Beatles Influences

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John Lennon, Paul Mc Cartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. Four names destined to go down in the annals of music history. Collectively known as The Beatles, they are one of the most important if not the most important band in modern music. They were mostly famous for playing pop music and being the first ever ‘boy band” but a more in-depth and interesting view of The Beatles was how each member incorporated their own love of music, influences and experiences into the 275 songs that they released. George Harrison was arguably the driving force of the early Beatles sound. His obesssion with American Rockabilly music can be heard in early Beatle’s songs such as “Honey Don’t”. The song was heavily influenced by rockabilly legend, Carl Perkins…show more content…
Songs such as “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and “ I Want To Hold Your Hand” were such examples where it was focused more upon the theme of happy puppy love and infatuation. This theme was revisted and reworked by McCartney into more modern love ballads such as “Yesterday” and “Eleanor Rigby”. McCartney’s songwriting was also influnced by his upbringing when he was brought up to listen to ragtime and vaudeville by his father. This is apparent in “When I’m 64” and their early single “From Me To You”. His friendship with Brian Wilson and Mike Love of The Beach Boys also played a role in Paul’s songwriting. Brian Wilson claimed that The Beatles’s “Rubber Soul “album motivated him to write “Pet Sounds” for The Beach Boys. In turn, Paul was inspired and conceived the idea and direction for The Beatles future album, “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band”. “Pet Sounds” was also responsible for the song “Here, There & Everywhere” from the album Revolver. Paul and Lennon reportedly wrote the song in the very same evening after they first listened to that album. Like George, Paul also was inspired by their trip to India and began to incorporate various aspects of Hindu songs such as the mantra like approach to vocals where he added the mantra ‘Jai Guru Deva Om” to the song “Across The…show more content…
Lennon was very impressed that he wrote and played his own originals, a feat that might seem common today but not so back in that era. Taking a cue from Buddy Holly, someone he and Paul greatly admired and respected, The Beatles began to shift away from playing covers and into writing and playing their own originals. Later on in their musical career when they were much more sucessful, Lennon paraphrased a line from Buddy Holly’s “Raining In The Heart”, “The sun is up, the sky is blue”, into the song “Dear Prudence” as a tribute and homage to the man that had inspired him greatly. Lennon was also mostly responsible for the experimental psychedellic phase the Beatles underwent. While Lennon was definitely not the only Beatle to experiment with narcotics, he was the most affected by this affliction, falliing slowly into a heavy drug addiction. He found that narcotics freed his mind and he was able to take in new perspectives of life and wrote psychedellic songs such as “Daytripper” which was a reference to marijuana and also “Strawberry Fields
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