Rubber Soul {1965} track review

Cafe Society
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Side One

Drive my Car: Solid song, but nothing special. Still has an older Beatles sound to it.

Norwegian Wood (This Bird has Flown): Holy crap this is beautiful and masterful piece. I’m not sure what the influences were on this song. George shows off his Sitar playing. Maybe this was just something new.

You Won’t See Me: Excellent if fairly standard song of the time. The Hammond Organ sounds excellent on it.

Nowhere Man: Musically pedestrian but I love the wordplay in the lyrics and the harmonies.

Think for Yourself: A Harrison song and one without a lot of radio play. Not a standard sounding Beatles song and maybe their first one where Love isn’t great.

The Word: This one is a little funky and a little psychedelic. I love the Bass on this one.

Michelle: A great Beatle Ballad. The songs is a little silly and yet perfect.

Side Two

What Goes On: A Vocal lead for Ringo and his first songwriting credit. Kind of country sounding isn’t it? Unless I’m listening to the album, I never hear this one.

Girl: There is some sort of throw back sound to this song and almost in the background a Greek rhythm. And then when the lyrics pause it comes to front.

I’m Looking Through You: The sound of the Beatles the Monkeys emulated. Not a great song. But a not great Beatles song is still pretty good.

In My Life: Amazing this album could one up Norwegian Wood but this is a song that gives me chills it is so powerful. The Lennon’s lyrics are pure poetry. As I am getting older now, and have lost friends and family this song means even more to me.

Wait: This one is fairly generic. Absolutely a more dated sound.

If I Needed Someone: Another Monkeyish song, but better than any Monkey song. I think this is forgotten classic. The Bangles clearly liked the string work on this one.

Run for Your Life: Kind of a weird finish to the outstanding album. I think it is a bit of an Elvis tribute.

So this and Revolver were my first Beatles albums and nearly my first albums. I bought it as my older Brother and Sisters had Sgt Peppers, The White Album, Let It Be and Abbey Road.

Some prior related threads: Best of the Beatles: Rubber Soul & What's the best song off of "Rubber Soul"?

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I agree, it’s a great tune, and was George’s tribute to the Byrds, especially Roger McGuinn’s “jingle jangle” guitar style. George freely admitted that he took the guitar lick from “The Bells of Rhymney.” You can read the whole story here: “If I Needed Someone” by The Beatles. The in-depth story behind the songs of the Beatles. Recording History. Songwriting History. Song Structure and Style. (beatlesebooks.com)

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“In My Life” is one of my favorite Beatles songs, and favorite songs period.

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Rubber Soul is like a greatest hits album. For almost any other band this would be a entire career’s-worth of wonderful songs.

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Nitpick: Monkees, not Monkeys.

The U.S. release only had twelve tracks, dropping “Drive My Car”, “Nowhere Man”, “What Goes On” and “If I Needed Someone,” but substituting “I’ve Just Seen A Face” and “It’s Only Love.”

In hindsight that’s a bizarre decision. “Nowhere Man” and “If I Needed Someone” are all-time classics. “Nowhere Man” was released as a U.S. but not British single and was played incessantly in 1966, which may skew my memories.

“If I Needed Someone” is the first truly great George track. I don’t get what you mean by saying that it is a Monkeyish [sic] song. While the Monkees at first were given songs that copied the Beatles’ ambiance, this would never occur to me to be one of them. Could you expand?

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Just that both the Monkees and Bangles had song(s) where I can hear the influence of this song.

Not a deep analysis, just as I listened to each track, my impressions or thoughts.

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It’s rumored that Bob Dylan wrote the suspiciously similar-sounding 4th Time Around as a response to Norwegian Wood - with the final lines a veiled jab at the Beatles for copying his style:

And I, I never took much, I never asked for your crutch
Now don’t ask for mine

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Needs more cowbell.

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I never could hear similarities between 4th Time Around and Norwegian Wood, no matter how often people told me so. Two entirely different songs, to my ear.

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This is an album worth listening to straight through, in order. There’s something interesting about every song.

The worst is “Run for Your Life”. The misogyny is absolutely terrifying. John Lennon was artistically brilliant, but had serious problems.

My favorite is “The Word” with its not-well-hidden Christian message. Along with “All You Need Is Love”, “Imagine”, and “My Sweet Lord” is one of the favorite sing-along.

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Run for Your Life…always leave that off my play lists. It’s not as bad as Mr Moonlight or Mxwell’s Silver Hammer, but still in the top 10 of losers.

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I’m going to disagree with you on this one. I don’t hear an “older Beatles sound”; I think it sounds relatively fresh and modern for its time. And I mentally put it in the same category as “Day Tripper,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” and “Hey Bulldog”: songs that are admittedly somewhat silly, but still very catchy and fun and I can rock out to.

Of course, Capitol Records butchered—I mean, released their own, different versions of all the pre-Sgt. Pepper’s Beatles albums in the U.S. Since those were the only ones that were readily available here prior to the early-90s CD releases, they were the versions that I and many others got to know when we first got into the Beatles. U.S. listeners got pretty much all the same songs, just divided up into albums differently.

The U.S. version of Rubber Soul is folkier, and I’ve seen the opinion that it’s actually a better, more cohesive album than the U.K. version (an opinion which I see some merit in, even though I don’t share it).

“Run For Your Life” is not a great song by any means, but I don’t have the problem with it that many people do, maybe because I can separate a song’s viewpoint character from the person who wrote and/or sang it. I think the song’s supposed to be terrifying, and I enjoy the menace that John puts into the vocal.

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I think the bass is the signature instrument for the whole album. Martin and his engineers finally realized Paul was one of the top bass players in Rock music in 1965 and really brought it forward in the mixes for Rubber Soul.

Elvis-adjacent Nancy Sinatra did a really interesting cover of the song that puts it in a much more palatable context and is, IMO, a better version than the Beatles vocally and instrumentally.

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Try working all the parts out, if you are a musician. It’s actually a very ingenious song. Might have been one of the last where John and Paul were really working together.

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Sure, she sings it from a woman’s perspective. That makes a gigantic difference. A man telling a “little girl” that he’d rather see her dead compares in no way to a woman talking about a “little boy” or “baby boy” as Sinatra does. The former is a threat, the latter just a put-down.

Lennon was more of a monster than anyone in the 60s understood.

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Well Lennon was a deeply flawed individual (in other words, an asshole). But…

Don’t read too much into RFYL. There is a long tradition of this type of song “Murder Ballad”. And the Beatle song, and the song it was based upon “Baby Let’s Play House” were covered by many artists. So he wasn’t alone. Unfortunately, a product of the times.