Bruce Springsteen is the Boss for a reason. He’s one of the greatest songwriters of the ’70s and ’80s, and his career has continued with great success all the way to the present day, which means his catalog can be intimidating. With so many classic records and new excellence, where do you start? I’m here to provide a fan’s guide to the discography: this is Bruce Springsteen’s albums ranked from worst to best.

I’ve been a Bruce fan since 2008, when I was 19. A dear friend had been trying to get me into him for a while, but I had a received notion of Bruce as corny, and nothing my friend was sending me was penetrating that perception. Finally, he told me to listen to Nebraska, so I got the CD from my university’s library and everything clicked. I was obsessed with only that album for a few months, then started absorbing every Bruce album I could get my hands on when I went home for the summer. CDs from my hometown’s library, my dad’s vinyl copy of Born in the USA, the beat up 50 cent LP of Born to Run I found in a thrift store… I was hooked. It culminated for me in the January 2009 release of Working on a Dream and seeing him live on that tour for the first time that April. My English professor at the time was an original fan from the Stone Pony days, and I talked him into postponing the paper I had due so I could fully enjoy it. That show remains one of my fondest memories, an intense experience of the power of rock and roll and the amazing energy of Bruce Springsteen.

So whether you’re an old fan or a newcomer, I hope you enjoy my reckoning of the studio albums from worst to best. I’m only ranking studio albums; no live albums, no EPs, no archival releases (i.e., no The Promise or any of the “Lost Albums” released in the Tracks II box set). When I ranked the Beatles’ solo albums, I had a category for bad albums, but there’s none of that here: Bruce doesn’t make bad albums. They’re not all great, but there isn’t a record on this list I’d toss completely. Therefore I will separate this list into three categories: The Merely Good, The Excellent, and The Essential.

The Merely Good

21. Lucky Town (1992)

As I just said, “worst Bruce Springsteen album” is a relative term — it’s impressive that someone who’s been active for 50+ years doesn’t have any albums that are completely without merit. But something has to drift to the bottom, and of course it was going to be his two happy albums from the ‘90s.

Lucky Town and Human Touch were released on the same day in 1992. They were his first albums of the ’90s, his first since the disbanding of the E Street Band, and his first flops. On them we hear Bruce lost, unmoored from all the ways he used to make music. He’s happier in his personal life than he’d ever been before, but he didn’t yet know how to make music out of that.

There are some good songs on Lucky Town, but it’s largely a monotonous (if mercifully short) listen. And compared to the rest of his catalog, it’s just rather insubstantial, so it gets the ignominy of being number 21 out of 21.

Songs for your playlist: If I Should Fall Behind, Better Days

20. Human Touch (1992)

Human Touch and Lucky Town are so similar to each other, it’s weird that he released them as two albums on the same day instead of one double album (or, and this would have been the real move, just one album with a lot of the fat trimmed away). Human Touch is the longer of the two, which gives it more time to stretch out with a greater variety of songs. There’s also a touch more of Bruce’s beloved dark side here. So though Human Touch is nearly identical to Lucky Town, it gets the edge over its twin brother and goes one higher on the list.

Songs for your playlist: Gloria’s Eyes, Man’s Job, Soul Driver

19. We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006)

Continuing through the good but nonessential Springsteen albums, we have his covers album of traditional folk singer Pete Seeger. Seeger was American music royalty, a hero of the ‘50s/early ’60s folk revival, a man whose populist-socialist spirit was never far from Bruce’s music. For We Shall Overcome, Bruce assembled a huge band (later dubbed the Sessions Band) that included horns, banjo, accordion, and choir. The group runs through a set of 13 traditional songs played by Seeger in raucous, spirited fashion — everything is BIG, LOOSE, and FUN. Some of the songs are over a century old, many are from the Dust Bowl and Depression eras, populist and progressive music in a very old mold. Bruce and his band play them with the same strident energy Seeger did: these songs aren’t just a vital part of our history, Bruce insists, they’re alive, and they can save us in the present.

So the songs are good, the band is full of fire, and Bruce is passionate — why’s the album so low? For all of its importance, We Shall Overcome is a covers album. It’s a loving document of one of the strains that influence Bruce’s music, but unless you need an introduction to Pete Seeger (an artist worth your attention), it doesn’t add a lot to your collection.

I’m not covering live albums on this list, but I’d recommend Bruce and the Session Band’s two-disc Live in Dublin over this studio album. These songs come to life even bigger in front of an audience, and the track list includes an expanded selection of Americana, along with folkified versions of classic Springsteen tunes like “Atlantic City” and “Blinded by the Light.”

Songs for your playlist: O Mary Don’t You Weep, Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

18. Working on a Dream (2009)

Bruce’s 2000s started with a bang (the E Street Band reunion tour and The Rising) and ended with a whimper (Magic and Working on a Dream). Bruce’s 2009 album benefits from the presence of the E Street Band, still the well-oiled rock and roll machine it was throughout the 2000s. But it’s another happy album — the songs are more diverse and interesting than the bulk of Lucky Town or Human Touch, but the joyous tone was a bum note in the year it came out, in the economic devastation after the 2008 financial crisis.

There are some seriously excellent songs on Working on a Dream, but it’s also held back by a lot of filler and a lot of corny stuff. It opens with an eight-minute Western drama that just feels interminable. It’s another of Bruce’s late career hit-and-miss albums; it’s got material worth revisiting, but it’s also mildly embarrassing. I mentioned in the introduction that this was one of young Maddie’s favorite albums the year it was released, but you know, time offers perspective…

Songs for your playlist: What Love Can Do, This Life, Good Eye, The Last Carnival (a sequel to Wild Billy’s Circus Story on his second album!)

17. Devils & Dust (2005)

Devils & Dust was Bruce’s third acoustic solo album after 1982’s Nebraska and 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad. It repeats the mold of Tom Joad pretty exactly (spoiler alerts for later on the list): an incredible title track, some other worthy songs, but all delivered with a dour tone and low energy level that make the albums hard to love.

The title track is an outstanding protest song about a soldier in (presumably) either Iraq or Afghanistan, and it follows the Springsteen anti-war song playbook to a T: empathize with the soldiers, hate the injustices and leaders that have put these poor innocents into the terrible situation they’re in. “Reno” kicked up some interesting controversy for its frank depiction of sex work. Most of the rest of the album passes in a haze of slow, almost mournful folk rock, with not a lot to break up the monotony.

If you love sad cowboys and midtempo folk rock, Devils & Dust might be right up your alley. But it’s a long way from Nebraska, and I rank it as the lowest of Bruce’s solo acoustic albums.

Songs for your playlist: Devils and Dust, Reno, Black Cowboys, Long Time Coming

16. High Hopes (2014)

High Hopes is an anomaly in Bruce’s discography — it’s a collection of old songs, mostly outtakes written for his earlier albums, but some covers and rerecorded versions of earlier songs too. In the wake of Wrecking Ball (2012), Bruce had been touring with Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine as a guest in the E Street Band, and the presence of the younger radical seemed to energize the Boss. And High Hopes is a Tom Morello album almost as much as a Springsteen album.

It’s not only that Morello’s guitar solos are all over it, or that he duets with Bruce on an electric version of “The Ghost of Tom Joad” (a song he also covered with Rage Against the Machine). Morello also suggested two of the three cover songs (“Just Like Fire Would” by the Saints and “Dream Baby Dream” by Suicide) and influenced the rest of the song selection. The rerecorded “41 Shots (American Skin)” is a song perfectly matched to its moment — an early 2000s song about the police murdering an unarmed Black man, which Bruce added back into his setlist after Trayvon Martin. I don’t know if Morello had anything to do with that, but his presence was exactly right for the song.

The best songs on the album are the already familiar ones, “Tom Joad” and “41 Shots” — the rest are okay, typical outtake fodder. But there is a ragged, hungry energy to Bruce’s 2010s output that contrasts his very comfortable 2000s work. The production on this and Wrecking Ball is more adventurous, with lots of modern processing and even use of samples. So this album succeeds more on its overall energy than its songs — it holds your attention sonically even when it doesn’t necessarily otherwise.

Songs for your playlist: 41 Shots, The Ghost of Tom Joad, High Hopes

15. Only the Strong Survive (2022)

Bruce’s latest album (at time of writing) is another covers album — it’s billed as Covers Volume 1, but his first covers album was the Pete Seeger one (#19). And honestly, I love this one to distraction — it doesn’t go higher on the list because they’re not his songs, but I’m tempted.

Only the Strong Survive is Bruce’s love letter to classic R&B and soul of the ’60s and ’70s. Bruce’s love of soul is evident to anyone familiar enough with his career: he was playing in racially integrated R&B bands at the beginning of his career, his early albums are extremely R&B-inflected, he did covers of soul classics for his soundchecks throughout his 1988 Tunnel of Love Express tour, etc. For Only the Strong Survive wanted to do an album where he could just worry about singing, so this is a straightforward collection of covers done with loving care and a voice that is in incredible shape considering his age.

This album moves, it’s funky and fun. The song selection is pitch perfect, banger after banger. It doesn’t feel like an old man doing karaoke (as I feared it might), it feels vibrant and alive and will blow your ears wide open if you don’t already know the genre.

Songs for your playlist: Hey Western Union Man, Do I Love You (Indeed I Do), When She Was My Girl, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

The Excellent

14. The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)

If you read the entry for Devils & Dust, you know a lot of what I want to say about its predecessor, The Ghost of Tom Joad: it’s an acoustic folk-rock album with a couple of very good songs, but ultimately too dour and one-note to make it an extremely engaging album. What puts this album in a category above the other? It’s partially the songs, and it’s mostly its place in the chronology.

Three years after Bruce’s disappointing Lucky Town and Human Touch, hearing Bruce abandon his aimless pop rock sound for a dour acoustic mood and social statements defending working folk, immigrants, the homeless, and the drug-addicted from the rich and powerful… well, Bruce was back. He wasn’t doing it exactly like he did in the ’70s and ’80s, but he still seemed to have gotten his bearings and become himself again. Ironically, the depressing tone was a breath of fresh air for fans of the boss.

The Ghost of Tom Joad is always going to be a lesser Springsteen album due to its somewhat monotonous tone and instrumentation, but the quality of its songwriting places it on firm ground and heralds Bruce’s return to good favor after a few years of faltering. And the title track is the definition of essential Bruce.

Songs for your playlist: The Ghost of Tom Joad, Youngstown, Galveston Bay, My Best Was Never Good Enough

13. Magic (2007)

Magic is a good record, but it does also feel like the moment the mojo left the reunited E Street Band — they’d done an amazing reunion tour (with a live album and concert film) followed by an incredible album of new material and more touring. Compared to all of that, Magic is rather humble: another collection of songs, some excellent, some mediocre. Where The Rising was Bruce’s rousing response to 9/11, Magic is a weary, frustrated response to Bush era America — but unlike some of Bruce’s earlier albums, the commentary is muted and subtle.

Overall, though I love a lot of the songs here, Magic is Just Another E Street Album. It’s an album you could easily put on and ignore: it doesn’t grab you and force you to pay attention like his stronger albums, but it also doesn’t push you away.

Songs for your playlist: Livin’ in the Future, Devil’s Arcade, Radio Nowhere, Magic

12. Letter to You (2020)

Letter to You was a triumph when it came out in the fall of 2020: our beloved Boss giving us exactly the album we needed in the miserable doldrums of the COVID pandemic. He’d recorded it in late 2019 pre-COVID, of course, but to contrast Working on a Dream, Letter to You felt perfectly fit to its time. It’s an album stuffed with both joy and sadness, with new material and old. It’s got one foot in the deep roots of Bruce’s history (especially the then-recent losses of some of his bandmates from when he was a teenager), and the other in the future, beckoning us to follow him into a more beautiful world.

This is an E Street album, his first without Clarence Clemons — the fact that Bruce replaced him with his nephew Jake Clemons tells you what you need to know about the E Street Band these days. The band is a family affair, one that has changed a lot in the last few years but keeps its history top of mind. The songwriting is good, but not what it was in the ’70s and ‘80s — in fact, two of the album’s strongest moments are a pair of songs Bruce wrote 50 years earlier but never included on a studio album (“If I Was the Priest” and “Janey Needs a Shooter”).

Letter to You is lifegiving for established Bruce fans, but not an album liable to convince anyone who isn’t already on board. It was a roaring way to burst into the 2020s, but it’s also still his latest album of original material here in 2026. (Frowns, taps watch.)

Songs for your playlist: If I Was the Priest, Ghosts, Janey Needs a Shooter, Rainmaker, House of a Thousand Guitars

11. Wrecking Ball (2012)

In 2012, Bruce followed up Working on a Dream with the E Street album we actually needed from him in 2009. Wrecking Ball roils with populist rage, with vitriol for the ones ruining the world and optimism that we can have a better one if we fight for it. Tom Morello is on it for two songs playing some killer guitar solos; he would later tour with the band, leading to High Hopes.

There are silly moments on the album, songs that don’t quite work. But there’s also a host of new, modern production techniques that push the band out of their late-2000s comfort zone — this is the first album produced by Bruce’s new go-to guy Ron Aniello, who took over for Brendan O’Brien, the guy behind the board for Bruce’s 2000s renaissance. And as is common for recent Bruce albums, he includes a song that’s been in his live set for years but never made it onto a studio album: “Land of Hope and Dreams” is a rousing gospel rocker that draws heavy inspiration from Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready.” The sequence of the end of the album (“Rocky Ground,” “Land of Hope and Dreams,” and “We Are Alive”) gets me bawling every time… two powerful, cathartic songs about trouble, followed by a soft ditty about all the people who have died fighting for social justice and who live on every time anyone else fights the same fight… shit this guy is good.

Wrecking Ball is a huge album that offers a big catharsis if you stick with it; it’s not quite a latter-day masterpiece, but it’s damn good.

Songs for your playlist: Rocky Ground, Land of Hope and Dreams, We Are Alive (in that order), Death to My Hometown, Shackled and Drawn, This Depression, Jack of All Trades

The Essential

10. Tunnel of Love (1987)

Tunnel of Love was a surprising change of direction when it came out in 1987. Bruce had been making huge rock records (with one folk exception) for 15 years, but the new album was pop, stuffed with synthesizers and drum machines. He’d also all but abandoned his social commentary and made an entire album about love. But Tunnel of Love wasn’t some sappy romantic record; it’s about all the ways love leaves us frustrated and lonely, the way it feels when all your ideals and hopes melt away and you’re left with two people trying their best but hurting each other anyway. Despite the sometimes-slick production, it’s one of Bruce’s deepest, most depressed records, and it’s incredible.

This is Bruce’s second true solo album after Nebraska: though there are some contributions from E Street Band members, especially vocals from his backup singer and soon to be wife Patti Scialfa, Bruce played most of the instruments himself, including programming the copious drum machines. The production was very modern then, meaning it sounds dated as hell today — that alone turned me off when I first heard it, I dismissed this album for years. But once you’re used to it, the sound of the album is charming; it’s a departure, but that’s not a bad thing.

But the real star is the songs. Bruce married a model/actress in 1985, flush from his Born in the USA success — feels like the sort of cynical thing a pop star does, but he was always idealistic and thought he could really settle down with this woman. The fact that their marriage was nothing like he hoped fuels the album. You hear his frustration, confusion, and depression, but also that hopeful streak that got him into this mess in the first place. His lyrics despair of the possibility any two people can ever truly know each other — and the woman he would soon divorce his wife for and live his happily ever after with is singing backup.

Tunnel of Love is mildly divisive and doesn’t sound like anything else in my top ten, but despite a possibly-lethal dose of the ’80s, it offers some of the deepest songwriting Bruce has ever done about love.

Songs for your playlist: All That Heaven Will Allow, Brilliant Disguise, Tougher Than the Rest, Spare Parts, One Step Up

9. Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ (1973)

If you’re only familiar with Bruce’s biggest albums, the sound of his debut will take you by surprise. Bruce burst onto the national scene promoted as the second coming of Bob Dylan, a manic, mercurial songwriter with a band that blends rock and R&B. Bruce sings fast on his early albums, lyrics rolling from his tongue in an impenetrable haze of allusions — something with that many words has to be deep, right?

Early Bruce is as much posture as it is brilliance, but you can absolutely hear what the hype was about. The early E Street Band (no Max Weinberg, Danny Federici, or Roy Bittan yet, but Clarence Clemons is there and huge) is a crack band full of fire, and young Bruce is a dynamo. The R&B influence is a lot more pronounced here than you might expect: it’s heavily syncopated and danceable, where E Street’s eventual sound is heavier and more direct. The first adjective for this album is hungry. These were a restless bunch of guys from New Jersey who were ready to crack the world wide open.

It didn’t work out that way right away. I love this album, but I also hear why its singles didn’t land right on the radio. Bruce’s first two albums gained him a small, devoted national following to add to his small, devoted New Jersey following, but they didn’t make him a superstar. The industry did recognize his songwriting talent quickly: songs he’d written (both from this album and unreleased) started popping up on other artists’ albums in the same year, and in 1976 Manfred Mann’s Earth Band had a massive hit with a cover of Greetings’s opener, “Blinded by the Light.”

Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ is an incredible record full of promise, but it isn’t the fully formed Bruce who would rightfully blow up a few years later. He hasn’t arrived yet.

Songs for your playlist: For You, Does This Bus Stop at 52nd Street/Lost in the Flood (I thought these were only one song for a long time and they’re better that way), Growin’ Up, Spirit in the Night

8. Western Stars (2019)

Western Stars is a non-E Street solo album, and it’s tempting to place it in the line of Bruce’s acoustic albums (Nebraska, The Ghost of Tom Joad, Devils & Dust), but it’s something else: it’s acoustic Bruce + orchestra. And that could have been so chintzy if the taste level was off at all, but leave it to our man Bruce, because it’s amazing.

The songwriting here could easily have come from one of the earlier acoustic albums: they’re mostly character studies of restless men, ones who have been kicked around by life or whose best days are behind them. But they’re so firmly rooted in southern California (the place other than New Jersey where Springsteen has lived the most) that they almost form a concept album. Hollywood greatly informs the songs: the title track is a pun, the Western Stars are the movie stars from cowboy pictures; there’s also a stirring song about a stunt driver. Geographical references are constant. The image of a coyote with a chihuahua in its teeth is stirring, like the wilderness coming to collect its due from the wealthy who try to ignore it. There’s weary nostalgia and even bitterness in the lyrics that a younger Bruce sometimes touched on, but that come across with so much more gravitas now that he’s lived it himself.

And the orchestra, oh the orchestra. The arrangements on this album are huge and majestic, often sweeping Bruce away in favor of cinematic catharsis. Bruce’s musical touchstone for this album was ’60s and ’70s pop country, but as much as I respect the genre, he blows those original recordings out of the water. That’s partially just the magic of not mastering the songs for radio — the orchestra here sounds rich and alive, perfectly realistic where the older songs’ limited quality makes them sound corny — but I think he’s also writing a type of literary song that those older artists weren’t.

Western Stars is an amazing anomaly in Bruce’s catalog. Nothing else he’s made sounds remotely like it, and part of me hopes nothing else ever will, because this album is so incredibly special.

Songs for your playlist: Chasing Wild Horses, Sundown, Western Stars, Tucson Train, Drive Fast (The Stuntman)

7. The Rising (2002)

The Rising was the E Street Band’s comeback album — Bruce’s too. After spending the early ’90s without his famous backing band, Bruce reunited them for an EP in 1996 (Blood Brothers), a massive tour in 2000 (check out the Live in New York City album and film for a document of this triumphant comeback) and, finally, a new album in 2002, their first album together since Born in the USA in 1984. The Rising is also, famously, Bruce’s 9/11 album.

Bruce was made for moments like this. He appeared on a televised benefit concert shortly after the tragedy, debuting the new song “My City of Ruins” — he’d written it about his dying hometown in New Jersey, familiar 20th century smalltown malaise from the Boss. But in a spare arrangement of guitar and harmonica with a gospel-like choir of backing vocalists, the song became an anthem for the strength of New York City in the wake of a devastating loss. “My City of Ruins” is an emotional high point of the album, and the songs he wrote in direct response to 9/11 don’t disappoint either. Bruce didn’t fall into the trap a lot of other songwriters did in this period, of explicitly or implicitly supporting the War on Terror: his songs offer comfort and solidarity to the grieving, not visions of revenge. He highlights the firefighters sacrificing themselves trying to save others, the missing space in the families who lost someone, the jarring new skyline that reminded so many of their pain. And through it all, Bruce’s optimism shows: he knows we can meet this moment and become something better than we are now. He was our mourner in chief, not our avenging angel; while the crimes carried out in the names of 9/11’s victims have made a lot of the art made in its wake age poorly, Bruce’s response is just as stirring today as it was at the time.

And it sure is great to have the E Street Band back. The Rising was Bruce’s most straightforward rock record in over a decade, and his band is in beautiful shape after a year on the road together. The sound is updated, not a return to where they left off in the ‘80s — instruments like violins and Indian tabla bring new textures, and huge choirs of backing vocals become a fixture from this record forward.

The Rising is Bruce’s triumphant studio return, an incredible record that meets its moment with meaningful compassion and brings back the band that is his family with a sound that is both new and classic. It’s his best record of the new century so far.

