Shameless plug: My Blog post on the 50th Anniversary of A Hard Day’s Night, including my Top 10 favorite Beatles songs (interestingly, none of them from my fave Beatles album Revolver)
It’s really hard to choose, I guess I’d say “I’ve Got a Feeling” (skip to 7:20). I like the rooftop concert performance. The Beatles are weary and strained and about broken up, but still in great form. It has an edginess to it, but also has vocal harmonies just like their early songs.
Second favorite: “You’ve Got My Name(Look Up The Number)”.
Cool - thanks for doing that. Yeah, I understand major vs minor of course, but the theory behind where and when they can be used, and where the shouldn’t be mixed, is not stuff I can explain well. Heck, I play the super-easy chords for The Yardbirds’ For Your Love and still marvel at how little changes make that riff work. E to Em to A to Am (or Am7). So cool.
There’s 12 different chords in “I’ll Be Back”!
[side discussion]
Isn’t it Em to G to A to Am? That’s a song where the final chord is Em, but, if you wanted to, you can throw in a Picardy third E major a la “Happy Together” to end it to mix it up. Might be a little cheesy, though.
At any rate, off the top of my head, the IV chord is probably the most likely chord where you’ll see both the major and minor being used in the same song. A common early rock and roll bridge could be something like A-Am-E-B7 (in the key of E) Think of it in a Fats Domino “Blueberry Hill” 12/8 kind of beat. You also hear it in Radiohead’s “Creep” in the lyrics “You’re just like an angel/Your skin makes me cry” where it goes from IV to iv. (Or in the song they borrowed from, the Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe” in the line “Can’t Think of Anything I Need.” In both cases, it’s IV-iv-I). I know there’s a slew of other examples, but those are the ones that come to my head. I can’t remember the exact theory behind it, something to do with a borrowed chord from the parallel minor, but whatever. It sounds good.
And then we have the Picardy third, already mentioned, which is with the tonic (I) chord, and is used at the end of a musical section or song.
[/side discussion]
Duh - sorry I blew that :smack: that’s what I get for trying to think about it. I have this riff I’m with raking that goes A E Em D and conflated them.
I just never think about how I switch between majors and minors - just like I don’t know what jazzy, funky, whatever chords I play. There are 7ths and flatted stuff - sigh.
Nice, pulykamell. Sometimes the “Picardy third” refers to when most of the song uses the minor, but then ENDS (cadence) on the same-root (“parallel”) major. Like in…The Beatles’ “And I Love Her,” recorded just a couple months before “I’ll Be Back,” and with a similar acoustic-guitar riff.
WordMan, I think you’re right that iv and IV are often found in the same song. I should have been more specific – what makes “I’ll Be Back,” “Aqualung,” and (on the last note) “And I Love Her” stand out is that they use both i and I.
Also “Things We Said Today,” also from 1964. The chicks start screaming* at the start of the “middle eight” (bridge) in part because of that tangy parallel major chord.
*in the Hollywood Bowl recording
Yes. That’s how it’s usually used. If it wasn’t clearly expressed the way I said it and with the “Happy Together” example, that’s what I was saying. It shows up in Catholic mass stuff a lot, where everything is in the natural minor/Aeolian mode, and when the psalm or whatever singing part is finally over, it resolves into the parallel major tonic to signify the finality.
Good lord - my cat’s breath smells like cat food. 
I’m not a big Beatles fan, but I really dig “Get Back” and “I’ve Got a Feeling”.
I appreciate the side conversation here, because it reafirms my my belief that The Beatles wrote some sophisticated music.
Not to mention the vocal harmonization, which was incredibly good.
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Oh, come on. I know you can follow that! Play a bunch of shit in A minor, then end on A major to signal the end of the song. 
That’s part of what I love about that song (and I mentioned it early in this thread.) It’s got this cool, vamping, mysterious sounding verse in a minor key, and then it resolves into a contrasting rocking middle 8 with “normal” blues-rock seventh chords. But my favorite part that always gives me chills is that little chromatic melody run that goes “Someday when I’m lonely,” with the chords underneath going C to C9.
And they use the Neapolitan chord in an unusual way… in TWST it’s a Bb chord leading back to a minor with no dominant chord in between.
It’s All Too Much
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x439u1g
pulykamell, right on. Just this evening I saw the great recent animated film Sing, a favorite of my 7-year-old, and was reminded of how Elton John’s song “I’m Still Standing” features yet another variantion on the parallel major/minor theme: the verses are in C Major, while the choruses are in c minor. I hear it as a full-fledged key modulation, not just a different chord or set of chords.
Okay, back to everyone’s favorite Beatles songs! Yes, they were very sophisticated, and not just with the later stuff. All the more impressive that they were essentially untrained, and couldn’t read music. Didn’t George quip, when a reporter in 1964 mentioned how some classical critic was impressed with their Mixolydian coloring or whatever, that “yeah, our doctor is taking a look at that,” (paraphrasing), as if it were some physical malady… 
I find picking a favorite Beatles song a difficult task. There are soooo many good songs.
The song I’m most likely to play repeatedly is Paperback Writer followed by Eleanor Rigby.
Ya know, I never noticed that. I mean, I noticed that it was a Bb going into an Am, but I never thought of it in classical terms like that. A major flat II chord going to the minor I doesn’t seem all that unusual to me. I know I’ve encountered it in some kind of bII-i vamp kind of thing, but I can’t quite remember where. Probably some types of modal pieces (phrygian being the obvious one) or maybe some kind of Balkan or Spanish or Middle Eastern kind of thing. I’m not sure.