So why is The Beatles’ Rubber Soul on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
The first time I listened to Rubber Soul all the way through, I was writing a guide for youth baseball coaches at a now long defunct internet start-up.
I remember this specifically because it was the first time I ever thought about whether sharing MP3s was even legal.
A co-worker had added a bunch of music to a shared drive that I could access anytime I wanted from my desktop computer at the office, which I found completely dazzling and mystifying – something that now feels deeply quaint and laughable in the 2020s.
I had only been living in San Francisco’s East Bay for a year or two at that point, and there I was working at a VC-backed start-up, with a great girlfriend and harnessing one of the earliest forms of peer-to-peer music sharing.
When I take myself back to that experience as a content editor for that start-up—now lost to the digital sands of time – I think about how hard it is to pin down what Rubber Soul really is at its center: slippery, the rubber of its musical soul, I suppose. I connect that slipperiness to how I felt about myself back then, and in many ways still do.
It ties to a conversation my wife and I have had occasionally.
And by the way: she and I met during that very era that I’ve described. In fact, I recall telling my boss at the time – Kit, a great boss who I’m grateful for to this day for giving me my first big break into the then-nascent internet industry – that I had gone out on my first date with my now wife.
Kit must have seen a certain look on my face, and she asked, “Is she the one?”
I thought for a moment and answered honestly: “I think she might be.”
That was a quarter century ago.
Anyway, my wife and I talk about how we’re connected because we don’t fit into any particular “box” in terms of our identity, our friendships, or our life together.
Maybe that’s why we’ve both embraced Seattle as we have, which is less “liberal bastion” for us – even though it is that – than a place that’s simply come as you are (to borrow the term from one of the most famous Seattle bands of them all), that doesn’t expect you to be any one particular thing.
These thoughts swirl around as I listen to the rocking-yet-dreamy “Think for Yourself,” with its gentle-yet-assertive message. Maybe it serves as an anthem for figuring out who I was.
And “Nowhere Man” drives the same idea home – that uneasy freedom of not fitting anywhere, yet somehow belonging everywhere. Bonus: it’s transcendent.
There’s something about “Girl” and “Michelle” that makes me feel easier in my body and in my mind. Even back in those early start-up days – when my typical music listening diet consisted of cranked-up ska punk albums like Reel Big Fish’s Why Do They Rock So Hard? (#102 of best 1,000 albums ever) or the hardcore of Downset (#52) – the sublime acoustic rock plus Paul and John’s masterful songcraft called to me across the decades.
And it still does.
These days, my favorite track is “If I Needed Someone,” a relative deep cut by Beatles standards. That minor chord change just melts my brain with delight each time, much in the same way “Things We Said Today” and “Baby’s In Black” does.
“Run for Your Life,” the album closer, is pure harmonic bliss and country rock swagger.
I was a bit astonished to discover, via The Beatles Bible, that John Lennon mentioned a few times over the years that he didn’t like this one, even calling it his “least favorite Beatles song” in 1973.
I suppose if you’re going to pick a least favorite song that you’ve written, you’re in a pretty elite place if it’s “Run for Your Life.”
A challenge with these best 1,000 albums ever pieces at this stage is trying to touch on all of the “famous” songs (read = Rubber Soul is jam-packed with them) without writing a War and Peace-length treatise.
I’ll close on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” which I’ll offer a mea culpa for: I completely assumed for many years – based on the song title and its gorgeous, naturalistic acoustic rock and chimes feel – that it was about something to do with nature.
This ties to the fact that even as a writer and someone who cares very much about words and meaning, with music I’m often largely about sound and energy and performance and feeling and “vibes.”
And as a secondary mea culpa: even though I lived in England for six months post-college so therefore I’m well aware that “birds” are slang for women over there in the same way that “chicks” are in the U.S., the “bird” in this song title further lulled me into believing this one’s about some lovely Scandinavian outing in the splendors of nature.
Well, that would be completely and utterly wrong then, as it turns out. Things aren’t always what they seem on the surface. Slippery.
In short: this one entails “an extramarital affair that John Lennon was involved in,” with the Norwegian wood referring to popular and cheap apartment paneling that adorned the apartment of the woman Lennon had the affair with.
I’ll again lean on The Beatles Bible here, which relays a Lennon interview in which he talks about how he “always had some kind of affairs going” on, and the idea here was to reference one of them in a poetic-meets-obfuscated way.
Maybe that’s what I love most about Rubber Soul – it resists every box you try to put it in.
Anyway, to “land the plane” on this piece, this last bit ties to the fact that while Rubber Soul isn’t The Beatles’ loudest, flashiest, or most experimental work, it’s their most deeply human.
Slippery to define, but brilliant in execution.
Some stats & info about The Beatles – Rubber Soul
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? British Bands, Rock Music, Psychedelic Rock, Garage Rock, Pop Music, British Invasion
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – #35
- All Music’s rating – 5 out of 5 stars
- When was Rubber Soul released? 1965
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #28 out of 1,000
The Beatles’ Rubber Soul on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from The Beatles’ Rubber Soul that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
What goes on in your heart? What goes on in your mind?
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.