Songs for your playlist: My City of Ruins, The Rising, Mary’s Place, You’re Missing, Into the Fire, Further On (Up the Road)

6. Born in the U.S.A. (1984)

Bruce had been a bona fide rock star since Born to Run in 1975, but Born in the USA pushed his stardom to dizzy new heights. It’s easy to see why — this one takes all the hard driving rock the E Street Band was famous for, dresses it up with some synthesizers and the slickest production the ’80s could offer, and hits every passionate lyrical theme Bruce has always delivered straight down the line. It’s tight, with nary a bad song or wasted note in the whole album. It’s as if Bruce distilled everything his fans loved about him into a perfect formula and then just stamped this one right out.

This is an album I feel I have to defend from people’s willful misunderstandings. The title track is often mistaken for a flag-waving jingoistic anthem, but if you pay even the slightest attention to the verses it’s obviously a protest song — it’s not even subtle. And “I’m on Fire,” the infamous “hey little girl is your daddy home” song, isn’t about pedophilia. Rock music has been using “little girl” to mean “adult woman who I’m attracted to” and “daddy” to mean “boyfriend or husband” since the ’50s. Vaguely misogynistic, sure, but Bruce didn’t invent it. Listen to the song and it’s obvious he’s just seducing a married woman. Grow up.

Lyrically brilliant, musically intense, and fodder for the tour that finally made Bruce hire an accountant: Born in the USA is a classic few others can touch.

Songs for your playlist: Downbound Train, Bobby Jean, My Hometown, Glory Days, Cover Me, Born in the USA, Dancing in the Dark

5. The River (1980)

As we get into the top 5, we have some really tough calls… any one of these could be my favorite Bruce album depending on the day. The River is a nearly perfect album, hampered only by its being a double LP: it’s long as hell, and inevitably, some of that length is bloat that could have been cut down.

With Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, Bruce had conquered the FM radio world where classic rock thrived. But by the end of the ’70s, the musical landscape was shifting, and Bruce deftly rode the wave: it was time to go a little more pop. The River continues the lyrical themes of his earlier albums and keeps the hard rocking E Street Band firmly in familiar stylistic territory, but Bruce kept his ear on the hooks to create some singles that could crack pop radio open for him, and the production is slick as hell, with ’80s gated drums and some synthesizers. It worked — The River was yet another big step forward for Bruce’s commercial success.

The songs feature the same cast of disillusioned working-class folk as Darkness on the Edge of Town, looking for escapes in bars, in disappointing relationships, in crime, in cars. Disc 1 is the tighter, poppier of the two (notwithstanding its two weepy side-ending ballads), where disc 2 is darker and less focused — that’s where the bloat lives, but the change in atmosphere is amazing, and I tend to listen more to disc 2 these days.

The River is an album absolutely packed with essential Springsteen songs and the full gamut of his impressive emotional range, even if it does take patience to make it through the full runtime.

Songs for your playlist: Point Blank, Hungry Heart, Sherry Darling, The River, Jackson Cage, Fade Away, Drive All Night

4. The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (1973)

This album being as high up as it is might be a product of the fact that this is my list — as I mentioned, Bruce’s first two albums don’t sound like the E Street Band everyone knows best. And this, his sophomore album, is indispensable for me. The debut album was mildly R&B-inflected Dylanish rock, but the second goes much further into R&B, soul, and even jazz fusion. It sounds like the music Steely Dan was making at the same time, but with a lot more down-to-earth grit. (I love Steely Dan but they are cerebral as hell; Bruce has heart and balls as well as brains.) E Street Shuffle is the funkiest Bruce has ever sounded on record.

There’s even more Jersey shore in this one than the debut. The lyrics describe the constant lure of summer fun and its darker, criminal underbelly pulling young people away from their dreary mundane lives. Underpinning the songs are huge, richly textured instrumentals: a riot of horns, keyboards that skitter and shimmer, and Bruce’s finest ever lead guitar moments. From Born to Run on Bruce’s bands would employ lead guitarists who take most of the solos, so Bruce is most known as a rhythm guitarist. But every guitar note on this record is Bruce, and it’ll make you wonder why he ever bothered with other guitarists. (Then you’ll think of Little Steven and go “oh yeah, that’s right…”)

The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle didn’t do anything for him on the radio or the charts at the time, but it’s one of his absolute finest outings. Put it on and find, to your surprise, that the Boss has serious guitar chops and that the E Street Band can make you dance.

Songs for your playlist: Kitty’s Back, Rosalita (Come Out Tonight), 4th of July Asbury Park (Sandy), The E Street Shuffle

3. Born to Run (1975)

Bruce had released two albums in 1973, and neither had been commercially successful. Columbia was still willing to throw the full force of its promotional machine behind him, but they made themselves clear: if the next album didn’t break through, he was done. Born to Run was made in this pressure cooker. Bruce slaved over the album, especially its singles, layering them with overdubs to create towering behemoths of rock and roll. And it worked. With one more gigantic marketing push including a simultaneous appearance on the covers of Time and Newsweek, Bruce broke through and became the superstar he’d always been destined to be. Born to Run is his first classic, and one of his finest ever records.

Whether because of his need for mainstream success or just his own changing taste, Bruce greatly pruned down his band’s sound. Gone were most of the R&B and jazz pretensions; Born to Run is pure rock and roll (don’t mistake that for “simple”). This album also sees the E Street Band form the lineup that would remain through the glory years of 1975–1984: Roy Bittan joined on piano, solidifying the band’s double keyboard sound (Bittan on piano, Danny Federici on organ and other keyboards); and the mighty Max Weinberg replaced “Mad Dog” Lopez on drums. Where Lopez had been a jazzy sort of drummer, Weinberg’s style is weighty and straightforward, and for the last 50 years has provided an anchor that keeps the band from flying into the stratosphere no matter what other craziness they get up to.

Bruce’s songwriting also matures on this album. Bruce has always been a character study writer; both his earlier and later albums are riddled with songs about larger-than-life personalities. But on Born to Run, his character sketches gain depth and start to feel deeply personal. Where on his first two albums he had a Tom Waits-esque penchant for a third person description of the sort of person no one knew in real life, on Born to Run most of the songs are in first person and feel lived in, real. The kid started to wear his heart on his sleeve, and the record-buying public richly rewarded him for it.

Bruce’s big breakthrough is a classic for a reason. Born to Run is a towering giant of classic rock that perfects the best of what he’d been doing before and pushes him to a higher plane.

Songs for your playlist: Backstreets, Jungleland, Thunder Road, Born to Run, Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out

2. Nebraska (1982)

Nebraska is a fascinating record — so much so that they made it the lynchpin of his recent biopic (which I have not seen because I hate biopics, sorry). And, as I mentioned in the introduction, it was the first Springsteen album I ever loved. What became Nebraska wasn’t ever supposed to be the album: it was a set of demos that Bruce recorded in a depressed and isolated winter in his home in New Jersey, intended to be re-recorded by the E Street Band as a follow up to The River. But when the band entered the studio to work on the songs, no one was happy with the results. Try as they might, the full band recordings just never had the same special something that the demos did. So Bruce decided to release the demos as the album.

The sound quality is crude. Bruce recorded the demos-turned-album on a cassette 4-track machine, which allowed him to overdub, but it was still a cassette — he carried the tape in his back pocket for a while. The album is mostly acoustic (he plays an electric guitar on one song, but without a full band it still sounds stark) and hauntingly spare and minimal. The instrumentation, combined with the fact that these were never meant to be the final versions of the songs, lends the album an intimacy Bruce has never achieved since; it feels like a glimpse directly into Bruce’s soul. The lyrics include some of the darkest material Bruce has ever written. Desperation has always been a theme of his music, but when making Nebraska Bruce had been reading about American history and the stories of Flannery O’Connor, whose nihilism inspired some chilling songs.

Nebraska is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, an accident whose strengths lie in the circumstances of its creation. It was the perfect first Bruce album for a university girl who was obsessed with early folk Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and various country blues singers. And it far outclasses its sequels, which match it in dreary tone but not in brilliance.

Songs for your playlist: Nebraska, Atlantic City, Highway Patrolman, Reason to Believe, Johnny 99, My Father’s House

1. Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)

It took Bruce three years to follow up on the success of his breakthrough with Born to Run — success, as it often does, revealed mismanagement, and Bruce spent a few years touring while legal battles with his former manager prevented him from recording. By the time he entered the studio in 1977, he was overflowing with new songs. The recording sessions were lengthy and unfocused, yielding twice as many outtakes as songs that made the album. (Many of those outtakes were released as The Promise in 2010, but even those 2 full CDs don’t contain all of them.) Eventually Bruce and the band skimmed the absolute cream of the crop from those copious options, and the result was, in my estimation, Bruce’s best ever album.

Bruce’s first three albums, especially Born to Run, clustered around the theme of leaving. The stifling, soul-crushing hometown was the problem, and the open road was the solution. But by 1978, Bruce had had his fill of running. He’d toured the world with his band for years, and the road hadn’t solved his problems. He wasn’t going to keep writing about characters with itchy feet, and in the writing he did for Darkness, he found his new subject, a well that he would return to off and on for the rest of his career. Instead of writing about people leaving their homes, he wrote about people who stayed. In the economic malaise of the late ’70s, and then increasingly in the industry-destroying Reagan years to come, the ways Bruce wrote about the poor and dissatisfied struck a mighty chord. The characters in his songs turn to all sorts of ill-fitting solutions for their unsatisfying lives, but unlike the characters doing the same things in his earlier albums, these ones are stuck. There are no easy answers, just more of the same.

Darkness is a classic from top to bottom, every song perfect. Some rock with driving purpose, some burble and brood. The E Street Band that was coalescing on Born to Run reaches its finest form here after years playing together on the road. And Darkness contains some of my favorite of Bruce’s vocal performances, ranging from rich and honeyed to strident rocker shouting.

Darkness on the Edge of Town was the perfect record for its moment when it was released in 1978, and it hits every bit as hard today. If you’re looking for a distillation of everything Bruce is great for, this is the best place to find it.

Songs for your playlist: Adam Raised a Cain, Racing in the Street, Badlands, Candy’s Room, The Promised Land, Prove It All Night

Bruce Springsteen’s Best Albums

There’s only one Boss, and his discography is as daunting as it is rewarding. Each one of his albums has treasures, but in a career as long as his, some unevenness is inevitable. I hope I’ve provided some guidance for new fans, and old fans find my order satisfying and my explanations lucid.

Your turn — which one is your favorite Springsteen album, and why am I a fool for not ranking it higher?

Spoilers for Nolan’s Odyssey ahead. And no, it’s nowhere near the same as the 3,000 year old epic, so spoiler warnings are warranted.

I tend to write about music when I blog, but I am a Classicist by vocation: I’ve taught Latin for 16 years, and while most of my expertise is ancient Rome, Homer has been a major love of mine since I was in university. So I went to see the new Odyssey film expecting to be aggravated, and for the most part, I was pleasantly surprised. Despite a wine-dark sea of historical and literary quibbles (of which I’ll barely scratch the surface here), I enjoyed the movie immensely. It did the suitors (both their intrigue with Telemachus and their fight against Odysseus) better than any Odyssey adaptation I’ve ever seen, the Siren sequence was bone chilling, and Agamemnon’s character design has me obsessed. But there’s one glaring flaw in the midst of all the film’s good qualities: Odysseus isn’t in it.

Odysseus is the man of many turns: much traveled and full of tricks. He’s paranoid, a liar and a cheat, always the smartest guy in the room. And he’s a show stealer, a man who will talk your ear off to distract you while he steals from you. He’s been much portrayed in both the ancient and modern worlds — he’s not a character of a single text, he burns his way through other ancient poems and plays. In short, I know this guy. I’d recognize him if I met him. And Nolan’s Odysseus isn’t the guy.

In Nolan’s Odyssey, Odysseus’s defining personality characteristic is his sense of honor and justice. He plucks his bow to give his prey fair warning when hunting. He’s tortured by the terrible things he participated in at Troy (or, really, the things he enabled others to do — Nolan doesn’t let us see Odysseus commit any war crimes himself, only stand by in horror as his fellow Greeks do). People say Odysseus was the smartest Greek in the war, but the only intelligence we see from him on screen is an action hero’s knack for battle tactics — more Bourne Identity than Odyssean wit.

The ancient Odysseus is a trickster character, but the only trick Nolan’s Odysseus is responsible for is the Trojan Horse. (I’m going to note here that I think the design of the horse looks stupid. It’s not a serious quibble and reasonable people may disagree, but I hated it.) We first see the Trojan Horse partially submerged in the sea, something I’ve never seen done before. We learn that the tide has come in, and the Greeks inside are having to pass down straws to try to keep the soldiers at the bottom from drowning. Some of them do drown. The one example of Odysseus’s tricky intelligence we get, and it involves him leaving the horse in the goddamn ocean so some of his fellow soldiers can drown for no reason? Smartest of the Greeks indeed.

(Another minor complaint: it drives me crazy that they call themselves Greeks. That term won’t exist until centuries later. It doesn’t appear in Homer because it wasn’t around at time of composition, let alone the even earlier Bronze Age setting. Of course the characters in the movie are also speaking English, which also didn’t exist yet, so it’s absolutely excusable as a translation. But it does make me mad. Use Achaeans or something, put me in the Homeric frame of mind instead of sticking me in an intro World History class.)

All the other moments that ancient Odysseus uses his famous cunning are conspicuously absent from the film. There’s no verbal jousting with Polyphemus; they don’t say a word to each other. (I do enjoy the concept of Polyphemus being able to talk but not addressing the Greeks because “Do you talk to ants?”, but I feel it’s a choice that removes more than it adds.) There’s no battle of wits with Circe; Odysseus just ends up ordering her around. On Ithaca, Homer’s Odysseus recruits lots of his slaves into his deception; here, he doesn’t reveal himself to any of them, just takes it all on his own shoulders and communicates with them when necessary through significant glances.

There’s a tradition in Homeric scholarship of separating Odysseus’s trials into two categories (which roughly alternate in the epic): violence or temptation. Polyphemus, the Laestrygonians, Scylla and Charybdis — these are violent foes that Odysseus must survive. The lotus eaters, Circe, the Sirens, Calypso — these tempt him to stay with them, to lose who he is and forget what he’s supposed to be returning to. But Nolan’s Odysseus is a character of violence; Nolan deftly avoids tempting his version of the character at all.

Nolan’s Odysseus does encounter most of the Homeric Odyssey’s temptations, but the changes to the story make them fail to test him meaningfully. The Sirens are closest to their depiction in the epic: in both versions, Odysseus would have caved to their temptation if he had not had himself tied to the mast, unable to influence his sailors. Helios’s cattle (a slightly different sort of temptation) are also functionally identical: Odysseus is forewarned that anyone who eats them will die, and his men disobey the order while he remains firm. But Nolan’s Circe is robbed of most of her character. She is not the beguiling witch who invites Odysseus into her bed and keeps him there for a year; Nolan’s Odysseus regains his sailors by threatening her, not seducing her, and leaves her island on the same day.

It is Calypso who undergoes the most interesting change. Nolan’s Calypso does take Odysseus as her lover unlike poor Circe, but she does so in a way that doesn’t threaten modern notions of his faithfulness to Penelope: she drugs him with lotus to make him forget the pain of losing his entire crew while she nourishes him back to health. Moving the lotus flowers to this place in the story is graceful and serves Nolan’s aim well, but it robs Odysseus of his choice to abstain and drag his sailors away from it. It also makes his Odysseus less himself on Calypso’s island: he doesn’t remember his family, his crew, or the Trojan War; when Calypso takes away the lotus and he remembers, he is heartbroken to find he has spent seven years in a stupor.

Nolan has stripped his Odysseus of his agency. The Odysseus of epic pulls himself away from temptation at every turn, only to find himself shipwrecked on Calypso’s island and stranded as her prisoner for years. He avails himself of the opportunity to become her bedmate, but he remembers Penelope the entire time, living torn between his temporary happiness with Calypso and his desire to return home. Homer’s Odysseus returns to Ithaca with a complicated history of the previous ten years, full of some stories that make him a hero and others that make him a heel. Nolan’s Odysseus is obsessed with his return to Penelope, and only a drug administered to him without his consent (though with the best of intentions of course!) could make him forget it. This is a character trait, not a choice we ever see him question and thus reinforce. It is flat, static.

The ancient Odysseus is messy, both by ancient and modern standards. He’s a liar, he cheats, he wins by treachery as often as by being the better fighter. Nolan’s Odysseus is simple. He’s the strongest man on Ithaca, the smartest and best of the Greeks, the only upholder of “Zeus’s law” (don’t get me started on that one; xenia is not “do unto others as you would have them do unto you;” I will bite someone) in a time when the world is forgetting it. He facilitates (stops short of personally committing) terrible deeds in war, but he has the good grace to feel tortured about them afterward. He has to kill the suitors to return stability to his kingdom, so any joy he takes in the revenge is merely incidental to the noble deed he’s committing. His last act of the film is self-sacrifice, disappearing into further exile to allow his son to rule.

This isn’t the guy. You can like him if you want — I find him too flat and modern overall, but he does have some compelling features. But you can’t tell me this is Odysseus, because he just isn’t.

Now if you want Odysseus, you know where to find him. George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill in O Brother Where Art Thou?

Sure, it’s not a straight Odyssey adaptation, but Odysseus is as alive in there as he is in Homer. Everett is boisterous and tricky, a man always on the lookout for how to turn bad circumstances into the con that will get him what he wants. He speaks a mile a minute, filling the air with the sound of his own voice in an attempt to make sure he’s the only one in the exchange able to think clearly. And, crucially, it only sometimes works. Everett’s intelligence is never in doubt, but his prudence sure is. Every setback he faces is his own doing. He is his own biggest problem as well as his solution.

That’s Odysseus. That’s the scene-stealing, too-smart-for-his-own-good blowhard I know. Matt Damon is good in Nolan’s Odyssey, but they didn’t write the right character for him to play. George Clooney with a tiny mustache and a hairnet? That’s Odysseus.

So yeah. The Odyssey was damn good. Go enjoy Robert Pattinson as Antinous the scheming suitor, and Darth Vader Agamemnon with his spine ponytail, and Argos the pathetic former hunting dog on the dung heap. But spare a thought for poor Odysseus, who didn’t make the cut.

If you enjoyed my take on Nolan’s Odyssey, you might enjoy “Polyphemos,” my short story adaptation of the Cyclops scene from the Cyclops’s point of view! You can get access by subscribing to my Patreon at the Friend (CA $2) level or above, or find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other eBook retailers!

There a monstrous man was wont to sleep, who shepherded his flocks alone and afar, and mingled not with others, but lived apart, with his heart set on lawlessness. For he was fashioned a wondrous monster, and was not like a man that lives by bread, but like a wooded peak of lofty mountains, which stands out to view alone, apart from the rest.

— Homer’s Odyssey Book 9, translated by A. T. Murray

“Polyphemos!” my neighbor shouts from across my field. “Good morning!”

I flinch at the sound, narrowing my eye. Steeling myself, I look up and find him in the distance. He’s grinning and waving like an empty-headed puppet. I’d rather have a hot stake driven through my eye than talk to this moron.

“Abraxos!” I call back. “You’re looking content! You must have finally popped that boil on your ass!”

Abraxos’s face falls. He runs a hand over his beard, his jaw working aimlessly.

“Are you trying to think up a response?” I call. “Or are you chewing a bit of gristle? If it’s the latter, do the whole island a favor and choke on it!”

“Why do you always have to be such a dick, Polyphemos?” Abraxos stomps away, his face flushed. I can always hope that this was the last straw and he’ll give up trying to be friendly with me for good. But I know I’ll never be that lucky. He’ll be back in a few hours, the same vacant grin on his big round face, trying to make conversation out of nothing.

But I’ve bought myself a morning of peace, and I intend to enjoy it. I sit back down in my usual spot, beneath the shadiest tree on my hill. My sheep are grazing all around me, the biggest ones on the island. There’s a ewe right next to me, and I reach out to run my fingers through her curly wool. Beautiful: thick and soft with no mats. It’ll be time to shear them all in another few days. For now, I let them graze. I milked the ewes this morning, so there’s nothing left for me to do but enjoy the fresh air, maybe catch a nap.

I keep petting my ewe, a red-haired beauty I call Aurora after the rosy-fingered dawn. She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t shy away from me. My sheep trust me like they trust their own mothers. They’re the only beings on this island I would never hurt. Some of the Cyclopes eat their sheep, but not me. My sheep give me milk, cheese, and wool; that’s enough. I prefer other sources of meat.

The grass sways with a gentle breeze. Not far from where I’m sitting, the sea laps gently at a rocky shore, filling the air with the sound of waves and the smell of sea salt. A nearby freshwater spring bubbles away in a thrumming refrain. I hear a melody and quickly locate the source: a rock thrush singing from a hollow in the mountainside right next to the entrance to my cave. Its blue-gray feathers shine in the sunlight. The colors are so rich I almost wish I could paint them, but what would be the point? To show someone else? I’d rather enjoy it now, by myself.

The other Cyclopes all like to clump up, work together, form organizations, and talk, talk, talk. They think I’m crazy because I want to be on my own. They’re the crazy ones. What could be better than this?

I glance out at the sea and stop short. There’s something out there. I shield my eye from the sun with my hand and squint over the waves. Little dots in the distance, near the horizon. It’s rare for ships to come within sight of this island.

They’re probably lost. Experienced seafaring men know better than to explore these parts. If they come ashore, may the gods help them — certainly no one else will.

“Have you seen the ships, Polyphemos?” calls Abraxos as the afternoon wears on to evening. “Mortal men, drawing near our island! It’s all anyone is talking about!”

Of course they are. Talking, talking, talking. Filling the air with their foul breath and fouler opinions. That’s all other Cyclopes are good for.

“Oh, sure,” I call back. “I suppose you’ll be going with them, then?”

