The Beatles' 5 Most Underrated Songs

As the biggest band in pop and rock music history, The Beatles have been the subject of countless hours and column inches dedicated to discussing their greatest songs, albums, and even movies and post-group releases. But alongside their array of chart-topping hits, the band’s output was so great that their complete catalogue contains several hundred less well-known, but no less impactful and meaningful, tracks.

Over the years, critics and fans alike have thrown forward dozens of these underrated songs as their favorites—five choice examples of which are listed here.

“THE WORD”
“SHE’S LEAVING HOME”
“I’LL FOLLOW THE SUN”
“THE END”
“YOU KNOW MY NAME (LOOK UP THE NUMBER)”

“THE WORD”

Track six on the Beatles’ sixth album Rubber Soul, John Lennon’s “The Word” marks a turning point between the band’s earlier pop and rock sound and a shift towards a more experimental, psychedelic sound and more expressionistic lyrics. Here, they write about love in an overtly philosophical way for the first time.

According to Paul McCartney, that shift in “The Word” was at least in part due to the band’s use of marijuana during the songwriting process here—but there was a musical driving force behind this track too, besides a psychoactive one. As McCartney also later explained, the band was keen to write a song using a melody based around a single repeated note, “like [Little Richard’s] Long Tall Sally,” adding that “We got near it with ‘The Word.’”
“SHE’S LEAVING HOME”

Released on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, “She’s Leaving Home” showcases a band willing to experiment with both their sound, their lyrics, their arrangements, and their storytelling. Co-written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, the three-and-a-half-minute song—which tells the story of a young girl who runs away from her stifling family home, leaving her parents devastated—is one of only a few in the band’s catalogue in which none of the members plays a single instrument: instead, the backing is entirely performed by a string section.

Source: mentalfloss.com/Paul Anthony Jones

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