The Beatles were masters of the rock n’ roll genre. While they could create songs that sounded different from each other, they mostly stayed in the realm of rock, where they were comfortable. However, a few times, The Beatles branched out into other genres, creating a new sound that advanced rock even further.
‘Love You To’
On the set of 1965’s Help!, George Harrison became fascinated by the sitar and began fiddling with the Indian instrument. He first used the instrument on “Norwegian Wood”, but that song still remained closer to the classic Beatles sound with a bit of influence from Bob Dylan. “Love You To” from 1966’s Revolver was the first Beatles song to fully embrace Indian culture and the spiritual nature of its music.
Harrison, who was learning the sitar from sitarist Ravi Shankar, almost entirely orchestrated the track. The only help he received from the other Beatles was from Paul McCartney on backing vocals and Ringo Starr on the tambourine. While this is one of the band’s deeper cuts, Harrison would bring out the sitar a few more times for songs like “Within You Without You” and “The Inner Light”.
‘Yer Blues’
“Yer Blues” was written by John Lennon during their 1968 trip to India. The White Album song is an attempt by The Beatles to make an American blues track. From the instrumentals to Lennon’s morbid, bleak lyrics, The Beatles do an impressive job at fitting the blues genre, even if a different demographic typically does it.
In Anthology, Lennon explained that “Yer Blues” was written during regular periods of meditation that led him to write upsetting but realistic songs.
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“The funny thing about the camp was that although it was very beautiful and I was meditating about eight hours a day, I was writing the most miserable songs on earth,” Lennon said. “In ‘Yer Blues’, when I wrote, ‘I’m so lonely I want to die,’ I’m not kidding. That’s how I felt.”
‘Helter Skelter’
Another track from The White Album, “Helter Skelter” is one of the hardest-hitting songs by the band. Many consider this Beatles track a precursor to the heavy metal genre. “Helter Skelter” features an intense vocal performance from McCartney, paired with blaring instrumentals and a fast drumming performance from Ringo Starr that got him to yell, “I got blisters on me fingers,” at the song’s end.
“Helter Skelter” was written in the spirit of competition as McCartney wanted to one-up The Who’s Pete Townshend, who said his band had just made the dirtiest, loudest song ever. McCartney pitched this idea to The Beatles’, and that’s how the song emerged.
“I was in Scotland, and I read in Melody Maker that Pete Townshend had said: ‘We’ve just made the raunchiest, loudest, most ridiculous rock ‘n’ roll record you’ve ever heard,’” McCartney said in Anthology. “I never actually found out what track it was that The Who had made, but that got me going; just hearing him talk about it. So I said to the guys, ‘I think we should do a song like that; something really wild.’ And I wrote ‘Helter Skelter’.”
While The Beatles were versatile musicians who made distinct, memorable songs, they rarely branched out into other genres, except for these few tracks. Even when experimenting, The Beatles hardly ever missed.
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