“What do you mean?” Abraxos asks warily.

“Well, your father’s a mortal man, isn’t he? He must be coming to collect you!”

Abraxos eyes me from his hilltop in the distance. He comes no closer — he knows better than to cross into my field. “What are you talking about, Polyphemos? My father is Poseidon, same as you.”

“Oh, that can’t be,” I say, my face pretending great gravity. “Someone’s told you a lie. Short, dull, malformed… you’d have to be at least half mortal, maybe three-quarters.”

“Don’t be cruel,” Abraxos spits.

“If anything, I’m understating your case,” I laugh, starting to usher my sheep into my cave for the night. “But we’ll let that pass. Have you heard about the wolf that’s been marauding in these parts?”

Abraxos’s face switches to sincere concern as quickly as if he’d changed a drama mask. “I haven’t!”

“You’d better watch your flock, Abraxos, this one’s a killer.”

“I don’t worry. If any wolf comes near my sheep, I snap its neck before it can harm a one.” He mimes the motion, clearly trying to show me he’s not as puny as I say.

“Oh, not this one you won’t,” I say, my voice trembling. “It’s as high at the shoulder as I am, teeth like meat cleavers!”

I can see I’ve got Abraxos rattled. He is gloriously easy to fool, and no matter how many times I trick him, he’s always ready — I might even say eager — to fall for another.

“You’re lying,” he says with no conviction in his voice. “There’s no such wolf.”

“Take your chances if you want,” I shrug, my last sheep trotting obediently into my cave. It’s my biggest ram, Little Polyphemus — he’s always the first one out and the last one in. I’d say I love him like a son, but even if I did have a son, I could never love another Cyclops as much as I love my sheep. “I’m only trying to warn you. Good evening, Abraxos.”

I pick up the giant stone that sits next to my doorway and drop it into place. Abraxos couldn’t budge it even if he did dare to set foot on my land. Cyclopes are a large race, but I am big and strong even among my fellow giants. Few are the Cyclopes who could roll my boulder-door aside, let alone lift it as I do. Another useful way of guaranteeing my privacy.

The meat and cheese are delicious tonight — I caught two deer in the woods today and one goat off the face of the mountain, and they’re delectable. I tear all the meat off their tiny bones with my teeth, then suck out the marrow. I don’t cook my meat as some of the Cyclopes do. The fresher the better in my estimation.

As I settle in to sleep on my cot, I am troubled by those ships, which spent the day growing larger. I pretended not to care when I was talking to Abraxos, because fuck that guy. But I don’t like seeing those ships. There are mortal men approaching the island, and my cave is the closest to the shore. Whoever is aboard could decide to make themselves troublesome.

I do not like to be bothered.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this preview of “Polyphemos.” Read the rest by subscribing to my Patreon at the Friend (CA $2) level or above, or find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other eBook retailers!

Jack White is about to release his seventh solo studio album (and nineteenth overall studio album), Frozen Charlotte. That makes right now a great time to dive back in and discover or rediscover all the amazing albums Jack White has released so far, as himself or as part of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs, and the Dead Weather. Here’s your rundown of all of Jack White’s studio albums ranked from worst to best.

I’ve been a Jack White fan since 2004 — not the very beginning, but not that far off, especially considering that I was 15 at the time! I hopped on shortly after Elephant: I was wary of “Seven Nation Army,” which was way too popular to be good (I was that kind of music fan, still am to some extent), but my best friend (cooler than me) pulled me into the White Stripes with songs like “Apple Blossom,” “I Think I Smell a Rat,” and a live bootleg of “Boll Weevil.” I got my first White Stripes CD for my 16th birthday, a copy of De Stijl. (It came with my copy of We’re Only in It for the Money by Frank Zappa; what an important day for my taste.) I was head over heels after that.

Burned copies of the other White Stripes albums followed quickly. If you were a teenager in the 2000s you know this: you’d have a portion of your favorite music on official CDs, especially artists you liked more than your friends did, but most of the discs in your CD wallet were burned from your friends’ collections. And since the White Stripes were the coolest band around at the time, there was no shortage of people to give me CDs: Elephant in one friend’s handwriting, White Blood Cells in another, The White Stripes in my own because I had to download that one from my bestie in Chicago. I overcame my suspicion and came to love “Seven Nation Army.” I traded mp3s of Jack’s other work, weird live shows and his folk blues contributions to the Cold Mountain soundtrack (so cool). By the time Get Behind Me Satan came out in 2005, I was a certified superfan. I went out to get it the day it was released (and dutifully burned copies for all my friends).

I’ve followed Jack from laconic garage darling to offbeat music mogul, seen him received as exciting new blood and as a cringey passé relic. A lot has changed, both about Jack himself and the world around him. But a few things have remained constant: his prolific musicianship, his insistence on creative control, and his commitment to a mythical and mysterious public image. His work has fluctuated in quality, but he’s never let himself settle in or become boring, and I’ve never stopped respecting that.

So let’s start with the worst and work our way up to the best: this is Jack White.

The Bad and Mediocre

18. Boarding House Reach (Jack White, 2018)

It is an understatement to say that I despised Boarding House Reach when it came out. I’d been an ardent Jack White fan for 14 years at that point, and it left such a bad taste in my mouth that I almost completely stopped listening to even his older albums for a few years (until he coaxed me back into the fold in 2022 — see Fear of the Dawn).

Boarding House Reach saw Jack abandon a lot of the technical constraints he’d been working with for the rest of his career. He started using serious, expensive guitars instead of the oddball vintage ones he’d favored in the White Stripes (such as his famous Airline guitar, a stylish but not terribly playable piece of junk that wasn’t valuable until he rose to fame with one). And he recorded the album in a modern digital manner instead of his trademark old-fashioned analog setup.

The result is an album that feels very free and experimental. Jack is playing, stretching out with tools he’s been denying himself for years and finding that they’re a lot of fun. But a fun record to make doesn’t always translate to a good listen. That’s probably Boarding House Reach’s biggest issue: it feels like Jack just messing around, not a full artistic statement.

The songs range from decent but half-baked to fully cringeworthy. Jack White raps, which I could have lived a long and full life without hearing. Nothing feels finished; I can’t even point to a song that feels worth it, because it’s all so tossed off and ill considered. It’s a nothing sort of album, and I was beyond disappointed that my beloved fussy perfectionist had put it out. I’ve given it some chances to win me over since, hoping to get beyond my dreadful first impression, but I always end up waiting impatiently for it to end. It’s a divisive album among fans, not everyone hates it as much as I do… but invade my comments all you want, this one is trash.

17. Help Us Stranger (The Raconteurs, 2019)

Supergroup the Raconteurs put out two exciting albums in 2006 and 2008, then lay fallow for over ten years before offering us a third album. And it’s… fine. It’s not a bad record — there’s only one record on the list I’d call bad, so the rest of the lower tier of Jack White albums will be mediocrities, not disasters. And the worst I’ll call Help Us Stranger is lackluster.

The ingredients are there. Jack and Brendan Benson wrote good songs, and the band is in just as fine musical form as they ever were. But for whatever reason, the album doesn’t gel. The songs make good playlist fodder; they’re all nice listens, if a little relentlessly midtempo. They just don’t amount to much all in a row. Unlike their other two, this album doesn’t grow wings and take flight. It’s Just Another Raconteurs Album. Maybe they’d have been better off just doing a reunion tour.

16. Dodge and Burn (The Dead Weather, 2015)

Speaking of Jack White’s supergroups coming back just to do warmed-over versions of their old shtick. The Dead Weather weren’t dormant as long as the Raconteurs — they’d released their first albums in 2009 and 2010, so there were only 5 years between those and Dodge and Burn. But given that Jack had launched his solo career and put out two huge albums in that time, it felt longer.

And the third Dead Weather album? It’s fine. Some good songs and no magic.

It seemed like Jack was lost in the second half of the 2010s. It was a rough time to be a fan, because everything he put out was either an indifferent shrug or a slap in the face. It made his 2022 comeback that much sweeter. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

15. No Name (Jack White, 2024)

No Name was an album that generated a lot of buzz and excitement at its release. Partially, this was due to its very Jack White rollout: one day all customers to his Third Man Records storefronts and a randomly selected bunch of subscribers to his Third Man Vault subscription service received a white LP copy of the album in a plain white sleeve with nothing but “No Name” stamped on one side’s label. When they played the LP, they heard a whole new Jack White album with a blues/garage rock sound, which was the other part of the excitement: Jack was back to making White Stripes-esque music! Jack posted to his social media encouraging people to rip the new album and share it, so I (having not been chosen in the Vault lottery) first heard it as an mp3 needle drop with only guesses for the song titles.

The official release came the next week, giving us official song titles and a personnel listing, including Patrick Keeler of the Raconteurs on drums. When the album was still nebulous and almost secret, there was something very alluring about it, but once it officially landed, much of that evaporated.

Jack White has always had two sides: earnest and heartfelt, and aloof and posturing. Part of the secret of the White Stripes’ excellence was the way White juggled his sincerity and his nonsense. But from the comfort of his late career, White has a habit of doing entire albums of aloof nonsense without looking for the heart, and No Name is a great example.

Musically, No Name sounds like a more fleshed out version of the White Stripes: overdriven blues riffs, Jack’s beautiful voice, and sticky pop hooks, but with more traditional bass and drums. Lyrically, the album does nothing. Beyond the first couple of listens, one can no longer convince oneself that this is a spiritual successor to the White Stripes. It just doesn’t have the songs for it.

I don’t hate No Name — it gets my toes tapping, and a lot of the melodies are vintage Jack White excellence. But without that bleeding, beating heart, it all feels hollow. All style, no substance.

The Good

14. Blunderbuss (Jack White, 2012)

Before 2012, Jack had spent 13 years in the music industry, released albums with three bands, done untold numbers of collaborations, contributed to soundtracks, produced songs and albums for others… but he hadn’t released a solo album yet. He finally broke the streak with 2012’s Blunderbuss, and it was one of my highlights of that year.

Blunderbuss sounds like the first solo album Jack White was fated to make. It emphasizes his soft and acoustic side — there are a few great overdriven rock riffs, because he wouldn’t be Jack without them, but the album’s defining sound for me is a country rock style Jack would turn to frequently on solo records from here on: acoustic guitar, mandolin, fiddle, prominent piano, drums, and lots of backup vocals. It’s a formula that serves him well.

We have entered the “good” category of our countdown, because Blunderbuss is an outstanding record that is only as low as it is because of how great the ones above it are. It drags a little on side 2, stays a little too midtempo so the effect of the songs is diminished by their sameness. That’s the worst I can say about it, because the songs are still good.

13. Sea of Cowards (The Dead Weather, 2010)

At their best, the Dead Weather are a chic goth indie band, dark and with a heavy edge to their songs but staying firmly in blues rock territory instead of veering into punk or metal. The first two Dead Weather albums, released back to back in 2009 and 2010, are perfect expressions of this aesthetic. The first, Horehound, has the edge over Sea of Cowards because of novelty and by having more songs on it that are absolute classics.

Sea of Cowards sees Jack coming to the front a little more — the idea of him as Just the Drummer and Alison Mossheart as the frontwoman was thin to begin with, and with the second album, he comes to the mic more. The Dead Weather always had two frontpeople, and that’s not a bad thing; the second album just admits it more freely.

12. Lazaretto (Jack White, 2014)

Jack’s second solo album was released two years after his first, and the albums are extremely similar. There are lots of songs on one that would fit just as comfortably on the other. But where Blunderbuss felt like a songwriter’s record, Lazaretto leans a little more on the groove.

It’s also got some vintage Jack White gimmicky showmanship. For one, he claimed that he found all the lyrics for the album in diaries he kept as a teenager, then burned the diaries after turning them into songs. Sure Jack. Never change. For another, the LP version is a pull-out-all-the-stops showcase for silly things one can do on vinyl. One side plays inside to outside, one side has a parallel groove that plays a different introduction to its first song depending on how the needle happens to fall. There are etched holograms and extra nonsense hidden in grooves in both labels. It’s a bit much, but it is fun.

Musically, the album moves. It’s genre diverse, so it never stays in one place too long, and the songs have a nice balance of nonsense (the funk-tinged “That Black Bat Licorice”) and sincerity (“Would You Fight for My Love,” which could have been a late White Stripes song, only it wouldn’t have grooved this hard). This is some of the strongest songcraft you’ll hear on a solo Jack White album.

11. Entering Heaven Alive (Jack White, 2022)

In 2022, Jack broke a streak of lackluster albums by releasing two incredible ones a few months apart. Entering Heaven Alive was the second, and where the earlier Fear of the Dawn was the raucous one, this was the quiet acoustic one. It’s a coin flip which of these albums I prefer — I’ve put Fear above Heaven on this list because I do listen to it more often, but they’re evenly matched for brilliance in my mind.

Jack has always had a way with acoustic songs. The White Stripes’ albums are littered with them (including one of their earliest breakout songs), I mentioned my beloved Cold Mountain soundtrack, and he even released a compilation of his acoustic songs in 2016 (not included here because I’m not covering compilations or live albums). But on Entering Heaven Alive, his acoustic brilliance reaches new heights. It’s not all rock ballads, not even all country twang like on his earlier solo albums (though those things abound). There’s jazz fusion here, a dimension we’d hardly seen in his music before, and lots more inventive sounds besides.

And the songs. Desire, love, regret, madness, existential dread… there’s very little glib Jack on this album, it’s all openhearted. The music and songwriting are both very polished, so it isn’t the raw emotion of the White Stripes at their best, but Jack is older and more accomplished now — this is the poetry of a mature artist. If, like me, your first favorite Jack songs were “Apple Blossom,” “Sugar Never Tasted So Good,” “I’m Bound to Pack It Up,” or “Never Far Away,” then you have to hear “A Tree on Fire from Within,” “Love Is Selfish,” and “Help Me Along.”

10. Fear of the Dawn (Jack White, 2022)

The other 2022 album is the fun uncle of the pair. I knew we were in for a treat when Jack released the advance single “Hi-De-Ho,” a manic, feedback-drenched song with Cab Calloway samples and a guest rap from Q-Tip. Not on my bingo card, but would have been on my wish list if I’d dared dream of it.

Fear of the Dawn is the spiritual successor and elaboration on Jack’s funk rock on Lazaretto, and it’s way groovier here. It’s what Boarding House Reach tried to be: zany and fun, leaking genres as it careens around unexpected corners. Lyrically, it is lesser than Entering Heaven Alive; there’s a lot of surface-level nonsense here. But every time I drop the needle on it, I’m so carried away by its momentum that I don’t care. Fear of the Dawn is an explosion of inventive musicianship. It’s my favorite of the solo albums because all its alchemy just works.

The Great

9. Broken Boy Soldiers (The Raconteurs, 2006)

Listen. I told you who I was at the beginning of the post: I’m an original Jack White fangirl. Is it only bias that the entire top 9 of the list is all of his albums from the 2000s, and everything after 2010 makes up the bottom? No. It’s objectively correct, actually. Just listen to them.

Broken Boy Soldiers was Jack’s first album outside the White Stripes. We panicked a little bit at the time: did it mean the Stripes were no more? (We were a year early on that front.) But no, Jack assured us. This was a side project and supergroup. And though I didn’t know the other names at the time, they were great in their own rights: Brendan Benson is a power pop hero and amazing songwriter, and the rhythm section hails from the excellent Ohio garage rock band the Greenhornes.

I remember learning about this album’s existence from an online Rolling Stone article right after it was released, and driving my then-boyfriend-now-husband directly to Warehouse Music to get the CD. The first time I heard “Steady as She Goes,” Jack singing over a conventional drum beat and heavy bass felt surreal, almost heretical except for how good it was. 2006 was the summer I was packing up to move to university, and the theme of independence in the Zeppelin-esque title track hit me right where it hurt.

The songwriting on this is so fun. Brendan really elevated and challenged Jack’s extremely direct songwriting style with playfulness and pop bounce. Broken Boy Soldiers is short and to the point; every song pulls its weight. It’s a breezy, effortlessly cool album, a perfect first step in a life outside the White Stripes.

8. Horehound (The Dead Weather, 2009)

A few years after the debut of the Raconteurs, the White Stripes broke up, and Jack came out with this oddball supergroup: the Kills’ Alison Mossheart on vocals, Queens of the Stone Age’s Dean Fertita on guitar and organ (his organ for this group is moody and perfect), familiar Jack Lawrence (Greenhornes and Raconteurs) on bass, and Jack White on drums of all things. The first singles were killer gothic blues rock drenched in all black visuals, and it spoke to me immediately.

When the first album came out, reports of Jack White as only a drummer turned out to be quite exaggerated. His singing voice shows up plenty, his songwriting fingerprints are all over it, and it reeks of him musically. As producer, Jack was driving the ship, even if he wasn’t in his traditional seat of frontman and guitarist. When I saw them on the tour for this album, he was already taking the mic with a guitar for some songs. The Dead Weather is a project where Jack can step ever so slightly out of the spotlight, but not too far. And it’s fun that way — he lets Alison take the mic for the most part and just peeks out every now and then.

Horehound, the debut album, is the Dead Weather at their best. The music is heavy and propulsive, the songs are great fun, and Mossheart’s threatening sneer as frontwoman is just so cool. This is the Jack album for the Halloween-all-year crowd, and as a member of that crowd, I’m all for it.

7. The White Stripes (The White Stripes, 1999)

That’s right, we’re far enough into the best that we finally get to cover White Stripes albums. The impact of the earliest White Stripes albums is one of the few things I can’t personally attest to, but I know second hand: they were a garage rock shot across the bow in an era of meticulously produced pop-alternative and scumbag metal. They came up from a thriving scene of underground rock, and though they weren’t the first to make it, they certainly became the poster children. It was more than just raw, unschooled-sounding music: in an era of sexualized pop and misogynist rock, the White Stripes set themselves up as a sweet, innocent brother-sister duo with stage patter cribbed from ’30s blues and jazz singers. They were a breath of fresh air.

Of course it was an act. Jack and Meg were married, not brother and sister. They hid behind a primitivist style leant by Meg’s intentionally elementary drumming, but Jack was about as accomplished a guitarist as ever took the stage. But who cared, their aesthetics were too cool: the hand painted candy stripes, the white, red, and black exclusive clothing, the handmade flyers, the vintage guitars that looked straight out of pawn shops, the lo-fi albums recorded to tape. This band was it.

Their first album is fantastic, but also the bottom of the list. It’s their garagiest and punkiest, and though it hints at some of the genre exploration that would bring the band to full maturity, it stays stubbornly in the same style throughout. The White Stripes is a perfect snapshot of the band they were in their earliest years; they just got to be a better band as the 2000s began.

6. Icky Thump (The White Stripes, 2007)

Right above the White Stripes’ first is their last. They’d abandoned much of their simplistic lo-fi roots in their previous album, Get Behind Me Satan, in favor of a degree of studio polish and a whole lot more genre exploration. Icky Thump sees the band continuing to explore the potential of modern studios, though its sound is more focused on rock than its predecessor.

The songs are outstanding. The overall effect suffers a bit from the same problem as Get Behind Me Satan before it: Meg’s drumming occasionally sounds out of place in polished songs in a way that it doesn’t in garage recordings. But that’s a minor quibble in a sea of incredible sounds. There are huge rock songs, there are aching tender ballads, there’s the fun mariachi-tinged “Conquest” and the bagpipe-laden “Prickly Thorn, but Sweetly Worn.” Icky Thump isn’t the most essential of the White Stripes’ albums, but it’s a great one that deserves a spot on your shelf.

The Perfect

5. Consolers of the Lonely (The Raconteurs, 2008)

Starting our final stretch in the top five, we have the highest album on the list not by the White Stripes. The Raconteurs’ second album was a surprise in a few ways. First, I’d been pretty sure the first album was a one-off, and I can’t have been the only one — another Raconteurs album was a pleasant surprise. Second, they dropped it only a month after finishing it with almost no promotion. Third, it blew its excellent predecessor out of the water.

The first Raconteurs record was a fun, light confection, an effortless little summer album. Consolers of the Lonely is a masterpiece. It’s a far more ambitious project, and it reaches every one of those ambitions. Alongside the easy pop we have some seriously heavy rock and aching ballad work. Where Soldiers presents a new band enjoying learning their way around each other, Consolers represents a group of mature professionals forging new paths. The White Stripes had ended unexpectedly the previous year — Meg had declared herself done with the band mid-tour, catching Jack by surprise. Did he pour more of himself into this album because the stakes had gone up, because he didn’t have his main band anymore so now this one needed to count? Feels possible.

Some songs have an epic sweep — not only Jack’s infamous (and pretty self-indulgent) “Carolina Drama,” but their cover of “Rich Kid Blues” reach theatrical heights. Horn sections on two songs lend majesty and verve. The group vocals are always perfect and well deployed. It’s almost twice the length of the first album, but I never want it to end. For my money, this is the best thing Jack has ever done outside the White Stripes.

4. Get Behind Me Satan (The White Stripes, 2005)

I’m going to get in trouble for putting this one so high. Bring it on, commenters: you’re just mad I’m so right.

Get Behind Me Satan was a tidal shift in the White Stripes. Their first four albums were minimalist garage rock recorded in lo-fi style on analog equipment. The fifth saw Jack stretching out in genre and instrumentation and using excellent-sounding modern studios. And I say Jack deliberately, because despite Meg’s wonderful brief vocal performance, Get Behind Me Satan absolutely feels more like a Jack White solo debut than a White Stripes album. He was always the prime songwriting force, but he indulges his every impulse on this one. Meg is quieter than ever, and as I mentioned, her drums occasionally sound a little out of place on this bigger, more polished-sounding album.

