Last summer, Richard Curtis, the screenwriter of the Beatles-loving film “Yesterday,” told me about inviting six friends to rank 20 favorite Beatles songs, assigning 20 points for a first-place vote, 19 for a second, and so on. But the list they produced seemed unrepresentative: “Here, There and Everywhere” ranked first, only two voters included “Let It Be” and “Help!,” while “Norwegian Wood” and “Hey Jude” didn’t crack the top 30. Someone had to right this wrong, and I was just the obsessive Beatles fan to do it.

“I Feel Fine” is the 50th most beloved Beatles song of all time, slightly more adored than “The Fool on the Hill” and “Two of Us.” That’s the inarguable truth . . . at least according to an entirely unscientific, yet painstakingly compiled and endlessly discussed survey of my friends and family and their friends and family.


It was 50 years ago this month that the band publicly split, so it seems a fitting time to pay tribute to all they accomplished in seven years of recording. With that in mind I started asking, cajoling, pestering people for a top 30. You could do this for Dylan or U2, Drake or Kanye West, or even less commercially successful icons like the Clash, but no other band or artist has such a cherished collection nor one that would inspire as broad an audience (my voters ranged in age from 14 to 68) to invest so much time and thought into such an absurd activity. I hoped for 25 voters, but my e-mail bounced around the country and lists piled up, along with side conversations about certain songs. I stopped only when I hit 64, both for the song reference and because I had to finally start tallying.

Most voters followed my edict for choosing all-time favorites — a desert island list, not the most important songs, and not the ones they were listening to now. I urged them to try hearing the most overplayed songs afresh. The “Abbey Road” medley was to be judged as individual songs, and covers were grudgingly allowed (“Twist and Shout” finished 75th).


Picking a favorite or even a top 10 was often straightforward for voters, but the rest of the choices didn’t come easy, with people writing to me about their endless agonizing and constant revisions — after all, how can you objectively judge “I Am the Walrus” versus “Golden Slumbers”?

In the end, 180 songs earned votes. Even the 23-second “Her Majesty,” the instrumental “Flying,” and “Sie Liebt Dich,” the German-language version of “She Loves You,” made the list. (Someone also, somewhat inexplicably, included “Christmas Time Is Here Again,” an unofficial song sent out to the Beatles fan club in 1967.)

“A Day In the Life” was the definitive and unsurprising favorite, with 13 top votes and 27 top 10 rankings. But 34 songs in all got first-place support, including nine songs outside the top 50, such as “Helter Skelter,” “It Won’t Be Long,” and “Things We Said Today.” (Meanwhile, “Here, There and Everywhere” didn’t top anyone’s ballot and finished 27th, which seems about right.)

The list I produced is “approximately definitive.” The top 12 songs made the grade on more than half the ballots, clearly a cut above the rest, but within that there’s much hairsplitting: “Strawberry Fields Forever” (8th) and “Eleanor Rigby” (9th) finished just two points apart, so one more voter could have easily flipped their order. Only 10 points separated the eight songs from 48th (“If I Fell”) to 55th (“Can’t Buy Me Love”), so I’d argue those songs are essentially equal — one more ballot could dramatically rearrange that section, yet even 100 new voters probably wouldn’t propel those songs to the top 30.


The biggest revelation, to me, was George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” which finished second, ahead of more celebrated songs like “Let It Be,” “Hey Jude,” “In My Life,” and “Yesterday.” Actually, I’d have predicted Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” (7th) and “Something” (10th) as his two most popular songs. But people told me they loved the song’s mood and Eric Clapton’s guest guitar work, an irony because it symbolized and helped deepen the fissures in the band.

I was also struck by “Dear Prudence,” which I think of as a deep cut, finishing 13th, just ahead of more renowned classics like “Come Together,” “Penny Lane,” “Revolution” and “Help!” The India- and- acid-tinged vibes make it a less obvious favorite than the poppier “Nowhere Man (26th), with which it shares glorious harmonies and thematically-similar lyrics.

