Over this post and the last, Matt Blick and I are debating the motion that ‘The Beatles are the best artists for any songwriter to study’.
Here is his response to my argument, and my reply. Please feel free to Leave your own Thoughts in the comments.
“Matt Blick, [www.twitter.com/realmattblick] a songwriter/singer from Nottingham, UK, is finding out what happens when you write every day for a year and sharing the results at Matt Blick.com. He’s also blogging through the complete Beatles catalogue at Beatles Songwriting Academy. He can leap tall genres in a single bound and enjoys danger, mystery and writing about himself in the third person.”
For:
I would agree with you that The Beach Boys would be an excellent source of study for a songwriter. Ironically though, Brian Wilson would agree with ME that studying the Beatles is more worthwhile, because that’s exactly what he did! Some of his greatest works were written in direct response to Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt Pepper.
The Beach Boys are less useful for study because Wilson never reached his potential. We can learn from him what happens when a genius is surrounded by less gifted, unimaginative and unsympathetic bandmates and brutal exploitative management. Wilson created his best work with hired gun session musicians and outside lyricists, making it harder to track any development of ideas, and the Beach Boys continue working with and without Wilson to this day, so the sheer amount of dross you have to wade through makes studying them much harder.
I’ll grant that George Martin taught them about arrangement and contributed some fantastic ideas – the guitar solo to Michelle, the intros to Can’t Buy Me Love and Help, not to mention all the great orchestration. But they learned well and many more innovative ideas came from the bands, whether through ignorance (the Strawberry Fields mashup) or design (A Day In The Life’s orchestral freak out).
Some of your points are just.
Twee? John Lennon would agree with you on ‘granny music’ like Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, When I’m 64 etc. But that is an inevitable offshoot of pushing out into every genre. There’s nothing twee about Yer Blues or Taxman. And yet they are instantly recognisable as the work of the same band. So there’s massive lesson to learn about maintaining your voice while stretching out side of your musical comfort zones.
And lyrics? Guilty as charged.
Beatles lyrics are frequently sloppy, mostly trite, sometimes criminally bad (see my Lyrical Hall of Shame for further details) and only rarely brilliant.
Though they did have strong convictions (refusing to play segregated gigs in the US) they seem almost allergic to making any clear political statements (Lennon’s “count me in/out” wavering on Revolution/Revolution 1). If you want to look solely at lyrics there are hundreds of better artists to check out.
However, even a fairly articulate writer with strong convictions can still learn a lot from the Beatles as lyricists. Great songwriting occurs not just in lyrics and music but at the point they intersect. The Beatles skill at making trite lyrics seem profound (The love you make is equal to the love you take?) is more than a happy byproduct of sticking them onto a good tune. It’s to do with marrying the right vowel sounds to the right point in the melody and finding words that ‘sing’. For anyone labouring under the illusion that you can turn political/spiritual/emotional truth into art simply by singing it, the Beatles would be an excellent point of study.
The Beatles have so much to teach us about making lyrics memorable. Many songwriters today are trying to create catchy songs with only one tool in their box – sheer repetition. From the earliest point in their career the Beatles were writing lyrics that got stuck in your head, using indirect repetition and expertly placed titles.
I agree that there is something incredibly sad about the Beatles obsession and we shouldn’t try to sound like the Beatles. Beatles worship put me off studying them for a long time; but I’ve found the best antidote to both indoctrination and indifference is to study the music for myself.
-Matt Blick
Against:
Nah, I don’t buy that there are any lyrics by the Beatles that reach profundity – not that I think profundity is particularly important to lyric writing. I’ve never heard anything by them that didn’t sound trite no matter how it was set.
The Beatles are the Mozart or Bach of pop music – early and important, but with a reputation that their material doesn’t live up to. Any classical composer who studied Mozart and ignored Beethoven, the entire romantic movement and 20th Century clascial music would be considered odd.
Listen to the Beatles, but realise two things:
They’re good, but not the infallible geniuses that some seem to suggest they are.
Far more interesting things have happened in popular music since.
What about King Crimson’s use of discordance and whole tone scales?
What about David Bowie’s use of word randomisation and improvisation?
What about Burt Bacharach’s use of time signatures and melody writing?
What about the sheer pig headed individuality and deadpan humour of Radiohead?
What about the raw innocence and anger of punk?
What about the timbres of heavy metal or the technological exploration of electronica?
I would be happy if I could go the next ten years without hearing another Beatles song or a song that sounds like the Beatles.
They are not the best band to study if you want to write songs. You need to cast your net wider.
- Tom Slatter