Musically, Jack is pulling all the genres he’s been playing with outside the White Stripes into the tent. There’s the usual rock and pop, but there’s also the country and folk of Cold Mountain, there’s world music and vaudeville tomfoolery. Jack’s octave-pedal-laden guitar reaches new heights on this album, but its softer songs demand even more attention: I don’t think he’s ever written anything that touches me as deeply as “As Ugly As I Seem.”

I talked at the top of the post about getting this on CD on release day, and as excited as I was to get my hands on it, I was a little skeptical at first listen. The advance single, “Blue Orchid,” felt a little on the nose for me (the “Seven Nation Army” problem, too likely to be popular), and the overall impression was distinctly non-White-Stripes-ish. But it quickly won me over and became easily my favorite album of my last year of high school. Get Behind Me Satan was an artistic turn not every White Stripes fan could get behind, but those of us willing to follow were richly rewarded.

3. De Stijl (The White Stripes, 2000)

The White Stripes’ second album was my first of theirs, and it still competes with the rest of the top 4 on this list for my favorite. Where their debut was purposefully constrained to a single garage rock sound profile, De Stijl expands the palette, keeping planted in its roots.

Overall, De Stijl is a little softer and more acoustic. Jack gets way deeper into the Delta blues (including covers of Son House and Blind Willie McTell) and relaxes some of the tempos to let his songs breathe. But we’ve still got our garage punk fun in tracks like “Let’s Build a Home” and “Jumble, Jumble” near the end. The White Stripes showed a lot of potential, but De Stijl is the arrival of Jack White as a blues rock force to be reckoned with.

2. White Blood Cells (The White Stripes, 2001)

The White Stripes’ third album was their breakout. The electric “Fell in Love with a Girl” and the acoustic “We’re Going to Be Friends” got noticed and did a good job showing what breadth the tiny band was capable of. But those two hits barely scratch the surface of the brilliance in this album.

White Blood Cells is a barn burner start to finish. It’s as tight and focused as The White Stripes, as dynamic and varied as De Stijl, and an improvement on both. The songs formed the core of the Stripes’ live sets for the rest of their touring years — I’m not even going to start listing the classics, because they’ll overtake the paragraph. The lyrics are pure Jack White: disillusionment with modernity and growing up, pleas for the simplicity of the past (personal and historical), love met with apathy, just a dash of jaded cynicism to undercut all the sincerity. And the guitar playing and synergy are on a new level — the world touring Jack and Meg did after De Stijl elevated them both as musicians.

I consider White Blood Cells to be the pinnacle of the White Stripes, the payout promised by their first two albums, the culmination of what the group set out to be. But there’s one album I’ve placed above it. Because after White Blood Cells, the band reached beyond what they’d ever tried to do, and touched the sublime…

1. Elephant (The White Stripes, 2003)

Where White Blood Cells is the finest White Stripes album, Elephant is something more. The band started with a lot of artificial restraints in place: the limited color palette was a hint at their adherence to Spartan songcraft, restrained drums, old-fashioned gear that limited their technical abilities, etc. And while they made a bigger step out of those restraints with 2005’s Get Behind Me Satan, their first spiritual steps beyond were here on Elephant. And boy were they good steps.

The first song on the album isn’t only the album’s biggest song, it’s the biggest thing Jack White has ever touched, a song that is belted out in sports arenas the world over even by people who have never heard the original. Yet even if you were to cut off “Seven Nation Army” and start this album as-is from track 2, Elephant would still be the best thing Jack White has ever done. In fact, that’s exactly what I used to do — as I mentioned, when I started listening to the White Stripes in 2004, I hated “Seven Nation Army,” so I consistently started this CD from track 2. It was the powerhouse “There’s No Home for You Here” that doomed me. Within a week I was obsessed with the whole album, overplayed hit and all.

It’s got Meg’s best ever vocal song. It’s got probably Jack’s best ever guitar performance on “Ball and Biscuit.” It’s got classic song after classic song that veer around their normal garage punk and blues styles, all while cultivating a hooky pop appeal that is significantly more muted on their earlier albums. In a way, this album is the birth of the smirky, posturing Jack White that I’ve decried in his later career, but I can’t be mad at him here. The White Stripes in 2003 were just too cool.

Jack White’s Best Albums

That does it for my list of Jack White’s albums ranked from worst to best. He was unabashedly my hero when I was a teenager, and while he’s lost some of his luster since then (part of growing up is learning that all heroes do that to some extent), he’s still an incredibly gifted musician with a body of work worth diving into. I’m 24 years out from poring over Rolling Stone articles in my bedroom sifting out scraps of information about him, but one thing hasn’t changed: Jack White rules.

What do you think? What are your favorites, and how would you rank things differently?

1 pm on Sunday, June 6, 1971: a reporter wakes Frank Zappa at his hotel room door and asks him if he’d like to meet John Lennon. The first in a series of events that led to John and Yoko sharing the stage with Zappa for 25 minutes that evening, a moment enshrined in rock and roll infamy. The aftermath of that June night in New York City would highlight the common ground and differences between these two rock stars, the effects of varying levels of fame and financial power, and the impossible conflicts over licensing and intellectual property.

Background: The Edgy Beatle and the Mean Mother

John Lennon needs no introduction. He was the most outspoken and experimental of the Beatles. Though his background was straight rock and roll, he ventured into more experimental territory with his wife, the conceptual artist Yoko Ono. The Beatles are on record as admirers of Frank Zappa’s work in the ’60s, and in particular John’s infamous “Revolution 9” from the White Album is a conscious imitation of the sorts of musique concrete Zappa frequently used in his music (see “Return of the Son of Monster Magnet” on Freak Out or “The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny” on We’re Only in It for the Money.

Frank Zappa is the lesser-known of this pair of rock icons. He was an underground hit in the ’60s with his band the Mothers of Invention — he didn’t sell many records, but fellow musicians loved him. His shows and house parties were always packed with celebrities, there to soak up his revolutionary musical ideas or (somewhat more likely) to enjoy the undeniably cool cachet of being in the orbit of an iconoclast. Zappa’s music was intentionally challenging: dense compositions with unusual scales and time signatures, long improvisational stretches that challenged what could even be called music, and lyrics that often combined humor with biting social commentary. Zappa was a musician’s musician, someone you name-checked to prove you were really with it.

And though the Beatles had a lot of appreciation for Frank Zappa, Zappa mostly treated the Beatles with disdain. He had been making highly experimental music since the early ’60s and releasing challenging albums since 1966. So when the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper was hailed as an experimental masterpiece and the first rock and roll concept album, Zappa balked. He had already released two concept albums, and compared to his band, the Beatles were commercial pop dilettantes. The Mothers’ next record, We’re Only in It for the Money, was a send-up of Sgt Pepper: the album design was a direct parody, the lyrics skewered the peace and love hippies as a bunch of vapid trend-chasers, and the music was more experimental than ever. One would have every reason to believe the Beatles might take offense at the album, but they either didn’t mind or just didn’t notice.

As the ’60s gave way to the ’70s, Zappa and Lennon both underwent significant changes. Lennon left the Beatles and embarked on a solo career, which involved a lot of studio time (prior to the night he played with Frank, he’d released Plastic Ono Band in 1970 and recorded but not yet released Imagine in 1971) but almost no public performance. Aside from a few tossed-together one-off charity gigs, John hadn’t played a concert since the Beatles quit the road in 1966.

For his part, Zappa summarily dismissed the original Mothers of Invention in 1969 and began recording solo albums at his usual rapid pace. In 1970, he put together a new touring band, now mostly called the Mothers (no “of Invention”). The second-generation Mothers were anchored by a pair of vocalists called Flo & Eddie — Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, formerly of the pop group the Turtles. The show the band developed was heavily reliant on insider humor about groupies and touring, which was a bit off-putting. But underneath the ribald humor was a tightly rehearsed progressive rock band, featuring star turns from keyboardist and woodwind player Ian Underwood and the extraordinary drummer Aynsley Dunbar. Zappa was a dedicated road warrior, playing shows at a relentless pace through the end of 1970 and all of 1971. It was this touring that finally brought the LA-based Zappa and the London-based Lennon together.

The Meeting

And I was supposed to go ‘Eek!’ and fall backwards into the doorway, so I said ‘Okay, come on in and sit down.’

Frank Zappa and the Mothers were playing a two-night engagement on June 5th and 6th, 1971, at the Fillmore East, which was slated to close at the end of the month. The 5th and 6th were a Saturday and a Sunday, and Frank was playing his complex set on two shows per night, at 8 pm and 11 pm.

It was on the Sunday (between the two nights) that WPLJ radio host Howard Smith showed up at the door of Frank Zappa’s hotel room at 1 pm. Zappa had an interview scheduled with Smith, but Smith caught him barely awake. Excitedly, Smith brandished his tape recorder and told a half-dressed Zappa that he’d like him to meet his friends John and Yoko.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were in New York preparing to move there (which they did in August), and while meeting with Smith, Lennon got excited at the prospect of being about to interview Zappa. In Frank’s telling, the interviewer expected him to be bowled over by meeting the much more famous Lennon, but Frank wasn’t impressed, merely inviting all three to come sit with him in his hotel room. Apparently, he and John told each other they weren’t as ugly as they looked in pictures.

Smith did the interview with all three celebrities (the interview itself does not seem to survive) — in Smith’s recollection, John was heavily deferential to Frank, and Yoko was more forthcoming. After the interview, someone proposed that John and Yoko make an appearance at one of Frank’s shows that night: Zappa said it was him, but Howard Smith claims to have pitched the idea. Whoever proposed it, John said maybe, Yoko said absolutely. They arranged to meet in the dressing room between the two shows.

The Show

Sit down and cool it for a minute so you can hear what we’re going to do…

It happened in the encore of the second show on June 6, Zappa’s last moments on stage at the doomed Fillmore East. Frank had played his first show of the night, then retired to the dressing room to jam on old R&B songs with the Lennon-Onos. R&B was an important common ground between John and Frank: both had grown up obsessed with late-‘50s R&B and begun their careers playing R&B covers in bars. They picked a suitable song to open with, and Frank returned to the stage for the second show. John and Yoko spent the main part of the show in the sound mixing booth, then came out as soon as the band left the stage.

The audience didn’t know it was coming — they were there to see Zappa and the Mothers, who could have guessed a Beatle would show up? Frank dropped one tantalizing hint as the band tuned at the very top of the show, saying, “And I think that tonight, boys and girls, this may be one of the memorable events here.” Right he was. We’re lucky enough to have almost the entire event on film and audio, a rarity for this era, so we can tell a lot about what happened.

There is no moment of Frank Zappa or any of his band saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. John Lennon!” John goes straight to the mic and says, “I’ve decided to say hello,” receiving rapturous applause while Yoko gives peace signs behind him. Frank tries to quiet the audience, then addresses his band, giving a hilariously vague description of the chord changes in this song they have not rehearsed.

John, introducing “Well,” tells the cheering crowd that he used to do the song in the Cavern in Liverpool. And indeed he did — “Well” is a 1958 B-side by Walter Ward, a driving R&B number that plays to all of John Lennon’s strengths. John delivers an incredible lead vocal performance (though he sings the same verse over and over), Frank plays blistering lead guitar, and Yoko Ono provides her divisive signature vocalizations. Frank Zappa takes the first solo, then gives the second to his keyboardist (either Ian Underwood or Bob Harris, I can’t tell, assisted in either case by Don Preston on mini-Moog). John Lennon takes a short solo near the end, but he’s never been a celebrated lead guitarist — he lets Frank take back over quickly.

Frank: We’ll take turns conducting.

John: Okay!

After “Well” is a loose jam session, variously sectioned and titled across the three released versions of the set. There is an atonal section (later called “Say Please” by Zappa) ruled by hand gestures. Frank Zappa was famous for controlling his band’s improvisations with a set of hand gestures, playing his band like an instrument. Frank had done some of these to guide the band during “Well” (remember, they hadn’t rehearsed it!), and John had imitated him, so Frank taught John the basics and allowed him to take over. Watching John Lennon do Zappa’s signature moves is a joy, and of course, he can’t help but make a joke out of it and do things that have no meaning, like putting the signal between his legs. Yoko improvises over all of it, the one person on stage not guided by the hand motions.

After a few loose moments, Zappa plays the opening riff to one of his signature compositions, and the band joins in immediately. “King Kong” was prominently featured on the Mothers of Invention’s 1969 album “Uncle Meat,” and had been one of his concert staples for a few years. The Mothers play an abbreviated version here while Yoko vocalizes and John tries his best to pick up the chord changes on his guitar.

As the brief “King Kong” rendition winds down, John starts to conduct the band with hand motions again, and another atonal section ensues. Yoko begins to make a noise that later caused Zappa to title this section “Aaawk,” and Preston’s mini-Moog shines again. Honestly, Yoko Ono and the Mothers are a match made in avant-garde noise heaven — if there was any justice, this would have been the first of many collaborations.

Eventually, the music picks up rhythm and tunefulness, and John starts to chant “scum bag” over the vamping band. The Mothers take up the chant, and Howard Kaylan starts to list aspects of his life he’s going to put in the scum bag (all my possessions, my Zappa records, my old high school, etc.). Eventually, Kaylan produces a big bag from somewhere backstage and puts it over Yoko’s head — I remember reading about this in the pre-video days of the internet and thinking it sounded cruel, but in the video, you can see him show her the bag and get her permission; it’s rather charming, really. Finally, Frank lowers the music to encourage the audience to chant “scum bag” with the band, then leads the whole building in a shout-along.

Finally, Frank says goodnight and shoos his band off the stage. But John stays, and Yoko lingers by his side as he holds his ringing guitar up to the amp and starts to play with the feedback. John whispers to Yoko a bit, and she returns to her mic to resume her vocal improvisations. For the next few minutes, John and Yoko make hypnotic, ambient noises together, aided by a few Mothers who come back onstage (the one you can hear best is Aynsley Dunbar playing cymbals). Then Frank, John, and Yoko say a final goodbye and leave.

John: We’d like to thank Frank for having us on with him.

Yoko: Yeah, he’s great, isn’t he? He’s the greatest.

All in all, the lack of preparation of any sort is palpable in this set — it’s a jam session more than a performance. They play one pretty good cover tune and a snatch of one of Zappa’s compositions, and the rest is loose improvisation and intentionally abrasive noise. One could have hoped for better from two of rock and roll’s greatest minds, but hey, they met at 2 pm that day, and Frank had two shows to play starting at 8. The loose, unplanned nature of the set suited John’s live style fine; he always flew by the seat of his pants. Frank was more of an obsessive, perfectionist rehearser, but he also finely tuned his band for spontaneity and improvisation. The Mothers were the perfect foil for John and Yoko.

The Tapes

So far, everything in this story is nice and cozy. It was the fate of the recordings that turned everything sour and ensured that Zappa and Lennon would never collaborate again.

Frank Zappa had recorded pretty much all of his shows since the late ’60s, cobbling together albums out of a mixture of live and studio material. So naturally, tapes were rolling when Zappa and Lennon took the stage together at the Fillmore. They had an informal agreement that they’d each be allowed to do with the tapes whatever they wanted — that neither would have full ownership of the session, but both could use it in their own releases.

Zappa sent a safety copy of the multitrack tapes to Lennon and made his own mix of the recording, intending to release it on the album he was preparing of the show, but Lennon’s lawyers wouldn’t move fast enough to clear his inclusion. Zappa’s Fillmore East — 1971 was released a mere month after recording in August 1971; he had intended to include a second disc with his epic “Billy the Mountain” on side 1 and the Lennon/Ono session on side 2, but the legal delays meant that the final release was only one disc.

Sometime in 1972, Zappa was informed that Lennon planned to release a recording of their jam session on one of his albums. He was promised that Apple would contact him to negotiate about rights and credits. But no such negotiations ever took place. John Lennon and Yoko Ono released Some Time in New York City in June 1972. It was a studio album with a live bonus disc: side 1 was from a charity gig John and Yoko played in 1969, and side 2 was the jam with Frank Zappa. Zappa was already bothered that he’d been prevented from releasing the material, and this release angered him further for three main reasons.

First, the mix. Phil Spector drenched the sound in reverb, mixed the band low, and almost entirely removed Flo & Eddie’s vocals to give extra prominence to John and Yoko. (“Well” also contained overdubbed bass by Klaus Voormann, but this was standard operating procedure to punch up live albums at this time.)

Second, the credits. As I mentioned, the Mothers played an abbreviated version of the well-known Zappa composition “King Kong” under some improvisations by John and Yoko. But on the LP, the section containing “King Kong” was titled “Jamrag” (British slang for a menstrual pad) and credited to Ono and Lennon. It was not only an insult, but a legal issue: they’d credited one of Zappa’s signature compositions to themselves and robbed him of songwriting royalties.

Third, the sleeve. Zappa’s Fillmore East album came in a plain white sleeve, with a cover and liner notes handwritten by Zappa’s designer, Cal Schenkel, in pencil. Lennon’s album reproduced Zappa’s Fillmore East cover as the inner sleeve of the live disc, with handwritten additions by Lennon in red ink. I think it’s pretty dang charming myself, but Zappa was bothered by Lennon releasing a modified version of his own work, and especially by him crossing out credits and writing over the message “Don’t forget to register to vote” with the less practical “War is over if you want it.”

All of this was enough to permanently sour Zappa on his encounter with Lennon. He had been prevented from his own release of the material so that Lennon’s people could put out a slapdash version and steal credit from him. Now he had to wrangle with Apple’s lawyers over the songwriting credit and royalties for “King Kong,” a song that was so patently his that only rank carelessness and incompetence could have let it see uncredited release on an album by one of the biggest artists of the time. The legal issues were mostly fixed, but Zappa and Lennon apparently never had any contact after their one and only meeting.

Decades later, in 1992, Frank Zappa finally released his own edit of the Lennon/Ono recording on Playground Psychotics, an early archival CD that’s a sort of tour diary for the Mothers in 1971. The mix on Playground Psychotics sounds much cleaner and more muscular than the version on Some Time in New York City, with Flo & Eddie’s vocals fully restored.

Thirty years after that, in 2022, Zappa’s estate released the complete recordings of the June 5th and 6th Fillmore East shows for the album’s 50th anniversary, which included the Lennon encore at the end of the fourth show. The Mothers 1971 version of the tape is the first release that includes the complete session (both John and Frank cut a few things from their own versions), and its mix is neutral and clinical to contrast with the muddy Lennon mix or the dialed-up original Zappa mix. If you want to hear the full Lennon/Zappa jam session in context, Volume 6 of The Mothers 1971 is your source.

Sidebar: The Released Versions

Let’s take a moment to dissect the three officially released mixes for this set: the Phil Spector/John Lennon mix from Some Time in New York City (1972), the Frank Zappa mix from Playground Psychotics (1992), and the Joe Travers mix from Mothers 1971 (2022). The last is complete (as confirmed by comparing it with bootlegs, including the video), so it will serve as our reference for the edits made on the other two.

Both the 1972 and 1992 mixes edit “Well” shorter. The full performance has three vocal sections, each a repeat of exactly the same verse, with solos between — it is a tad repetitive that way. Both versions present the first vocal section, the guitar solo by Zappa, and the second vocal section. The ’72 Lennon mix has a really obvious cut after that second vocal section: it edits in a non-contiguous bit of the keyboard solo as a fadeout and uses canned crowd cheering to obscure the artificial nature of the ending. The ’92 Zappa mix has an invisible edit in the middle of the keyboard solo (Zappa was a superb editor under every circumstance, and was also using more precise tools in the ’90s than anyone had in the ‘70s) — this mix jumps from the middle of the keyboard solo to the end of Zappa’s second guitar solo, then jumps again to the proper end of the song.

After “Well,” the ’72 Lennon mix presents the rest of the set in roughly continuous fashion. It lists the first five minutes of jamming, including the freeform pieces and, infamously, “King Kong,” under the title “Jam Rag.” The next track is “Scumbag,” with Flo & Eddie’s vocals removed. The final ambient section is titled “Aü,” and I really like the mix on this version of it — Lennon and Spector presented the set’s calmest section to its best advantage.

Zappa’s ’92 mix is heavily truncated. He presents a short excerpt from the early section where he and John conduct the Mothers as “Say Please,” and a bit from the later conducting session as “Aaawk,” but he omits “King Kong” entirely. Knowing Zappa, he probably felt it wasn’t the band’s strongest performance of the piece and didn’t think it was worth repeating. “Scumbag” is reasonably complete — the sense is palpable that Frank is righting a wrong by presenting Flo & Eddie’s vocals as performed on this version. The ambient closing section that John and Yoko titled “Aü” is also intact in Frank’s mix and titled “A Small Eternity with Yoko Ono.” (I am a Yoko apologist and have no tolerance for people hating on her, but I have to admit that is a very funny title.)

John, Yoko, and Frank

In a way, this story could only have ended with animosity. For all their similarities (coming to fame as big-idea artists in the ’60s, their R&B roots, their contrarian impulses and wicked senses of humor), Frank Zappa and John Lennon were oil and water.

Zappa was detail-oriented and meticulous, and a scrapper who had to fight for every crumb of his commercial success because his music was so obtuse. Lennon had been one of the biggest stars in the world since he was 23; he was accustomed to the idea that anything he made would be a massive success, and that the money would sort itself out. John and Yoko could afford to be careless; Frank lived on a razor’s edge. They were bound to irritate him.

