisite contrast between Lennon’s heartfelt rendition of an absurdist lyric and McCartney’s matter-of-fact and literal evocation of the mundane, and the production (especially at the end) that goes so far over the top that it becomes tasteful again (George Martin showing Phil Spector how it is really done).
“Strawberry Fields” may be John’s masterpiece, “Eleanor Rigby” (or maybe “Penny Lane”, not on this list) may be Paul’s, but “A Day in the Life” was The Beatles’ masterpiece.
I feel pretty much the same way. For me, from this list, the choice is actually between “A Day In The Life” and “Eight Days A Week” as they represent newer-era Beatles versus old and they both to me represent a more total Beatles experience rather than as you mention, say, “Strawberry Fields” being all John or “Eleanor Rigby” being all Paul (more or less). Still haven’t voted though!
I’ve gotta go with In My Life. It’s a great song, with lots of personal memories of the time in which it came out.
I still say this is not an accurate way to find the best songs. It’d be accurate for the #1 winner, but not for others. For example: Hey Jude and All You Need Is Love should be on this list.
It’s a tie between Eleanor Rigby and While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
I’ll go with the former because I think that I’ve known and loved it since I was a child whereas the latter is a more “recent” discovery (20 years ago probably).
Because the list is in chronological order, the responses are producing an interesting curve. It seems there were two peaks: a big one from about mid-1966 to late 1967, and a smaller one in 1969. I’ll let a more mathematically inclined Doper come up with the polynomial function, standard deviation, etc.
ETA: Note that “Strawberry” and “A Day” are in incorrect order, due to the former’s inclusion in the later “Magical…” products.
I think what you are seeing is Lennon/McCartney peaking, followed by Harrison peaking. (The appearance of a second peak is almost entirely due to “Here Comes the Sun”.) In fact, throughout their career, George was always a couple of albums behind John and Paul in songwriting “style”, that is, his songs sound like what they were doing back then. It is actually more noticeable in his earlier songs I think. “I Need You” and especially “You Like Me Too Much”, both on the Help! LP, sound so much like they belong on A Hard Day’s Night. (That is not a put-down of the songs, A Hard Day’s Night is, in my opinion, a better album than Help!).
