Abbey Road: The Beatles' Goodbye Masterpiece
A triumphant return, a secret farewell, a masterpiece in musical composition, a confirmation that Paul McCartney is dead. There are many labels people can and have placed upon Abbey Road. So much has been said about this album that there’s not much left to contribute. But I’m going to try anyway. There’s a simple reason why this album can be considered the definitive Beatles album: As the last album the band recorded, it has the most context to build off of. The Beatles play with that to no end in Abbey Road. Yet despite playing with context and paratext, they still somehow managed to revolutionize their own discography, their own legacy, and the history of music forever. Abbey Road is the secret goodbye that the Beatles used to change everything on their way out.
Side A:
“Come Together”
The album’s first track, “Come Together”, sets the tone of this album by drawing upon the Beatles’ influences and past while evolving the music to demonstrate the Beatles’ ability to collaborate musically even under stress. Every instrument, including John Lennon’s vocals, has varied rhythms within its patterns, and so the rhythms’ intersections produce depth. Though the instrumentation and melody may seem sparse and simple, the Beatles’ musical confidence shines through in these gaps. Most songs rely largely on melodic relationships, but this song’s texture is interesting because of the rhythmic relationships between all the instruments. In fact, the song is heavily groove-driven to the point of being almost anti-melodic. Each Beatle helps build the tight musical connections in this song, which produce an uneasy tension.
The production also keeps the bass, drum, rhythm guitar, and vocals to a darker timbre that almost mimics low-fidelity recording styles. And this, along with the general form and rhythmic influence, reveals that the Beatles were heavily inspired by the old American blues tradition that the band’s original influences like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry drew from. In its production and overall tone, the song reflects its influences because of its weighty rhythm section. Psychedelia [such as “I Am The Walrus”] is to hallucinogenic drugs what “Come Together” and its blues influences are to heroin. Which is to say that this song sonically reproduces the feeling of a weighty, drug-like haze. And this doesn’t appear to be an unconscious move given that Lennon alludes to heroin multiple times in the lyrics and had been a heroin user at the time. This is a dark Beatles track, and its elusive simplicity communicates to listeners that this was similar to what they’ve heard before, but not quite the same. As such, the Beatles were similar to the musical powerhouse they’d been before, but they were falling apart and quickly becoming too musically individual for there to be a point in staying together. But as “Come Together” demonstrates, the Beatles’ increasingly separate artistic identities combined for one more album to create a unique record that was unified in its diversity.
“I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”
The final track on the A-side, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”, is a radical rock song that darkens the mood of the album and sets listeners up for the more experimental work that they will hear on the B-side. The song’s form is highly unusual and precise. It begins with a five-bar intro in 12/8, the time signature that the coda is in. This intro is also the exact same basic melody upon which the coda is built. This makes the song somewhat cyclical and foreshadows the coda’s massive build. It also reinforces the lyrical themes like obsession, hyperfixation, and regression. The first verse begins with only Lennon's vocal and guitar playing the same melody as the vocal. At the end of each line, the bass, drums, and rhythmic guitar play 3 beats in sync. This dramatic emphasis mimics creeping: Lennon (physically) creeping up to the woman of his affections, or his feelings creeping up to him. These cycles underscore Lennon trying to halt his desire and put it aside.
This song pushes rock music to evolve through experimentation in texture, form, and contrast between minimalism and maximalism. The Beatles had recorded Let it Be with the idea of performing the album live in concert, and thus needed to keep the production and instrumentation simple enough to be played live. But later when the band recorded Abbey Road, they were aware that they had no intention of ever playing it live. This enabled them to make far more complex music. For the song’s coda, the guitars, drums, and vocals were overdubbed many times, and these layers are added gradually over the span of the three minutes. This creates a loud, chaotic, and dense texture that builds to the point of being out of control. A howling wind effect adds a sense of danger. And a Moog synth produces a drone that grows in volume throughout the three minutes until it overwhelms all the other instruments. Yet right before the point of collapse, the song suddenly cuts off. This experimental, dark song’s placement within the A-side is a stark contrast to the more upbeat and straightforward songs that comprise the rest of the A-side, and so it throws off everything listeners came to expect over the course of the prior five songs. And by ending the A-side with this unusual and uneasy feeling produced by the random cut-off, it serves as a warning that the B-side will be different (even more experimental, darker). It makes the listener cautiously intrigued, enough to flip to the B-side immediately.
Side B:
“Here Comes the Sun”
At the start of the B-side, George Harrison greets listeners with the bright, warm “Here Comes the Sun”. After the near-scream vocals, overdubbed electric guitars, overwhelming instrumentation, and intense texture of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”, listeners flip the album over to hear Harrison’s simple acoustic guitar plucking. The bright timbre cuts through the dense timbres and textures of the preceding song. Harrison plays harmonium and Moog synthesizer on this record, both of which were unusual instruments in pop music. He also played one of his guitar parts through a Leslie speaker to create a more distorted timbre. This is evidence of Harrison’s musical evolution and increasing technical sophistication. This song has multiple time signatures in the bridge, containing both duple and triple meter. This is a product of Harrison’s inspiration from Indian classical music. Harrison constructs the song so that he can integrate these atypical time signatures without overly-jarring transitions. For example, Harrison anchors the song by keeping the melody relatively simple throughout the song, and making the lyrics easy to follow in their repetition and meaning. Furthermore, Harrison’s handclaps during the bridge allow listeners to clap along to keep track of the meter and ground themselves. “Here Comes the Sun” indicates several major changes about the Beatles. Firstly, Harrison got a prime track listing placement, and this reflects his rapid and intense growth as a songwriter and musician. Moreover, this song sounds very different from the other Beatles’ compositions. So his success, growth, and individualism as a musician, all of which can be heard in “Here Comes the Sun”, prove exactly why the Beatles broke up, and perhaps why it was good for them to do so.
Above everything, Abbey Road is a testament to both each individual Beatle’s talent as well as their talent as a group. The cover art itself visually represents this: Each Beatle is dressed differently, but they’re all moving in the same direction, directly towards their musical home. Nearly every song was written without the presence of the other band members. Yet, as they all entered the studio together, they still were able to push each other’s boundaries by making each other play challenging music (ex Starr’s drumming on Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun”) and by adding new musical ideas to each other’s songs (ex McCartney’s bassline on Lennon’s “Come Together”). They were reaching some of their songwriting peaks as individuals, yet applied their more sophisticated musical abilities to working on a collective effort. With a vast body of technical knowledge and skill developed over their years as a band, they no longer needed to figure things out: They could have a vision and execute it with precision, control, and mastery. They had grown together, personally and musically, from their most formative moments. So at this point they had found who they were, inside and outside of the band. On this album, the Beatles last album to be recorded, they each express, in the most direct and authentic way yet, who they are as a band. And that’s why this album holds up so well: it’s the definitive statement from the most iconic rock band of all time.