For his part, Lennon seemed to prefer admiring Zappa from afar. He maintained that he and Zappa were similar breeds of artistic geniuses that the world wanted to silence. But he’d always valued raw, gut-level emotion, and he described Zappa derisively as “a fucking intellectual.” It’s probably too much to hope that two egos of this size could possibly have coexisted peacefully.

So, instead of Zappa’s meeting with Lennon and Ono producing a beautiful collaboration or an ongoing friendship, all we got was a 25-minute jam session and a legal feud. But for the one night when Frank Zappa, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono were almost friends, we did, at least, get a well-documented glimpse of magic.

Sources:

• Frank Zappa interview with Dick Cavett

• Frank Zappa radio interview with KMET, Los Angeles, summer 1972

• Electric Don Quixote by Neil Slaven (book)

• Bootleg footage of the concert

• Some Time in New York City by John Lennon and Yoko Ono (album)

• Playground Psychotics by Frank Zappa and the Mothers (album)

• The Mothers 1971 by Frank Zappa and the Mothers (album)

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Welcome back to my list of the albums I’d need if I were stranded on my own desert island. Today, a classic of underground hip hop: Madvillainy, the only album by Madvillain, aka MF DOOM and Madlib. It’s a classic of underground hip hop that hits just as hard and sounds just as revolutionary as the day it was released over twenty years ago.

Why it matters

Madvillainy is considered the greatest work of rapper MF DOOM, a deliberately elusive and mysterious artist, as prolific as he was laconic. The DOOM persona first appeared in 1999, almost a decade after Daniel Dumile’s previous project KMD folded (it had been dropped by its label and his collaborator and brother had died). He affected the persona of a supervillain and a mask reminiscent of Marvel’s Dr. Doom, never being seen in public without it, and peppered his music with samples from old superhero cartoons. But it was his lyrical style that was his true claim to fame. DOOM’s lyrics are dense and abstract with truly impressive internal rhyme schemes, more word association than storytelling. DOOM was multitalented, producing most of his own albums (along with tons of songs for other rappers) and releasing a lengthy series of beat tapes. But DOOM’s most important legacy is as one of hip hop’s greatest, most innovative poets.

Madlib is another of the greatest producers in hip hop history. He’s a true DJ and crate digger, with amazing taste in jazz records and an ear for bizarre, fractured sounds. Madlib’s production is heavily sample based, rooting him in classic hip hop even as his style moves into uncharted territory. His work includes some of his own rapping but is dominated by instrumental work, especially collaborative albums with his favorite rappers (Talib Kweli, Freddie Gibbs). Producer and DJ are the main roles Madlib plays on Madvillainy.

Madvillainy started in 2002 in Madlib’s studio in an old bomb shelter near LA. Madlib and DOOM hadn’t met before Madlib initiated the collaboration, but they hit it off immediately. During the initial sessions they spent all their free time together, consuming a lot of beer, pot, and magic mushrooms. Madlib left for Brazil with the album partially finished and did most of the rest of the work on it using a portable DJ rig in his hotel room.

An early demo of Madvillainy leaked online in 2002, frustrating DOOM and Madlib. They considered the leak the end of the project, assuming it meant the official record wouldn’t sell, and moved on to other endeavors. But the unfinished album gained fans online, and both principals heard from enough people about it that they decided it would be worth finishing. For the final version, DOOM changed his vocal approach, slowing his tempos and affecting a more laid back delivery, which became DOOM’s signature sound. The final product was finally released in 2004.

Madvillainy is a hip hop head’s album — no hooks, just dense lyrical excellence and obscure samples that keep the listener guessing. A drug-soaked atmosphere pervades, and the twists and turns satisfy the most ADHD of listeners. It sold moderately well at first, but on the scale of the tiny Stones Throw Records that released Madlib’s records, it was a smash success. And it has only gained in esteem since then. Madvillainy inspired a generation of rappers and producers and is a regular on lists of the best albums of all time.

DOOM and Madlib both had excellent careers after Madvillainy. Madlib continues to produce for other artists at the same rapid pace he did twenty years ago. DOOM had a few more good years, but mostly dropped off the map in the 2010s and died, quiet and unheralded, in 2020. He had always been an odd duck with a conflicted relationship to his own notoriety, so the fact that he died at home almost as a non-celebrity feels fitting.

A sequel, Madvillainy 2, has been in the works for about twenty years now — apparently Madlib produced the basic backing tracks not long after the release of the original album, and DOOM was the one dragging his feet. In 2008, Madlib released a remix album (confusingly titled Madvillainy 2: The Madlib Remix) to try to get DOOM to work on the sequel. According to Madlib, DOOM did deliver his verses a few years before his death. As of 2023 (the last we’ve heard), Madlib was still working on the album’s mixes and intended to release it. Will it ever be released, or will it stay in the storied annals of lost hip hop albums? And can it possibly challenge its classic predecessor, or is it doomed to disappoint us? I suppose time will tell.

Why it matters to me

I went through a big rap fixation in my first two years of university. 18-and-19-year-old Maddie was an insatiable listener of hip hop CDs. MF DOOM came onto my radar because of The Mouse and the Mask (his 2005 collaboration with Danger Mouse) and his superlative guest verse on the Gorillaz’ “November Has Come” (same year). Wikipedia reading showed me that Madvillainy was the DOOM album to get, and I acquired it from an electronics store in the summer of 2007, between my freshman and sophomore years.

I was quickly obsessed. The lack of hooks bothered me a bit at first, but after enough listens, everything about this album becomes a hook. It’s so immaculately curated and constructed that it feels inevitable. The samples, the complex rhymes… they all wormed their way into my ears and changed the way I listened. Madvillainy was a staple in my CD player and non-iPod mp3 player for the rest of the decade, one of the few albums that escaped undiminished in my affections when I emerged from my rap obsession and started listening to other genres again.

So, yeah, I can’t pretend to be with the old heads on this one. I wasn’t a ground floor fan; I found it three years late on Wikipedia after DOOM had gotten a lot more famous. But it’s an incredibly important album to me, and a perfect time machine to a formative period in my life.

Standout tracks

There isn’t a bad moment on this record, but in terms of my favorite tracks, it’s pretty frontloaded. The first two proper songs (as opposed to the sample-laden skit that opens the album), “Accordion” and “Meat Grinder,” are two of my go-tos. “Slip like Freudian/your first and last step to playing yourself like accordion” is an oft-cited example of DOOM’s unusual lyrical excellence, and “tripping off the beat kinda, dripping off the meat grinder” is a personal favorite.

I’d separate the best tracks into two categories: the straight DOOM tracks and the experimental tracks. “Accordion” and “Meat Grinder” are both great DOOM tracks, and to that I’d add “Strange Ways,” “Raid,” and “All Caps” (source of the classic line “remember all caps when you spell the man’s name,” which is why we fans capitalize MF DOOM).

On the more experimental side, we have the two Quasimoto features. Quasimoto is a cartoon alter ego of Madlib with a chipmunk-high voice perfectly designed to pop out of dense, confusing mixes. His Madvillainy songs are “America’s Most Blunted,” a wonderfully drug-laden song (“duly nominated for the best rolled Ls”), and “Shadows of Tomorrow,” a solo Quasimoto track featuring a stoned philosophical rant over backward instrumentals and Afro futurist sci-fi samples. This latter one I find myself quoting constantly: “That which is perfect is finished/The perfect man is no exception to the rule/The perfect man of the past is made according to the rule of the past/The rule of the past is a law of injustice and hypocrisy/The revelation of the meaning of the law is revealed through the law itself…”

Finally, I’d be remiss not to mention the short and dissonant “Rainbows,” which is the closest we’ll ever get to hearing DOOM sing. He apes a jazz horn section sampled by Madlib: “Hope they don’t know/As much as he thinks they know/That what, he drinks Drano/Rat but, she winks, rainbows.” What more can I say?

Further listening

DOOM has a diverse catalog, and Madvillainy is its watershed — all his other albums are legible as precursors or responses. They’re all damn good, but his best non-Madvillain album is MM..FOOD, also from 2004. It’s got a similar sample-based, hook-light aesthetic as Madvillain; DOOM did most of the production himself, and his production is just a little lighter-handed that Madlib’s. The vocal samples that aren’t food related are mostly from Dr. Doom-adjacent Saturday morning cartoons, a delightful vibe. The two albums even both have early Frank Zappa samples! I’d also recommend the King Geedorah album, his two Viktor Vaughn albums, and his final solo album Born Like This.

Madlib is ridiculously prolific, and after hanging on everything he did in the 2000s, I lost track of him in the 2010s. A new album he did will pop onto my radar every now and then, and I’ll enjoy that, but I don’t listen to everything he does anymore. But I think the best two Madlib streams for fans of Madvillainy will be his Quasimoto albums and his jazz work.

Quasimoto is the Madlib creation who featured on two Madvillainy songs — Madlib apparently doesn’t like how his voice sounds while rapping, and speeding it up Alvin and the Chipmunks-style helped him be okay with it. Lord Quas’s debut, 2000’s The Unseen, was produced largely on magic mushrooms and shares a lot of DNA with Madvillainy. But my favorite Quas album is The Further Adventures of Lord Quas from 2005. It’s got the sample-heavy scattershot magic of Madvillain and feels like a direct sequel.

Madlib’s best jazz project is his 2003 remix album of Blue Note songs, Shades of Blue. His work with Yesterday’s New Quintet is also fantastic, and proves that Madlib isn’t just a DJ who appreciates jazz as a sample source: he is a jazz understander and a jazz musician extraordinaire.

Madvillain has reunited in a couple of places other than the unreleased Madvillainy 2. The track “One Beer” from MM..FOOD is a DOOM track produced by Madlib, and “Closer” from The Further Adventures of Lord Quas is a Madlib track featuring DOOM’s rapping. Both perfectly reproduce the alchemy of Madvillainy — if they’re any indication of how good Madvillainy 2 is, then we don’t have to worry. Overall, my first two recommendations for Madvillain fans would be those two albums: MM..FOOD and The Further Adventures of Lord Quas.

As for other experimental hip hop, I’m not as much of an expert as I would have been if music were as freely available in 2007 as it is today, but I’ve got a couple to toss out there. Yasiin Bey/Mos Def’s 2009 album The Ecstatic was heavily influenced by Madvillainy and features some Madlib production. The work of the producer J Dilla is heavily reminiscent of Madlib’s; his 2006 album Donuts is a classic of instrumental alternative hip hop, and his collaboration with Madlib, Champion Sound, is a fantastic record with deep Madvillainy connections. Further afield, contemporary albums by the Roots or DOOM’s friend Ghostface Killah and the early work of Odd Future (and its star Tyler, the Creator) would all sit comfortably on the same shelf as Madvillainy.

Madvillainy is a true hip hop oddity, a revolutionary album that is both a product of its time and its creators and utterly without peer. It’s the album that made DOOM into the icon and legend he is today, and it befits that legacy that, though he continued to make great records, he virtually refused to follow up on its success. The perfect album by the shadowy, mysterious supervillain of hip hop, ably abetted by one of the best producers in the game. A masterpiece, and the next addition to my desert island record shelf.

What’s coming with you to your desert island?

Maddie’s Desert Island Playlist (so far):

1. “Brompton Oratory,” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

2. “Baba O’Riley,” The Who

3. “Badlands,” Bruce Springsteen

4. “Meat Grinder,” Madvillain

Welcome back to my series about the albums I’d choose for my own personal desert island! Today I tackle a classic from another of my personal biggest artists: Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Why it matters

Bruce Springsteen is among the best songwriters in rock music and the most important performers of the ’70s and ’80s. Though he’s often misunderstood as a corny pop star or a shallow slogan-pusher (thank you conservative misinformation about “Born in the USA”), the Boss spent his early career channeling the restless and depressed working class world he grew up in and crafting songs that work as well in an intimate bar setting as they do in the massive arenas he’s been selling out since the ’80s. (The corniness, sometimes present, is a byproduct of earnestness.)

Bruce started in the late ’60s and early ’70s as a rambling beat poet rocker, taking on the voice of the street toughs of his native Jersey Shore. He signed to Columbia as the second coming of Bob Dylan and released two albums in 1973 (Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ and The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle) to great critical fanfare but little commercial success. His third LP, Born to Run (1975) was his make-or-break moment, perhaps his last chance to make good on his massive promise. The LP delivered and then some, becoming a rock classic overnight and bringing Bruce success both on the radio and in concert halls.

But success, as it often does, brought hidden problems to the fore. Bruce feuded with his manager, and the end of their relationship led to a lawsuit that kept him out of the studio for two years. Springsteen and his recently-solidified E Street Band toured relentlessly through his lawsuit era of 1976 and 1977, developing into the thundering rock ’n’ roll machine they still are today and growing Bruce’s fanbase. By the time Bruce was allowed to start recording his follow up to Born to Run, he was overflowing with new songs.

That didn’t make Darkness on the Edge of Town an easy record to make. Bruce’s earlier albums were characterized by a desire to break away, to escape a stifling hometown and become something more. And in all his touring, Bruce had done just that. He’d found out how hollow it was to run. It was hard to find a new angle to write from, because the Peter Pan shtick of Born to Run wasn’t honest anymore. The sessions also granted him a lot of artistic freedom that he wasn’t sure what to do with. He and the band dicked around in the studio for nine months, recording incredible amounts of material — in the next few years he gave away lots of the leftover songs to other artists, and in 2010 he released a two-disc set of extra songs from the original sessions that still don’t represent all the songs recorded.

Bruce did hit upon a successful angle for the songs that made the final version of Darkness on the Edge of Town. Where Born to Run was an album about wanting to run away, Darkness is an album about the people who stayed. Bruce channeled the voices of his friends and relatives and many more stuck in depressed working-class communities all over the country — and in 1978, a year of economic hardship imposed by international forces outside any individual’s control, that subject struck a chord.

Bruce didn’t allow much promotion for the album — he’d been ashamed of the hype Columbia gave his first three albums, worried that he was becoming more of a marketing success than a musical one. As a result, the album and its singles performed more moderately than Born to Run. Darkness took a little longer to find its audience, but eventually became widely acclaimed as a contender for Springsteen’s finest album. Where the first three albums were the restless work of a kid with everything to prove, Darkness is mature and fully realized. The songs captured something vital about the mood of much of America in 1978. And the E Street Band are at the beginning of their best era, a finely tuned rock n’ roll machine.

After Darkness, Bruce trended pop again with The River (1980), a double LP with a ton of radio-friendly hits but enough space for a lot more dark, profound songs like its predecessor’s. Then he infamously recorded a series of demos for a brooding, uncommercial follow-up, was disappointed with his attempts to orchestrate them with his band in the studio, and simply released the demos as Nebraska (1982). That’s my other favorite Springsteen album — more on that in a moment — a dark masterpiece that was a stark window into Bruce’s as-yet-untreated depression. Bruce capped off his classic era with Born in the USA (1984), another massive commercial record with more heart than it gets credit for.

1975–1984 were Bruce’s most vital years, the beating heart of his career and the source of 90% of the sets he still tours with today. This isn’t to dismiss the rest. 1987’s synth solo record Tunnel of Love holds up magnificently, The Rising (2002) is absolutely one of the best albums of its decade, and his orchestral record Western Stars (2019) is stunning, to name a few. I’ve never met a Springsteen album I couldn’t love. But nothing touches that original streak from Born to Run to Born in the USA, and Darkness on the Edge of Town is (if I must choose) the best of the run.

Why it matters to me

I came to Bruce in college. Before that, I’d been deceived by his reputation, thinking of him as exclusively corny dad barbecue music. (Please do not judge me for my past feelings on dads, barbecues, and their music. It is a rich and noble culture. I am listening and learning.) A close friend had no patience for my bullshit, and after failing to interest me in his Bob-Dylan-soundalike debut Asbury Park, told me to listen to Nebraska. I got it from my university’s fine arts library (my primary source of CD rips at the time) and fell instantly in love. Everything I loved about early Dylan or Woody Guthrie, but with an unrelenting darkness and its stark cassette production — it spoke to me as a sort of outsider folk masterpiece.

For a time, I thought Nebraska would be the only Bruce album I cared about, but over that summer (2008) I grew obsessed enough with the songcraft to realize that I’d need to try the rock records too. But it was summer! I was marooned in Houston, my beloved fine arts library four hours away! (Ah, the pre-streaming era.) My dad had an LP of Born in the USA (didn’t hit me — I had to get far enough into it to understand that my first impression of the title track was incorrect) and a CD of Tunnel of Love (an acquired taste that did nothing for me at first listen). But the library in my neighborhood had two more that did the trick: his then-latest, Magic (2007) (a merely okay record), and Darkness on the Edge of Town. The latter I immediately recognized as holding the same spark as Nebraska. I played it relentlessly through that summer on my non-iPod mp3 player and through the burned copy in my car CD player.

From there, I was toast. I found an LP of Born to Run in a thrift store and fell hard for it, then got back to my university and ripped almost his full discography to my laptop. I spent the next year or so methodically listening to all of it, reconsidering and embracing albums I’d rejected before. It was a full-throated obsession that culminated with the release of Working on a Dream in early 2009 and my first time seeing him live in one of the first shows for that tour — April 5, 2009, at the basketball arena of my university. I convinced a professor (an original Springsteen fan from the Stone Pony days in Jersey) to push back the deadline of a paper because it was scheduled for the day after the concert. (“It’s been a while, hope he’s doing ok…”) He opened with “Badlands,” exactly the song he opened with in my dreams. If I wasn’t already a fan for life before that, I became one that night.

I also roped my dad back in with me — he’d always had an appreciation for the Boss, but me burning him copies of all the albums brought him in deeper. To this day Bruce is a constant conversation topic; I’ll never think about Bruce without thinking about my dad too. He even brought me to my second Springsteen concert (and his first) in 2023. (Yes, I’ve only seen him twice. I’m a fan but I’m not made of money.) So, thanks for that one, Boss.

Standout tracks

Listen. The standout tracks from Darkness on the Edge of Town are all of them. Bruce wrote at least four LPs worth of songs for this — the ones that made the final cut are perfection. My early favorites in college were the intense openers, “Badlands” and “Adam Raised a Cain.” The latter I frequently used to play on guitar, but any version without the demented howls of Bruce’s original vocals falls flat. I also adored “Candy’s Room,” and I handed my History major future husband the song “Factory” to use in a multimedia project about the ennui caused by the industrial revolution.

In more recent years, “Racing in the Streets” has become a favorite. It’s easy to dismiss as another Springsteen car song, but it’s a lot more than the machine worship present on Born to Run. “Racing in the Streets” is about a street racer who loves his craft, but it’s actually about his life crumbling around it. How his life is meaningless outside this one obsession, and how it isn’t enough to save him. Deep shit. And a scene from the movie Blinded by the Light has given me a permanent adoration for “The Promised Land.”

Further listening

The greatness of Darkness on the Edge of Town comes from two factors: its brutally honest, dark songwriting, and the fact that it fucking rocks. If you’re here for the songwriting, then your other favorites in Bruce’s catalog are Nebraska (1982), disc 2 of The River (1980), and perhaps Western Stars (2019). If you’re here for the rock, go for Born to Run (1975), Born in the USA (1984), disc 1 of The River, and if you’d like to stick a toe out of the classic period, The Rising (2002). I’ll also mention The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (1973) — it’s another of my favorite Bruce records and I’ve barely mentioned it because it’s so different. It sounds like a Steely Dan album, but it has the same spark of brilliance in the songs.

Bruce had a lot of contemporaries making similarly styled music, but as for people who could nail the same balance between songwriting brilliance and great commercial rock? Not many. I’ll point you to Patti Smith Group’s Easter (1978), which contains the best Darkness outtake, “Because the Night.” Bruce couldn’t make his arrangement work so he let Patti have it, and she did it so well that Bruce adopted her arrangement (and altered lyrics) into his setlists. Patti’s own material is killer too. I’ll also point out Neil Young, especially After the Gold Rush (1970).

For a comparatively modern flavor, try The Hold Steady. They have a similar ethos to Bruce: street kids trying to make good, lyrically brilliant while musically just aiming to be a really good bar band. Darkness fans will enjoy Stay Positive (2008), an anthemic record full of dogged hope in the face of tough times.

That does it for my third entry on my Desert Island Albums. Which records make the cut for yours?

Maddie’s Desert Island Playlist (so far):

1. “Brompton Oratory,” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

2. “Baba O’Riley,” The Who

3. “Badlands,” Bruce Springsteen

Welcome to the second entry in my ongoing series writing about the albums I’d want with me if I was stranded on a desert island. What would your picks be? Today, mine is The Who’s classic rock masterpiece Who’s Next.

Why it matters

The Who were part of the ’60s British invasion of rock acts, and they were always one of the cooler bands, a hit with the hip and edgy mod scene. They had one giant hit (“My Generation”) to give them name recognition, but a ’60s Who fan was just a little more “with it” than someone who listened to the more mainstream Beatles or Stones. (Don’t come after me for that, I also love the Beatles and the Stones.) From the beginning, the Who’s claim to fame was raucous R&B anchored by their unparalleled rhythm section: John Entwistle on bass and Keith Moon on drums. Today, people are more likely to recognize vocalist Roger Daltrey or guitarist/songwriter Pete Townshend (the two surviving members who still tour their husk of a “band” around), and both are incredible musicians, but listen to those early records — they’re all about the animal intensity of Moon’s drums and the matching virtuosity of Entwistle’s bass. The songs were an afterthought. The band, as a unit, were the show.