At the other end of the spectrum, it should come as no surprise which songs of the 213 the Beatles recorded got zero votes: covers like “Chains” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”; early ditties like “Little Child” and “Thank You Girl”; experimental White Album tracks like “Revolution 9” and “Wild Honey Pie”; and snippets like “Dig It” and “Maggie Mae” that producer Phil Spector shoved onto the “Let It Be” album. All but three songs from “Rubber Soul,” “Revolver,” “Sgt. Pepper,” “Magical Mystery Tour,” and “Abbey Road” got votes — “Love You To,” “Doctor Robert,” and Lennon’s misogynistic “Run for Your Life.” My personal favorite of the zero-vote group is the 1965 rocker “I’m Down.”


One theme emerged but it contradicted my expectations. The movie “Yesterday” became a hit in large part because it captured the joy so many of us experience when we’re listening to the Beatles. Yet the bouncing, sunny hopefulness of the early songs that catapulted the band to fame and still echoed later in “Hello Goodbye” (42nd) and “Getting Better” (46th) (the latter perfectly tempered with Lennon’s “can’t get no worse” counterpoint) is not what resonates the most with these most passionate of fans. Only 10 of the top 30 songs fit that description (including “Here Comes the Sun,” “Penny Lane,” and “A Hard Day’s Night”). The vast majority of their most beloved songs tap into deeper, darker emotions — they are wistful, yearning, even angry and desperate.

The truth is that my personal rankings followed that same pattern, with “Eleanor Rigby,” “For No One,” “Help!,” “Norwegian Wood,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” dominating the top of my list.

Perhaps that is why I put “Hey Jude” No. 1: It mixes both sides of the Beatles perfectly, with lyrics about loneliness and struggle refracted through an optimistic lens, followed by a climax that offers individual catharsis and blissful unity. Of course, most people reading this started just saying “Nah, nah, nah” — some of you because you’re singing along, the rest because you have your own favorites.


Ultimately, of course, the pleasure is not in picking a single favorite, or even a top 30, but in constantly revisiting a catalog that goes from the simple pleasures of “Love Me Do” all the way to the majestic and elegiac “Let It Be,” and still sounds fresh all these years later.

WHAT SOME VOTERS SAID ABOUT THEIR FAVORITES (See the entire ranking of 180 songs here.)

“Yes It Is”

“When John belts, ‘It’s my pride, yes it is,’ I get chills every time. Consistently, people are drawn in by the off-kilter melody and the dissonant harmonies, which parallel the sad and sweet premise of wanting to love in the present but being haunted by someone from the past.”

“Let it Be”

“Its chord structure is my favorite basic progression, but done to perfection. I also felt it is the true swan song of the Beatles and is about that very fact and reflects that feeling. Paul has acknowledged writing about his sadness about the Beatles and his [late] mother coming to comfort him. His having lost his mother at a young age also resonates with me.”

“You Never Give Me Your Money”

“This sums up the whole catalog in one song. It’s got drama, tension, release, harmonies, introspection, camp . . . All in 4:02. Paul threw classic rock songwriting structure to the wind on that one, and the ensemble playing is on fire. ”

“A Day in the Life”

“It’s catchy, smart, a little sad, but a little weird so it’s very Beatles. I’ve also always loved the combination of Lennon/McCartney it exudes — even though it’s so separate.”

“Blackbird”

“When I lived in Buenos Aires in the early ’90s, one of my buddies used to play it on the guitar all the time while we guzzled $1 bottles of wine and fried steaks on his crappy Argentine stove.”

“Tomorrow Never Knows”

“It’s the Beatles’ most successful avant-garde studio creation. It largely eschews melody and harmony for a continuous drone using a variety of sound effects. Not your standard fare for a pop group in 1966 or even today.”

“I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party”

“This always had a place in my heart out of all their early work. The harmony of John and Paul locking in on the high ‘I still love her’ takes the cake for me.”

“I Saw Her Standing There”

"[It] may not be the greatest Beatles song, nor the most complex, nor most melodic, but it took me by surprise and continued to do so every single time I’ve heard it.”

“We Can Work It Out”

“I consider it to be the perfect pop song. It should be used as a model for anyone interested in writing pop songs. Great verse, great chorus, harmonies, and also a great example of John and Paul playing off of each other.”

“The Long and Winding Road”

“There are some songs on my list I really don’t play much anymore. I’ve probably heard this enough. ‘Hey Bulldog’ was painful to leave off, but as much as I might play it over ‘Long and Winding Road’ these days, there’s something about the perfection of McCartney’s songwriting craft on that song.”

Stuart Miller can be reached at stuartmiller5186@gmail.com.