As the ’60s drew to a close, the Who became famous for something bigger than “My Generation.” They created one of the biggest ever rock operas with their ambitious 1969 double LP Tommy. It wasn’t the first or the best rock opera, but it was probably the most impactful. After Tommy, Townshend immediately threw himself into developing a second rock opera, an even more ambitious multimedia experience called Lifehouse with a dystopian plot and film elements that would be partially accomplished through live collaboration with their audiences at concerts — the audience would help create the new rock opera. In Lifehouse, the Who bit off much more than they could chew. After a year of failed concerts, uninterested audiences, and stressful studio sessions, the band abandoned the project.

The Who returned to a studio with new producer Glyn Johns (Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, Eagles, etc etc), who was concerned more with songs than with the conceptual or image concerns that had often pervaded the Who’s ’60s records. Some of the songs on what became Who’s Next started as Lifehouse material, and some were new. Townshend experimented with early synthesizers, integrating them fully into his songwriting process, and Moon toned down his drumming to a less showy style that better served the songs. Compared to the tortured, frustrating process of Lifehouse, the sessions for Who’s Next were quick and fruitful. The band believed so thoroughly in the songs they’d made that they allowed Johns to assemble the album out of them however he chose to.

The result is unquestionably the Who’s finest album. The showy excess of their early work and the insane ambition of Tommy (as much as I love those things) are all scaled back, and we receive the tasteful work of one of the best all-around rock bands of its day. It produced three massive singles (“Baba O’Riley,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”), but even the lesser songs are some of the band’s strongest ever. The synths are tasteful and groovy, the ballads are smooth and perfect, the rockers rattle the walls and show you exactly what this band is about. Who’s Next is the Who’s masterpiece, a band at the very top of its game.

After Who’s Next, high concept rock operas beckoned yet again. The Who put out the stunning Quadrophenia in 1973, then promptly began to fall apart due to substance abuse issues, which affected both their professional relationships and the quality of their playing. They squeaked out a few mediocre albums before Keith Moon’s death by overdose in 1978. They made two more forgettable albums without Moon in the early ’80s, then disbanded with much publicity. They’ve had their reunions and dissolutions since — Entwistle died in 2002 but Daltrey and Townshend carry on, even though reportedly they hate each other so much that they made their 2019 album Who without so much as speaking to each other. This current Who is a shadow of its former self and shouldn’t even be talked about in the same breath as the ’60s and ’70s Who, even if I’m sure the live shows are still a great time.

Why it matters to me

I first bought this album when I was 15. I was an obsessive Led Zeppelin fan then, and I’d read something online about a rivalry between Zep and the Who. The assertion was that though they were two of the best rock bands of the ’70s, you could be either a Zeppelin fan or a Who fan — never both. I said “bet” and went to Warehouse Music, where I was guided to Who’s Next. A more fitting introduction I cannot imagine. (I also bought Opeth’s Morningrise album in that trip. What a great week to be my Discman.)

This was around 2004, so the edition I got was the 1995 remaster with bonus tracks, most of them Lifehouse outtakes that I now regard as essential to the album. Though I mostly listen to my vinyl copy these days (a carefully selected US Decca original, not an MCA reissue), it feels incomplete to me without “Pure and Easy,” “Naked Eye,” and “Water.”

I remember road trips watching the trees disappear into the edge of my backseat window with the synths of “Baba O’Riley” in my headphones. I remember telling my friends listening to Limp Bizkit’s version of “Behind Blue Eyes” that it wasn’t an original. I remember dancing with my friends to “Bargain,” and lying on my back imagining my future love affairs to “Love Ain’t for Keeping.” I love a lot of Who albums, but this one is my Who album.

I didn’t stop liking Led Zeppelin either. So there’s that myth disproven.

Standout tracks

The opening and closing tracks on Who’s Next are possibly the best opener/closer combo on any rock record. The synth strain in “Baba O’Riley” will always be one of the most exciting things to hear coming out of a pair of speakers, and it has an interesting cousin in the pulsing organ synths that underpin the longer and harder-rocking “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” A lot of greatness happens between those songs, but the record’s overall impact is tied thoroughly to its bookends.

I absolutely love the softer moments of Who’s Next. “Behind Blue Eyes” is the famous one, which has a crackling sort of intensity under its softness that erupts in the second half of the song. But I think the light, folky, upbeat “Going Mobile” is quite underrated. And the similarly acoustic “Love Ain’t for Keeping” is one of my favorites on the album, equal parts tender and lecherous — it’s a come-on, but a come-on that would work on me. The Beatleish wordless backup vocals under the guitar solo really sell it.

Further listening

The Who never made another album that sounds much like Who’s Next. Closest would be the phenomenal Live at Leeds from the previous year — Who’s Next is the studio album that best captured the Who’s rocking live performances, and Live at Leeds (especially the expanded version with the complete show) is the best record of those performances. Their rarities compilation Odds and Sods is also stylistically comparable and littered with Lifehouse outtakes, though of course it’s nowhere near as consistently good as Who’s Next.

The other great Who records are their three early pop/R&B masterpieces (My Generation, A Quick One, and The Who Sell Out) and their rock operas (Tommy and Quadrophenia). All amazing records, but they don’t scratch the same itch as Who’s Next.

Fans of Who’s Next might turn to the ’70s output of the Kinks, another moddish ’60s group that dedicated themselves to great rock songs and ambitious concept albums in the ‘70s — their albums Sleepwalker and especially Misfits both sound a bit like Who’s Next.

It’s hard to compare other albums to this one, so firmly in the classic rock canon is it. The Beatles’ Abbey Road, Led Zeppelin IV, The Doors’ LA Woman… all good points of comparison, but too dang basic!

To compare to the album’s softer side, I’ll mention a couple of early ’70s contemporaries: Todd Rundgren (especially Something/Anything?) and Rod Stewart (Every Picture Tells a Story, but also everything else pre-1975) often evoke the same feel of a “Love Ain’t for Keeping” or a “Going Mobile,” even if neither ever attempts anything like the bombast of “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

My desert island suitcase has gained its second album in Who’s Next by the Who. What’s on your list?

Maddie’s Desert Island Playlist (so far):

1. “Brompton Oratory,” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

2. “Baba O’Riley,” The Who

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This Wednesday, I’m starting a series I hope to post to every week about my Desert Island Albums. It’s the classic question: you’re stuck on a desert island with only a limited number of albums to listen to to pass the time. What are your picks? Here’s one of mine: Nick Cave, the dirty, junkie punk rock poet, reinvents himself as a soft rock singer/songwriter. This is The Boatman’s Call.

Why it matters

Nick Cave is certainly one of the great dark songwriters of our time. The holy trinity of sad bastard music is Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and Nick Cave. If you’re moody, goth, or merely interesting, you’re going to want to get to know Nick Cave well enough to get a quotation from one of his songs tattooed on your arm.

The Boatman’s Call is an interesting album in Cave’s progression as an artist. He started as a barking, howling punk rock prophet in the seminal early ’80s post punk band the Birthday Party. After the Birthday Party’s breakup in 1983, Cave started his solo project the Bad Seeds, and for the first few years, the new band made the same sort of music: dark, spasmodic, and extreme; often droning or atonal; heavily fueled by Nick’s heroin addiction and the anti-formalist guitar playing of the mad genius Blixa Bargeld. In his early career, Nick was of the opinion that he couldn’t sing. He was a punk vocalist, not a singer.

Things started to change in the making of the Bad Seeds’ covers album, Kicking Against the Pricks, in 1986. Nick discovered melody and began to develop his singing voice, a rough and rich baritone. The Bad Seeds’ next two albums, Your Funeral… My Trial and especially Tender Prey, mixed their earlier anarchic post-punk sound with flashes of more tuneful pop.

In the ’90s, Nick Cave began to flirt more with traditionally beautiful music. 1990’s The Good Son was his least wild record yet, a soft-hearted, tuneful album made in Brazil. His next three (1992’s Henry’s Dream, 1994’s Let Love In, and 1996’s Murder Ballads) brought back the punk noise, but in much more melodic and accessible tunes than his ’80s work. Blixa Bargeld’s freeform guitar noise, for better or worse, receded into the background, and the songs took on traditional structures. But 1997’s The Boatman’s Call signaled a real change.

There isn’t a trace of the snotty punk of ’80s Cave in Boatman’s. It is a fully mature album of deep, heartfelt ballads. Nick’s heavily conflicted relationship with religion, which always lurked in his lyrics, came into full flower here. Where earlier Cave songs might have flirted with Christian imagery or embraced his demonic side, on Boatman’s we hear him wrestling with God, searching for beauty or comfort instead of just more darkness. Previous iterations of Nick saw him trying to shock, provoke, or titillate. The Nick of 1997 wanted to engage, challenge, occasionally comfort. His depths were always visible, but on this one, he lays them bare.

This is also one of Nick’s most romantic albums. “Into My Arms” is the most obvious example, it features on hundreds of writers’ and fans’ character playlists because of its pure, openhearted depiction of romantic love. But on this album, anytime Nick isn’t singing about God, he’s singing about love. (Or both. It’s a Venn diagram situation).

After The Boatman’s Call, Nick remained in balladeer mode for a while. He took a hiatus to get clean from heroin and returned with the similar-sounding No More Shall We Part in 2001, then the solidly mediocre Nocturama in 2003. He went in a more uptempo, gospel rock direction for his next few (two of my favorites, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus and Dig Lazarus Dig), turned to garage rock for his Grinderman side project, then pared the Bad Seeds down to austere sound loops and his almost tuneless reciting voice for his most recent albums. The Boatman’s Call began Nick’s deepest era, and remains among his most critically acclaimed and fan-adored albums.

Why it matters to me

I’d been listening to and adoring a fair few Bad Seeds albums before I came to Boatman’s. My introduction to Nick had been as a balladeer, but most of the albums I’d heard had been the ones that mixed that tendency with either punk or MOR uptempo rock. The Boatman’s Call grabbed me from first listen because it’s stark and slow throughout. Nick’s grim visage glaring at me from the cover was a perfect reflection of the music inside, and that’s what I’d been hungry for.

I’d be hard pressed to pick a favorite Nick Cave album; I could make a case for just about any of them. But The Boatman’s Call is lyrically incredible, musically breathtaking, and exactly the moody, brooding songcraft I look for out of Nick Cave.

Standout tracks

The two biggest and most enduring songs on The Boatman’s Call are “Into My Arms” (“I don’t believe in an interventionist God/And I know baby that you do/But if I did I would kneel down and ask him/Not to intervene when it comes to you”) and “(Are You) The One I’ve Been Waiting For?” (“O we will know, won’t we?/The stars will explode in the sky/O but they don’t, do they?/Stars have their moment and then they die”). Those are great to start with.

As you dive deeper into the album, “Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?” is a wonderfully morose song about doomed love — any song that can use the lyric “we fucked up the sun and then we fucked it down again” is okay by me. “Idiot Prayer” and “Far From Me” are both outstanding.

But the secret best song on The Boatman’s Call is “Brompton Oratory.” Over a spare drum loop, Nick visits a church and tries to find comfort for the absence of a lover through a God who also, unfortunately, feels absent. There’s a lovely essay in the Little Creatures book dissecting Cave’s use and perversion of Christian imagery in this piece, and I can’t get into it all. But my favorite moment is when the speaker looks at the stone statues of the Apostles and wishes he were also made of stone.

Further listening

If you’re into this side of Nick Cave, his two best albums in a similar vein (in order of importance) are No More Shall We Part (2001) and The Good Son (1990). I’d also heartily recommend Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (2004), Tender Prey (1988), and Skeleton Tree (2017).

To expand beyond Nick, give a listen to his hero Leonard Cohen, especially Songs of Love and Hate (1971), which achieves a similar stark, dismal beauty.

To complete the sad bastard triad, we’ll need some Tom Waits. Blue Valentine (1978) or Rain Dogs (1985) would sit nicely alongside Boatman’s Call.

Though he’s hardly who comes to mind when one thinks “artists like Nick Cave,” Bruce Springsteen’s dark masterpiece Nebraska (1982) will serve fans of this album very well.

For another unusual comparison, Neko Case in her darker moments scratches a similar itch to Nick Cave. Hell-On (2018) would be a great starting point.

There we have it: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ The Boatman’s Call is the first album I’m packing for my solitary fate on the desert island. What’s going in your suitcase? Subscribe to see who makes the list next!

Maddie’s Desert Island Playlist (so far):

1. “Brompton Oratory,” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Love the Beatles, but unsure where to start with their solo years? John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr put out a total of 73 albums between 1970 and 2025; some are classics, some belong in the rubbish bin. Let’s take a journey through the Beatles’ solo albums ranked from worst to best.

I’ve separated the albums into four categories for your reading pleasure: bad, skippable, good, and essential. The better the albums get, the more I’ll write about them — we’ll dispatch with the bad and skippable albums with lists and a brief overview, then get into a little more detail for the good and essential ones.

This post is an outgrowth of my year-by-year series Scorekeeping the Solo Beatles. If you’re interested in learning a whole lot more about the post-Beatle careers of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, give those pieces a read!

Bad

73. I Wanna Be Santa Claus (1999), Ringo Starr

72. Bad Boy (1978), Ringo Starr

71. Ringo the 4th (1977), Ringo Starr

70. Give More Love (2017), Ringo Starr

69. Old Wave (1983), Ringo Starr

68. What’s My Name (2019), Ringo Starr

67. Postcards from Paradise (2015), Ringo Starr

66. Ringo 2012 (2012), Ringo Starr

65. Y Not (2010), Ringo Starr

64. Change the World (2021), Ringo Starr

63. Zoom In (2021), Ringo Starr

62. Choose Love (2005), Ringo Starr

61. EP3 (2022), Ringo Starr

60. Ringo Rama (2003), Ringo Starr

59. Gone Troppo (1982), George Harrison

58. Снова в СССР (1988), Paul McCartney

57. Ringo’s Rotogravure (1976), Ringo Starr

56. Sentimental Journey (1970), Ringo Starr

Unsurprisingly, Ringo dominates the “bad” category. As I stated in my chronological piece, I believe that Ringo’s 1999 Christmas album I Wanna Be Santa Claus is the worst album ever released by a Beatle. Also firmly in this category are Ringo’s albums from the late ’70s when he was struggling with what sort of music to make after his career faltered, most of his slew of forgettably identical self-produced albums from the 2000s and 2010s, and the first three of his 2020s EPs. One record each from George and Paul sneak in: George’s tossed-off 1982 flop Gone Troppo and Paul’s low-effort fake-Russian fake-bootleg. Last of the bad is Ringo’s solo debut from 1970, a weird, sappy covers album of old pop classics.

Skippable

By “skippable,” I mean albums that are pleasant enough, but I wouldn’t go out of my way for them. If you’re in the record store wondering whether to buy the LP, well, no need.

55. Off the Ground (1993), Paul McCartney

54. Liverpool 8 (2008), Ringo Starr

53. Vertical Man (1998), Ringo Starr

52. Wild Life (1971), Wings (Paul McCartney)

51. Run Devil Run (1999), Paul McCartney

50. Driving Rain (2001), Paul McCartney

49. Kisses on the Bottom (2012), Paul McCartney

48. Memory Almost Full (2007), Paul McCartney

47. Electric Arguments (2008), Paul McCartney

46. New (2013), Paul McCartney

45. Press to Play (1986), Paul McCartney

44. Time Takes Time (1992), Ringo Starr

43. Rock n Roll (1975), John Lennon

42. McCartney (1970), Paul McCartney

41. Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984), Paul McCartney

40. Back to the Egg (1979), Wings (Paul McCartney)

39. Extra Texture (1975), George Harrison

38. London Town (1978), Paul McCartney

37. Stop and Smell the Roses (1981), Ringo Starr

36. Some Time in New York City (1972), John Lennon & Yoko Ono

35. McCartney III (2020), Paul McCartney

34. Mind Games (1973), John Lennon

33. Egypt Station (2018), Paul McCartney

32. Somewhere in England (1981), George Harrison

31. Traveling Wilburys Vol 3 (1990), Traveling Wilburys (George Harrison)

Paul dominates this category — very few of his records are unlistenable, but many of them are not worth your time. Much of what he’s done since the early ’80s lives here, along with the mediocre late Wings albums London Town and Back to the Egg. My placement of Paul’s post-Beatle debut McCartney may spark disagreement, but except for “Maybe I’m Amazed,” I find the album half-baked and nearly unlistenable — if not for that one song, I’d put it in the “bad” category without hesitation.

Also in this category are a bunch of Ringo’s less offensive albums: his minor comeback Stop and Smell the Roses from 1981, his two albums from his miniature power pop renaissance in the 1990s, and the somewhat interesting 2008 album Liverpool 8. John and George claim a few each with some of their less inspired efforts. None of them bad, mind you, just… less than good.

Good

The “good” albums are albums that, if you’re a fan of the artist, you’re going to want to give a shot. They’re not all albums I personally like, but they’re albums that will probably reward you if you’re already sympathetic to the sound of the artist. These albums come from all over the spectrum of the Beatles’ careers, from the early to the recent, and will merit brief individual writeups.

30. Crooked Boy (2024), Ringo Starr

The last of Ringo’s 5 EPs released from 2021 to 2024 was a welcome entry in his serialized autobiography in song. Written and produced by Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes, Crooked Boy is a standout in Ringo’s discography for its cohesion and lyrical excellence.

29. Rewind Forward (2023), Ringo Starr

Rewind Forward surprised me by being the first Ringo release I’d truly enjoyed since his ’70s output. It’s the fourth EP he made between 2021 and 2024, and while the first three followed the tired formula he’d been using since the 2000s, this one shook things up and made me pay attention with bold genre experiments and very good songwriting (by people who aren’t Ringo, of course).

28. Brainwashed (2002), George Harrison

George’s final album was obsessively planned out and in the works for a decade, but it wasn’t finished and released until the year after his death. It’s a worthy swan song, but overworked and not all that remarkable an album on its own merits.

27. Flaming Pie (1997), Paul McCartney

After years of stumbling, Paul finally relaxed into a sound he could live with in the late ’90s: Beatle-y power pop and vintage McCartney ballad work. Flaming Pie is the start of McCartney’s mid-career renaissance of the late ’90s and early 2000s. I find the entire period yawn-inducing, but some people really love it, and there are gems to be found here.

26. Milk and Honey (1984), John Lennon & Yoko Ono

Four years after John’s murder, his widow Yoko Ono compiled the demos he’d made for their next collaborative album and some of her own new songs to create her and John’s final album, a sequel to Double Fantasy. It’s a nice record, but John’s songs sound like exactly what they were, loose rehearsal takes never meant to be the final products.

25. George Harrison (1979), George Harrison

George’s self-titled album was the beginning of his laid-back era. The songs are the mellow work of an artist with nothing more to prove, suffused with the contentment of his life as a happy husband and father. The stakes are low, but the music sure is smooth.

24. Walls and Bridges (1974), John Lennon

John infamously had his “lost weekend” in 1973 and ’74, a period when he separated from Yoko and wandered through a haze of substance abuse. The two albums of original songs from this period, Mind Games and Walls and Bridges, are aimless, confused records. But the singles on the latter (“Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” with Elton John and “#9 Dream”) elevate it higher than its predecessor and are necessary entries in John’s oeuvre.

23. Thirty Three and 1/3 (1976), George Harrison

George had his own rough years of substance abuse and dark music making in 1974 and ’75, but in ’76 he reformed his life and pulled out a great return to form in Thirty Three and 1/3rd. It’s commercial, it’s got humor (including a collaboration with Eric Idle of Monty Python), and though it doesn’t reach the heights of George’s best, it’s a worthwhile album.

22. Flowers in the Dirt (1989), Paul McCartney

Paul struggled through most of the ’80s, unable to match the success of his Tug of War album from 1982. Flowers in the Dirt was the closest he came. He collaborated with Elvis Costello on the songwriting and produced a very modern-sounding (by late ’80s standards) record, which was a minor success.

21. McCartney II (1980), Paul McCartney

After the demise of Wings, Paul decided to retool his career by releasing a set of home recordings he’d done playing around with a brand new synthesizer. He named it McCartney II as a sequel to his 1970 album of home recordings. The result is an album that prefigures a lot of the developments in new wave and synthpop still to come. It wasn’t terribly successful at the time, but it has gained a substantial cult following in the years since.

20. Venus and Mars (1975), Wings (Paul McCartney)

Venus and Mars was Wings’ follow-up to their first smash success, Band on the Run. It is the little brother of that album in every way, but continues its catchy style. It’s a pop rock confection that I find ultimately unsatisfying, but enough people disagree with me that I’ve been convinced to put it pretty high on this list.

19. Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005), Paul McCartney

Chaos and Creation is the peak of Paul’s mid-career renaissance that started with Flaming Pie. He worked with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, who insisted he get out of his comfort zone (writing little ditties for his touring band). Paul wound up playing all the instruments for this stripped-down, melancholy, highly personal record.

18. Pipes of Peace (1983), Paul McCartney

After the smash success of 1982’s Tug of War, Paul rushed out another album to the same formula, largely based on studio outtakes from Tug. It’s the lesser of the two albums, but it’s got some great material, especially “Say Say Say” featuring Michael Jackson.

17. Traveling Wilburys Vol 1 (1988), Traveling Wilburys (George Harrison)

George went over to Bob Dylan’s home studio to bang out a B-side for a single, but so many of his famous friends showed up he had to make a supergroup album instead. The Traveling Wilburys were George Harrison, Jeff Lynne (of ELO), Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison. If you’re thinking that with that kind of star power this must be earth-shaking music, think again — these guys were in it to make some chill songs for fun, not to make their Next Great Album. Traveling Wilburys Vol 1 is an album with low ambitions; it’s nice, but far from essential.

16. Ringo (1973), Ringo Starr

Ringo made two odd little uncommercial albums in 1970, then didn’t make his first serious swing at a pop album until 1973. Ringo is Ringo’s first rolodex record — he knew he wasn’t going to make a big record on his own, so he called in a rogues’ gallery of his famous friends (including all three other Beatles) and turned his first big album into a music industry party.

15. Dark Horse (1974), George Harrison

In 1974, George mounted the first big concert tour of any of the Beatles since 1966, and expectations were sky high. But the tour was plagued with problems, especially a case of laryngitis that left George’s voice in poor shape and forced him to rely on other members of his band. The music press panned the tour, then took out their anger on his next studio album. And though Dark Horse also suffers from George’s laryngitis in places, it’s a far better record than critics gave it credit for. It’s darker than most Harrison albums, coming in the shadow of his divorce and on the ramp up to a big substance abuse problem, but it’s mostly quite good.

14. Wings at the Speed of Sound (1976), Wings (Paul McCartney)

1976 was the peak of Wings’ success. They released Wings at the Speed of Sound and did a huge tour that, after the disappointment of George’s tour in ’74, delivered the Beatle solo show of audiences’ dreams. Speed of Sound is another sugary pop confection like Venus and Mars, mostly shallow little ditties. Its biggest single, “Silly Love Songs,” is emblematic of the whole: a pleasant song that’s intoxicating on the radio, but has about a thimbleful of thought put into it. Still, the album is justifiably a minor classic. Paul did get the other members of the band to contribute songs and sing to beat the “just a solo project” allegations, and while the others’ work can hardly stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Paul’s, the variety is welcome.

13. Beaucoups of Blues (1970), Ringo Starr

In 1970, with the Beatles freshly broken up, Ringo heard that Nashville’s studio cats could churn out a whole album’s worth of original songs in under a week. He subjected himself to the factory process and came out with Beaucoups of Blues, a ’70s Nashville country album expertly crafted and with barely a hint of Ringo’s personality. I find it an odd and bewitching little album — there’s nothing else in the Beatles’ catalog quite like it. Perhaps more a curiosity than a work of greatness, but it’s always been one of my favorites.

12. Red Rose Speedway (1973), Wings (Paul McCartney)

Red Rose Speedway was Wings’ second album, after the slapdash and disappointing Wild Life in 1971. This one is a bit self-indulgent, but its strong songs are very strong. Paul does his trick where he mashes a bunch of songs together into a suite with pleasing results. This is perhaps only a hint at what Wings was capable of, but especially for Paul fans, it’s a very good record.

11. Look Up (2025), Ringo Starr

55 years after Beaucoups of Blues, Ringo made his second country album. This one wasn’t made on an assembly line; Ringo was an active participant. But like most of Ringo’s better work, Look Up succeeds because of his collaborators: here, star producer T-Bone Burnett and bluegrass legends Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, Alison Krauss, and others. As I’m writing this, this is the latest Beatle album, and it’s also the best any of them have produced in over thirty years. And it’s Ringo.

10. Goodnight Vienna (1974), Ringo Starr

Speaking of Ringo… for my money, Ringo’s best album is 1974’s Goodnight Vienna. It’s got great songs by John Lennon, Elton John, Harry Nilsson, and others. Much like Ringo, the album mostly feels like a fun party with an amazing guest list, but the songs work better here than on its predecessor. Most Ringo records feel labored over; Goodnight Vienna feels like lightning in a bottle.

9. Double Fantasy (1980), John Lennon & Yoko Ono

Double Fantasy started as John’s comeback album after five years of inactivity, but turned into his final album after his senseless murder only a month after its release. The album has been wrapped up in the emotions around his death ever since, and though it’s a very good album, its status as the best-selling Beatle solo album is warped by that happenstance. Double Fantasy is a light pop rock confection, very of its time, with excellent contributions from Yoko. But it isn’t John’s best album.

8. Living in the Material World (1973), George Harrison

George’s follow-up to his blockbuster All Things Must Pass is a lesser album, but still a worthy successor. Where ATMP is sprawling and stuffed to the gills with incredible material, LitMW is leaner. It’s a pleasant listen and classic Harrison, even if it falls short of classic status.

Essential

The records I’m designating “essential” are the best of the best, albums I think anyone with even a passing interest in the Beatles should hear. If you’re a vinyl lover, this would be the beginning of a very nice collection — find them used, most of them aren’t too expensive! The list starts with two standout ’80s records, but the top five slots all belong to the early ’70s, which was these three artists’ most fertile period. And I did say three — there are no Ringo albums in this category. Sorry Ritchie… as much as I love Goodnight Vienna, it would be flatly dishonest to call it “essential.”

7. Tug of War (1982), Paul McCartney

For his big comeback album after Wings fizzled then crashed, Paul returned to Beatles producer George Martin, who proved his value yet again: he could always hone and discipline those layabout Beatles and get them to deliver their best work. Tug of War was the solo masterpiece everyone knew Paul was capable of, finally delivered. Its biggest single is the schmaltzy Stevie Wonder duet “Ebony and Ivory,” but don’t let that scare you off. The rest of the album contains some of Macca’s best ever songwriting, a shotgun blast of different genres, and melodies that never disappoint.

6. Cloud Nine (1987), George Harrison

George had a miniature renaissance in the late ’80s that started with Cloud Nine and continued with the Traveling Wilburys. Cloud Nine is the best record of this period. George leaned on producer Jeff Lynne (ELO) and a lot of famous guests (Eric Clapton, Elton John, Ringo) to make a towering record of maximalist pop. The smash hit cover “Got My Mind Set on You” is outstanding, and much of the album is infected with the same driving propulsion after years of lazy, mellow Harrison records. My favorite track is the Beatle-reminiscing “When We Was Fab,” featuring an incredible ELO-style processed Ringo backup vocal, an “I Am the Walrus” string section, kitchen-sink production, and a vintage-styled sitar outro. This is probably the most fun album in George’s catalog (his other greats being either urgently sanctimonious or terminally laid back).

5. Plastic Ono Band (1970), John Lennon

John’s first post-Beatle album was a home run. He went to primal scream therapy and started (but notably didn’t finish) healing his inner child, and the brutally personal lyrics on this album show that process. It’s far from accessible pop: Plastic Ono Band is a bruising listen, with John’s lyrics and vocal performance pulsing like an open wound, the musical backing stark and minimal (just John on guitar or piano plus bass and drums). If you want John Lennon as deep art, man, this is your album.

4. Band on the Run (1973), Wings (Paul McCartney)

The non-album single “Live and Let Die” and Band on the Run were the releases that started people listening to Paul again after he’d spent three years as persona non grata in the music industry. Paul was widely (and probably correctly) blamed for the Beatles’ breakup, and his earliest solo/Wings albums had been quite uneven, so critics wrote him off until late 1973 rescued his career. Band on the Run is a great record made largely in Nigeria, with Paul playing bass, lead guitar, and drums. It’s the post-Beatle album that sounds the most like the Beatles: catchy power pop with wonderful vocal harmonies and classic song after classic song. “Jet,” “Band on the Run,” “Let Me Roll It,” “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five”… this one is stacked.

3. Imagine (1971), John Lennon

Now we come to the best album by each of the Beatles. I already spoke glowingly of Plastic Ono Band — if you want John to be a Serious Artist, then that’s your favorite Lennon album. But I believe John is at his best when he’s balancing his artistry with his canny ear for pop commercialism. And that’s Imagine. Yes, the title track has been overplayed to the point that I can’t hear it as anything but trite and corny, but there’s no denying its appeal. And the rest of the album? “Jealous Guy” is one of John’s best ever songs, and on side B we have the immaculate run of “Gimme Some Truth,” “Oh My Love,” and “How Do You Sleep?” Imagine is John at the top of his game.

2. Ram (1971), Paul & Linda McCartney

I am constantly at war with myself about whether Band on the Run or Ram is my favorite Paul album. But at the end of the day, Ram is inventive and risky where Band is effortlessly light, so I’m giving the more difficult album my nod. Ram is often called the first indie pop album, largely homegrown and incorporating a potpourri of genres. And it’s one of those albums where every single song makes me go “oh good, I love this one.” It didn’t get its due on release because critics were sour on Paul, but it has since become a deserved classic.

1. All Things Must Pass (1970), George Harrison

In the first year after the Beatles’ breakup, George delivered his best album (no argument on that point) and, in my estimation, the best solo album by any Beatle. He weirdly had a leg up on the other boys, because he’d been writing songs since the middle of the Beatles’ career, but John and Paul had rejected most of them. The group’s lead songwriters always made sure that their own songs dominated their albums, strategically relegating George’s songs to ancillary status. But one look at the George songs that became the Beatles’ biggest (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Something,” “Here Comes the Sun…”) will tell you that he had excellent material. All Things Must Pass is mostly composed of songs the Beatles rejected, and it is absolutely stuffed with excellent writing. In a way George set an unrealistic standard for himself, because ATMP represented years of the best of his songwriting in a way that none of his future albums could match. It’s a triple album, but my high estimation of it is exclusively based on the first two discs — the third disc is a series of loose jams, which sound like they were fun to make but I almost never listen to them. If I were forced to listen to the third disc every time I listened to the first two, this album would bump down a few places on this list. But those first two discs are full of earnest, urgent songs about spiritualism, love, friendship, death, and more, all set to maximalist Phil Spector production (yeah he was a monstrous person but no one could touch him in his prime). There’s no album like it.

The best solo Beatles albums

After the breakup of the Beatles, John, Paul, George, and Ringo all embarked on energetic solo careers to try and keep the magic alive. They reached their greatest heights in the early ’70s, crashed in the late ’70s, and had minor renaissances from the ’80s to the late ’90s. As mixed as the results have been, the 55 years since the breakup have yielded a lot of great music if you sift it out from all the swings and misses.

You can follow the careers of all four Beatles in chronological order in my Scorekeeping the Solo Beatles series. And don’t forget to subscribe, I post about all the music you wish you already loved.

Welcome back to my series that hands out the scores and separates the winners from the losers of every year of the Beatles’ solo careers. As I said in part 1, this is my quest to sort out not only who came out ahead in the aftermath of the breakup of the world’s biggest group, but also how and why. We’ve been through 8 parts so far: 1970–1971, 1972–1975, 1976–1979, 1980–1984, 1985–1990, 1991–1999, 2000–2009, and 2010–2019. In part 9, Paul produces one predictably critically successful album then goes quiet, and we spend the rest of our time on a slew of Ringo releases, in the middle of which he surprises me by starting to make interesting artistic choices and good songs. Who knew his career would finally start paying more dividends in its sixth decade? We’ll also spend some more time with the numbers, dissecting and reanalyzing the post-Beatle years through a bunch of different lenses, so stay tuned for the math-tastic conclusion!

My method for tabulating these scores is as methodical as it is idiosyncratic. See part 1 to learn more about my scoring system.

2020

Paul McCartney, McCartney III: Staying home because of COVID naturally brought out the home recording enthusiast in Paul, and he decided to make a new album in his McCartney series — like on McCartney (1970) and McCartney II (1980), he would overdub all the instruments himself. A worthy social-distancing-friendly project, or a legacy artist releasing the recordings of himself dicking around at home: you decide! For myself, I couldn’t bring myself to care about this album in 2020, and I still can’t today. It’s a very Paul album: lots of pleasant little ditties that leave little lasting impression. But music critics adored the album, calling it his best and most personal in years. It hit #1 on the UK chart, his first there since Flowers in the Dirt (1989), and #2 in the US, where Paul became the first artist to have an album in the top two in every decade for six decades. (I love it when accolades have to be so carefully worded they lose all their meaning.) This was also the album where Paul’s marketing team unlocked the financial wonder of infinite variations: the vinyl was released in more special variant editions than you can shake a stick at, both at the time and over subsequent years. (I get the joke of celebrating the album’s 3rd anniversary, for instance, but another set of limited edition variants for it?) A naked cash-grab. In 2021, Paul also released an album of covers and remixes of the album’s songs by prominent artists called McCartney III Imagined, which I won’t count for points because it’s a derivative work. What I’m saying is, Paul (and/or Paul’s people) milked this album for every dime it was worth. In any case, it gets an 8/10 critic score, and its sales bring it to 18.

2020 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 860 (+18)

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 192

The first year of the ’20s is, so far, also the last year Paul released any new music. The rest of the post will be the Ringo Starr show — regrettable at the start, but stick with me, he’s about to surprise me.

2021–2024

After What’s My Name, Ringo decided that albums weren’t the way he wanted to release music anymore. He’s far from the only legacy artist to look at the modern music scene and conclude that individual songs are now more important than the full albums of their heydays. Ringo noticed younger artists making EPs for the streaming market and decided the EP would be his new primary format. This presents a challenge to my scoring system. These aren’t albums — they’re a little under half as long, and Ringo is able to put out a lot more of them in a short time. But they are original studio projects, so I want to give them similar consideration as albums. So after a lengthy deliberation (I thought about it for thirty seconds after listening to the first EP), I’ve decided to give Ringo’s EPs my subjective critical score out of 5 points instead of 10, meaning each will earn half as much as a regular album. None of these make any sales points, so there’s no issue there.

Ringo Starr, Zoom In (2021): The first of Ringo’s 2020s EPs is a normal Ringo effort with the usual collaborators. It got the customary mixed reviews: it’s comforting, light, and fluffy; it’s schmaltzy, one-dimensional, and so cut-and-paste that it negates its considerable good intentions. 2/5.

Ringo Starr, Change the World (2021): More of the same. Relentless optimism, “singing a little tune” will save the world. While the last EP all had the same monotonous rock sound as his recent albums, this one plays with other genres: after a traditional Ringo rock opener, we get a pseudo-reggae song (“Just the Way”), a country rocker (“Coming Undone” featuring Trombone Shorty of all people!?!?!?), and a toothless cover of the early rock and roll classic “Rock Around the Clock.” The greater variety is appreciated, but not especially effective. It gets harder to find critical reviews of the EPs at this point — I think reviewers started to take Ringo not making album albums as an excuse not to listen to his new material, which, fair. Another 2/5.

Ringo Starr, EP3 (2022): We’re mostly back to Ringo’s breezy rock style on this EP. Steve Lukather of Toto and Linda Perry of 4 Non-Blondes are prominent collaborators (as they have been before). “Free Your Soul” is another genre experiment, this one with Latin music, featuring heavy saxophone accompaniment by Dave Koz and flamenco guitar by José Antonio Rodríguez — it’s a nice change of pace, even if it’s still not that good of a song. This record, too, was largely ignored by critics. 2/5 again.

Ringo Starr, Rewind Forward (2023): I’ve been down on these Ringo records for so long that this one caught me totally off guard — it’s not great, but it’s pretty good, which makes it a home run by Ringo’s standards. To take the tracks in order: “Shadows on the Wall” is a nice bit of power pop written by two members of Toto; “Feeling the Sunlight” is a Paul McCartney song that sounds like the upbeat ones he wrote on Revolver, and Paul also plays most of the instruments on it; “Rewind Forward” was co-written by Ringo and frequent collaborator Bruce Sugar and is the least successful song on the album because of how typically Ringo it is; and “Miss Jean,” written by two former members of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, is a rockabilly pop song that pleasantly recalls “Dizzy Miss Lizzie.” Three strong songs in varied genres that Ringo does well in, and one clunker. This one just works for me, and I don’t think it’s only the Stockholm syndrome. It helps that it’s a bit of a rolodex record like his ’70s successes, all the songs farmed out to others to write and largely play the instrumental backings on; it also helps that it expands previous EPs’ use of different genres, because Ringo’s music can get monotonous if he’s not careful. I could find precious few reviews of this one too, so it’s up to me to rate it. I’m giving it a respectable 3/5. It’s the first of these EPs (and indeed the first Ringo work of the last 40 years) that I’ve listened to again on purpose.

Ringo Starr, Crooked Boy (2024): Linda Perry of 4 Non-Blondes (who had contributed songs for two of Ringo’s EPs so far) asked Ringo if she could produce an entire EP for him. Perry was the sole writer and producer for Crooked Boy, and the EP benefits from being helmed by one person with a clear vision of what she wanted. The title track is especially effective — it’s a country-tinged rock song that reflects on Ringo’s sickly childhood, and it might be his best autobiographical song yet, which is funny because he didn’t write it. Perry did something Ringo had never done in his lyrics before: contextualized his optimistic, peace-and-love brand in the life of someone whose childhood was spent in the solitude of a sickbed with no guarantee he’d see tomorrow. Makes it a heck of a lot more meaningful. (Still, did we have to shoehorn “peace and love” into the lyrics of nearly every track? Exhausting.) Within the limited potential of a Ringo Starr EP in 2024, Crooked Boy is very good. I give it another 3/5.

Overall, I think Ringo’s experiment with making EPs instead of albums paid off. Those 2000s and 2010s albums had so much filler, and it’s just easier to enjoy 15–20 minutes of Ringo than 40–60. The first three were just shorter versions of his not-great albums, but as he went along, he seems to have embraced the lower stakes as license to experiment and allow some good writers to give him songs again. He made an album instead of an EP in 2025 (more on that in a moment), and I’m curious whether he’ll keep the EPs going in future years. If he keeps expanding on what he did with the last two, I’d like to hear where he goes next.

Hm. Maybe this is Stockholm syndrome after all.

Paul did make an archival release in 2024. One Hand Clapping is a Wings live-in-studio concert film and soundtrack recorded in 1974, when the band was poised for the market domination they soon achieved, but unreleased at the time. This is obviously ineligible due to being an archival release instead of new work, and also it was technically already released as part of the deluxe Band on the Run boxset in 2010 — this release is just the first time the film and album were made available as standalones. No points.

2024 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 860

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 204 (+12 since 2021)

In 2023 (the year of his first good EP), Ringo finally broke 200 — for reference, Paul did that in 1975, John in 1980, and George in 1987. Better late than never. The first half of the 2020s have been good for Ringo, and he’s not done yet.

2025

Ringo Starr, Look Up: Ringo’s latest LP, released in January of this year, is his return to country music. You might recall that Ringo had been singing country-tinged rock since his days in the Beatles, and that his second album after the Beatles’ breakup, Beaucoups of Blues (1970), was a straightforward Nashville country album. 55 years later, Ringo returned to Nashville (at least spiritually) to make his second country album, Look Up. He enlisted beloved roots music producer T-Bone Burnett (O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, Raising Sand by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, among many, many others) and a bunch of excellent country, folk, and bluegrass collaborators, such as the hotshot guitarists Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle and the legendary singer Alison Krauss. The result is great fun. Burnett’s writing is good, the guest stars shine brightly, and Ringo sounds perfectly in his element. Where Beacoups of Blues could have been anyone’s album, with all the backing tracks planned out before Ringo even arrived in the studio, Look Up has his drumming, some of his writing, and his fingerprints all over it. Ringo’s second country LP is a better record than his first, and his finest album since at least the ’70s, maybe ever. I knew the old boy had it in him. Critics have awarded it pretty solid reviews. It gets an 8/10 from me, and adds another 1 point for sales. It’s not commercial enough to change much for him on the scoreboard, but what a moral victory, as Ringo ends my series with his first real triumph after years of stumbling.

As far as I’ve read, I can’t tell whether Ringo intends to return to making albums for good, or whether Look Up is just an exception since the stars aligned for him to make the country album he should have made years ago. I suppose time will tell. God knows neither Beatle has much more time left, but it’s possible Ringo could make the 2020s his strongest decade yet. What a feat that would be.

2025 Cumulative Scoreboard (so far):

1. Paul McCartney: 860

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 213 (+9)

One final check of the scoreboard — tentative, as either Beatle might announce something new any day, but it feels unlikely to happen before the end of 2025 since they’ve been busy on the Anthology re-release and Paul on a solo documentary. In the up-to-date reckoning, we have Paul in an absurd first place with almost three times the points as George in second. John is in third and Ringo is in fourth, but not nearly as behind as he has been. Not a lot has changed in year 56 AB, but what a ride it’s been.

Conclusions: Who won the breakup of the Beatles?

Who won the breakup of the Beatles? Paul. I knew that when I started. The purpose of the series wasn’t just to crown a winner, but to track the intricacies of their careers year by year. Not just who won, but why and how, and especially how that narrative developed over time. If I may oversimplify for a moment:

Paul McCartney, our eventual winner with 860 points, started as a musical pariah — for the first few years (1970–1972) he mostly made mediocre albums, and even when he made a good one (Ram), critics and the public were so jaded against him that it didn’t get the attention it deserved. But his new band Wings released their masterpiece Band on the Run in late 1973 and gained traction through 1974 and 1975 before reaching a pinnacle in 1976. This period granted Paul the greatest commercial and critical success of his post-Beatles career, putting him head-and-shoulders above his bandmates; though he had great successes in the years after, most of his status as the greatest of the solo Beatles stems from 1973–1976. Wings fell apart with a series of weak albums in the late ’70s, but Paul redeemed himself in 1982 with the smash success Tug of War. He tried, but mostly failed, to maintain this mainstream success through the 1980s. In the 1990s, Paul stopped chasing chart success and settled in to making MOR rock albums of modest ambitions. After Anthology revived popular interest in the Beatles in the late ’90s, the profile of Paul’s albums rose, bringing critical success and industry awards but precious little airplay or cultural currency. Today, Paul makes an occasional pretty-good album and tours primarily on his hits of the ’60s and ’70s, an artifact rather than a vital modern artist, but an important artifact. In the end, Paul’s success is less due to raw talent (it’s my opinion that both John and George had more of that) and more to his work ethic. He kept putting out record after record, year after year, without ever taking a major hiatus. He followed up successes by more of the same, and he followed up failures with shotgun blasts of new attempts. Paul is the most successful Beatle not because he’s the best of them, but because he just never stops.

George Harrison, second place with 290, started off the unexpected favorite by making All Things Must Pass, the best Beatle album (and one of the best albums overall) of 1970. He enjoyed popular and critical success from 1970–1973, but fumbled it badly in 1974 with a poorly received tour and album. He never quite recovered: his reputation was eventually restored, but his break with success seems to have made him stop wanting to chase it permanently. For the rest of his life, George made modest records exactly how he wanted to, ignoring trends and mostly avoiding promotion, and often going long stretches without releasing anything. He was critically acclaimed but not terribly popular, and people tended to forget his albums — any good album he made after 1970 was described as “his best since All Things Must Pass” and inevitably became “a lost classic.” He had another brief blip of success in the late ’80s and early ’90s with Cloud Nine and the records by his supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, but mostly he stayed out of the spotlight. He died of cancer in 2001, leaving behind one final album to release. His was an intentionally modest career. Could he ever have challenged Paul? If we’re talking purely about talent, of course. But given that Paul’s success was so rooted in his determination to stay in the spotlight, in his careerism and ambition, George would have had to have been a fundamentally different person to equal him. George had the success he wanted; he could have chased more, and it was his decision not to.

John Lennon, third place with 248, might have been the Beatle most expected to succeed after the breakup, but he underperformed for a few reasons that had nothing to do with his untimely death. Though he came out swinging and released two wonderful albums and a lot of good singles in 1970 and 1971, his first misstep in 1972 spooked him — it’s my impression that he wasn’t a person who dealt well with anything short of runaway success. Personal turmoil, substance abuse, and legal troubles marred his mid ’70s, and he spent the latter half of the ’70s on hiatus. John responded to setbacks in his career by retiring, similar to (but even more extreme than) George. He began to mount his comeback in 1980 to mixed critical reaction, but his senseless assassination cut that comeback off right at the beginning, leading to a re-evaluation of his final album. It’s my opinion that, if not for his murder, John would have remained a popular force through at least the 1980s — waxing and waning like the others, perhaps, and probably not especially critically acclaimed, but he would have made and sold lots more records. Like George, I don’t think John could ever have challenged Paul for the top slot — he didn’t have the work ethic, and his priorities were never as careerist as Paul’s — but I think if John had lived into the 2000s, he’d have maintained his second-place spot to the end rather than ceding it to George. When I started this project, I wondered how large a role the Beatles’ deaths would play in their final scores. And I think I have my answer: I think John would be a spot higher if he’d lived, but I don’t think a lot would have changed outside that (at least on my scoreboard).

Ringo Starr, a predictable last place with 213, has had a rocky career, but even he wouldn’t fool himself on this point: he’s lucky to have had a career at all. He was never going to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his former bandmates. Ringo spent 1970 mourning the demise of the group with odd, uncommercial albums, then he had some great success through the early ’70s with albums and singles that felt like fun parties. These successful Ringo records were not his creative projects, but were created piecemeal by huge guest lists of the pop luminaries Ringo was friends with. That formula wore thin in the late ’70s, and Ringo flailed about trying to retool himself, but by the mid ’80s he couldn’t even get a record deal. After he got sober in the late ’80s, Ringo made a career out of touring with a supergroup of B and C-list music celebrities and releasing lukewarm power pop albums. He has made a steady stream of rock records since the 1990s, all nearly identical sounding and none gaining much success, but that never seemed to bother him. In the Beatles, Ringo had the reputation as the one who didn’t concern himself with the art, he was just there to have a good time. That reputation has persisted, and while it hasn’t leant much depth or variety to his albums, we get the unmistakable sense that he is doing the thing he loves most. We can admire him for that.

Scoreboard variants

But let’s spend a little more time with the numbers. Because of course, the cumulative scoring I’ve used rewards those who release the most (Paul) — now that I’ve got all the numbers in, what can I do to prize quality over quantity? Can I alter the rankings by changing my lens?

I just talked about the Beatles’ lifespans as a factor, and though I mostly dismissed it, we can be objective about it. Let’s divide the Beatles’ final scores by the amount of years they had to achieve them, which will negate Paul and Ringo’s twenty-five-year advantage over George and forty-five-year advantage over John. This will give us the average points gained per year by each.

Average Score Per Year:

1. John Lennon: 22.54

2. Paul McCartney: 15.35

3. George Harrison: 9.35

4. Ringo Starr: 3.8

Averaging by year moves John into a commanding lead. I’m a little surprised at the number, given that John’s 11 years include five years of total silence. But it’s a testament to just how much higher the Beatles’ profiles were at the beginning of the 70s — a successful album by a former Beatle in this century would have been a very modest one indeed by the standard of 1970, so all of the Beatles’ latter-day releases pale in comparison to what John put out in his only decade. So yes, John takes first place by this metric with over 22 points per year, but it hardly seems fair. John didn’t have to figure out how to eke out success in a world where his relevance slipped away with every passing year. I’m much more impressed that Paul could sustain 15 points per year through the twists and turns of his 56-year career. George’s score just north of 9 certainly reflects his long periods of inactivity. And Ringo at less than 4… that seems about right.

But dividing by years doesn’t reflect another core inequality of my scoreboard: that Paul kept releasing and releasing while the others had periods of inactivity. Do we really need to reward him for releasing dozens of mediocre albums hoping one of them succeeds? So let’s divide the scores by how many releases went into them, giving us the average score any individual release achieved.

Average Score Per Release: (the number in parentheses after the score is the number of releases counted)

1. Paul McCartney: 17.2 (133)

2. John Lennon: 8.5 (29)

3. George Harrison: 5.8 (50)

4. Ringo Starr: 2.7 (79)

Paul still comes out very well ahead in this number. It makes sense: sales are such an important part of these scores, and with the exception of the first few years of the 1970s, Paul’s sales were always in a different galaxy than the others’.

In that case, let’s try to figure out who made the best records without talking about commercial success. If I only look at the critical scores of their albums, who comes out ahead?

Critical Reception Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 168

2. Ringo Starr: 112

3. George Harrison: 88

4. John Lennon: 54

Now here’s a number that overvalues Ringo! Problem is, very few Beatle releases get fully panned by critics; there are always some good reviews that merit a score of at least a 3 for even the worst of the Beatles’ LPs. So Ringo is rewarded for his unending stream of bad albums with second place. This metric might be the least fair one yet. But I can make it better: let’s average these scores by dividing by number of releases.

Average Critical Score Per Release: (number of albums counted in parentheses)

1. George Harrison: 7.33 (12)

2. John Lennon: 6.75 (8)

3. Paul McCartney: 6.22 (27)

4. Ringo Starr: 4.31 (26)

This number favors George, which makes a lot of sense. We’re measuring in a way that rewards him for his longtime critical favor and doesn’t punish him for his disinterest in his commercial standing or his long periods of inactivity. John comes in second and Paul in third — Paul was an artist who threw a lot of things out there hoping one would stick, so this number finally knocks him for his many misses.

And just for grins, let’s see about when we average that first set of critical scores by how many years each Beatle had to work with.

Average Critical Score Per Year:

1. John Lennon: 4.91

2. Paul McCartney: 3

3. George Harrison: 2.75

4. Ringo Starr: 0.46

This number predictably favors John, who only had 11 years, spreading his points less thinly. Paul comes out pretty well due to the consistency of his schedule despite his longevity, and George isn’t far behind, which says something about his critical acclaim — he was the opposite of consistent. And this is the first number that puts Ringo underwater, which, lol.

Before I wrap up this series, I’m going to do one more tangential post. I have all the data (and all the subjective listening experience) to do a ranking of all the Beatles’ solo albums, so I’ll post that list next week.

Other than that, my long post-Beatle journey is over, at least until one of them releases something new. I’ve gained a lot of insight not only into the careers of these four artists but also into the larger musical and cultural scene they inhabited. Context always makes music more meaningful for me, and I love that now, every time I hear a post-Beatle song in the wild, I have so many associations to make. I’ve also discovered new favorite albums I’d never given a chance to before. I hope you’ve had fun riding this wave of data with me.

Sheesh, what am I going to obsess over now?

If you’ve enjoyed my Beatle posts, make sure to subscribe for more music writing (among other things). I’m always working on something, and I know you’re going to enjoy what I’m cooking up next!

Welcome back to my series that hands out the scores and separates the winners from the losers of every year of the Beatles’ solo careers. As I said in part 1, this is my quest to sort out not only who came out ahead in the aftermath of the breakup of the world’s biggest group, but also how and why. We’ve been through 7 parts so far: 1970–1971, 1972–1975, 1976–1979, 1980–1984, 1985–1990, 1991–1999, and 2000–2009. Part 8 is where we follow the Beatles into mind-numbing territory. Apart from a brief blip in 2014–15 when Paul was releasing singles with one of the biggest names in hip hop (more on that in a moment), both the remaining Beatles just kept making more MOR rock albums that made no dent in the popular imagination no matter how well they sold or how critically acclaimed they were. So this is a pretty short one (gone are the days when five years amply filled a post; this one is under count with ten years) and a bridge to the more interesting 2020s.

My method for tabulating these scores is as methodical as it is idiosyncratic. See part 1 to learn more about my scoring system.

2010

Ringo Starr, Y Not: By 2010, Ringo was financially secure enough to start his own record label to record and release his songs (via Universal Music Group) without any more pesky labels dropping him. He called his label Roccabella. All his albums since 2010 have borne this name, but it’s nothing more than Ringo’s home studio and cottage industry for his music, which he began to self-produce and release with increasing speed in this decade.

His first Roccabella album, Y Not, is a little like his bigger ’70s albums in that it has one notable co-writer per song. Paul McCartney plays bass on “Peace Dream,” which also mentions John, but lord is it insipid. The whole album expresses the relentless peace-and-love optimism that have become Ringo’s stock-in-trade — it’s fun, but inconsequential, and fully interchangeable with the Ringo albums that came before it. Ringo keeps plugging away making the same sorts of songs he always has, and the diminishing returns keep diminishing. It gets a 4/10 off its very mixed reviews, and manages a chart showing in the US for 1 more point.

2010 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 765

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 173 (+5)

2011 sees nothing but Paul’s final (for now) classical album, so we hop directly to another Ringo album in 2012.

2012

Ringo Starr, Ringo 2012: It’s nice that Ringo gave this one a name that helps me keep track of which one it is among his sea of identical new-millennium albums. Ringo 2012 is Ringo’s third consecutive album with an autobiographical song about Liverpool on it — he joked that no one would buy a memoir if he wrote one, so he was writing his autobiography one song at a time. As sour as I have become on Ringo in this decade, that’s charming. There isn’t much else to notice about this album, other than it has a lot of re-recordings: songs from earlier Ringo albums and classics by others like “Think It Over” and “Rock Island Line,” none of them particularly worth making. Same Ringo sound, same mixed reviews: 4/10 with 1 more for sales, see you in a couple years for another.

Paul McCartney, Kisses on the Bottom: In 2012 Paul finally made the covers album he’d always seemed to want to, of jazz and traditional pop standards (with a couple of originals thrown in written to match the tone). Even in the Beatle days John used to mock Paul for his “grandpa songs” (“When I’m 64,” “Your Mother Should Know,” “Honey Pie,” etc.), which were inspired by the family singalongs he’d had growing up, his father playing the family piano. These are the sorts of songs Paul is covering here. Paul contributed only vocals to the project (and guitar on one song); the jazz standards orchestra is assisted by the likes of Diana Krall, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Wonder. The result is much better than Ringo’s trad pop Sentimental Journey in 1970, but it’s also a covers album: low ambition, low rewards. Though Paul’s voice is in fine form, I can hear him straining on some songs — that might be age, but it’s probably more that trad pop requires a different sort of vocal training. Paul’s voice is well suited for his own singer-songwriter material (and in the ‘60s it worked great on rock & roll screamers), but he doesn’t have the sheer power he needs to belt the pure notes these songs require. A reminder that although Paul has always drawn inspiration from this sort of music, he isn’t really this sort of musician. In any case, Kisses on the Bottom got middling to positive reviews. It gets a 6/10, and sales push it to 17.

2012 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 782 (+17)

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 178 (+5)

As our years with both Beatles releasing grow more scarce, we have to enjoy the shootouts when we get them. Here in year 43 AB, a modest covers album from Paul absolutely creams a new original album by Ringo, absolutely unsurprisingly.

2013

Paul McCartney, New: This is Paul’s first album of new songs since 2007’s Memory Almost Full, an unusually long gap for Paul: even in the lengthy career he’s had, he has mostly delivered new albums within four years. For New, Paul worked with four producers, intending to pick one to go with for the whole album but eventually using all four. These included Giles Martin (son of Beatle producer George) and modern super-producer Mark Ronson. Contrary to the title, New is very typical Paul fare, a happy album about his life with his new wife (not Heather, the new new one, Nancy Shevell). Taking a cue from Ringo, Paul also waxes nostalgic about Liverpool; “Early Days” is a standout for its Beatle-ish sound, but is marred by Paul’s lyrical axe to grind (he wants to make sure everyone knows he and John were songwriting equals from the beginning). New got generally positive reviews: not comparable to Paul’s heyday, either with the Beatles or solo, but good on its own merits. It gets 7/10, and sales bring it to 17.

2013 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 799 (+17)

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 178

2014 was mostly a quiet year except for an explosive surprise on December 31st: a new Kanye West single featuring Paul McCartney. 2015 brought two more, so I’ll cover all three singles at once in the next section, but for the record: “Only One,” which technically came out in 2014, adds 5 points to Paul’s total.

2015

In December, January, and March of 2014–2015, Kanye West dropped three non-album singles that featured Paul McCartney. The absurdity of the pairing was nicely illustrated by some quickly-viral tweets by rap fans saying things like “I don’t know who this Paul McCartney is, but Kanye is about to make him famous!” It was an illustrative and funny as hell cultural moment, but what about the songs?

The first, “Only One,” is a spare song featuring Paul playing the electric piano under a vocal by Kanye adopting the persona of his own late mother. Kanye later claimed not to remember recording it, that he’d been possessed by his mother’s spirit, which sounds like the sort of thing he’d say.

The second single was the massive hit, “FourFiveSeconds,” also memorably featuring Rihanna. It broke Paul’s long drought in top 10 US singles, achieving the honor for the first time since “Spies Like Us” in 1985. But Paul only plays acoustic guitar on the song.

The last, “All Day,” is the best song of the bunch if you ask me, but also the one with the least Paul: it’s built off a Wings sample from Wild Life, and Paul whistles a bit toward the end.

These singles certainly put Paul into musical conversations he’d never been in before, but he feels more like an impressive marquis name than a real part of these songs. In mixes with huge amounts of layered backup vocals, Paul doesn’t sing a word. I know what I imagine when I think “one of the biggest rappers in the world collaborates with Paul McCartney,” and these aren’t that. If you didn’t know Paul was on them, you’d never guess it, and you certainly couldn’t distinguish these songs from the music Kanye was making without Paul in the same period. In other words, I don’t feel Paul’s fingerprints on these singles, at least not as much as I’d like to. So it feels honestly silly to talk about these as Paul McCartney songs, though I have to allow that they are.

As I said earlier, “Only One” gains Paul 5 points. “FourFiveSeconds” gets 13 — it’s a nice demonstration of the different scale the Beatles are working on in this era, because one big rap single in the 2010s scores almost as many points as Paul can achieve with a whole new album (to say nothing of Ringo). “All Day” gets 7. So the Kanye singles net Paul an impressive 25 points overall.

Ringo Starr, Postcards from Paradise: Oh goody, it’s more of the same from Ringo. Typical sound, typical collaborators, and I am tired of them. There’s another one of his memoir songs, this one about playing with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, the band the Beatles poached him from. Are we running out of worthy material already? No wonder he doesn’t write it. The title track (co-written by the infinitely talented Todd Rundgren) is mostly composed of Beatles song titles strung into sentences, some of them clever and some cringeworthy. Postcards from Paradise got more mixed reviews. If you want another Ringo, you know what you’re in for, and that’s exactly what you get. I give it another 4/10, and it just barely manages 1 sales point by making it to 99 on the US chart.

2015 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 824 (+5 in 2014, 20 in 2015)

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 183 (+5)

Paul tries something new and is rewarded; Ringo does the same thing he always does, and I guess he finds that pretty rewarding.

Nothing happens in 2016.

2017

Ringo Starr, Give More Love: For this one, Ringo had the idea to go to Nashville and make a country album, a sequel to Beaucoups of Blues, which might have been the most interesting Ringo album in decades. But wouldn’t you know it, he decided to make another rock album in his home studio. Paul plays bass on two songs and sings backup on one. What’s left to say about these records? How many more of them are there? It’s optimistic, openhearted, shallow, and ultimately boring as hell. Mixed reviews, so another 4/10, with no points for sales.

2017 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 824

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 187 (+4)

2018

Paul McCartney, Egypt Station: Paul’s next album came after a five-year break; you can feel him slowing down. Egypt Station shows Paul experimenting with a number of new sounds, mostly slightly heavier forms of pop rock, including a collaboration with Ryan Tedder of the briefly-hot band OneRepublic in which Paul sings about fucking (jarring, but good for him I guess). It ends with a multi-part suite in the McCartney style, and it’s not the Abbey Road medley, but it’s pretty good. Critics gave Egypt Station very positive reviews, crediting it with a sense of urgency not often heard in Paul’s recent music. And it became Paul’s first US #1 album since Tug of War. (Frankly this says more about the odd ways music is distributed and ranked in the modern era than it does about this album — there isn’t a thing on Egypt Station that has anywhere near the cultural reach of “Ebony and Ivory.”) I’m giving it an 8/10, and its chart success pushes it to 18.

2018 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 842 (+18)

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 187

2019

In early 2019, Paul released some non-album singles from the Egypt Station sessions, but none of them gain any points. In July Paul released an old recording of an in-store performance at Amoeba Records — it’s an expanded version of a limited edition release from 2007, so though it did chart modestly, I’m counting it as an archival release and not awarding points.

Ringo Starr, What’s My Name: October brought us Ringo’s latest, and I know I’ve been complaining about these, but this is true: when I started listening to and reading about this album, I kept going back and checking my notes, because it’s all so similar to the details of his last albums I could have sworn I’d already covered it. But no, turns out this one was new, and Ringo is just intent on making me act out Groundhog Day with mediocre albums. This one features a cover of John’s “Grow Old With Me” with Paul on bass and backing vocals and an orchestral motif from George’s “Here Comes the Sun,” to include all four Beatles on the track. It’s okay. The rest of the album gives us Ringo’s lukewarm take on social media (it’s exactly what you think) and a cover of “Money (That’s What I Want)” with some horrendous auto-tune. It got mixed reviews: one word used to describe it both positively and negatively is “earnest.” It’s openhearted; it’s also cringe. Another 4/10, and yet another 99th place on a chart (UK this time) grants him another 1 point. I am going to lose it.

2019 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 842

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 192 (+5)

And that does it for the 2010s. One year of interesting singles with McCartney on the “featuring” credit, and other than that, not much to report. Next week, we close out the series by bringing the Beatles into the present day. The 2020s so far are mostly pretty similar to the 2010s, but you’ll never guess who starts making pretty good records in his 80s — I’ll give you a hint, it isn’t Paul! See you in part 9.

Welcome back to my series that hands out the scores and separates the winners from the losers of every year of the Beatles’ solo careers. As I said in part 1, this is my quest to sort out not only who came out ahead in the aftermath of the breakup of the world’s biggest group, but also how and why. We’ve been through 6 parts so far: 1970–1971, 1972–1975, 1976–1979, 1980–1984, 1985–1990, and 1991–1999. In part 7, it’s the new millennium baby. Infinite hope on the horizon for about a year and a half before cold reality came crashing in. Paul makes a minor fumble and then a hell of a recovery, and Ringo gets the freedom to do whatever he wants and uses it to start making an endless series of functionally identical albums. But the biggest Beatle story of the 2000s is the loss of George Harrison and his final, posthumous album.

My method for tabulating these scores is as methodical as it is idiosyncratic. See part 1 to learn more about my scoring system.

2000 was another year without a new release (aside from a classical album by Paul), so we have to wait until 2001 to usher in the new millennium.

2001

Paul McCartney, Driving Rain: Paul recorded his next album just as quickly as Run Devil Run, bringing his touring band into the studio for a mere two weeks, which begs the question of whether Paul learned the wrong lesson from Anthology. The result is a pretty typical Paul album: a couple good ditties (“From a Lover to a Friend” is a nice ballad), some real stinkers (such as “Your Loving Flame,” which Paul played to death while promoting the album and which no one has heard since), and a lot of underbaked, tossed-off material. The album is largely animated by his new fiancé, Heather Mills, with whom he would soon have a brief, bad marriage and protracted divorce.

After Driving Rain was already at the printers (complete with its cover taken on a Casio wristwatch), Paul was sitting on an airport runway in New York City and witnessed the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Paul was moved by the event to organize a charity concert, the Concert for New York City, in October, which I remember watching on VH1 at the time. (I was 13 in 2001 and my Beatles obsession was in full swing, so I actually have firsthand recollections from this point on! They’re spotty though, I mostly thought [correctly it turns out] that their contemporaneous solo careers weren’t worth following.) At the show he premiered his new single, “Freedom,” written for the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. He thought it was so important to include on his new album that he halted production and had it added as the final track, though it wasn’t listed on most of the already-printed liner notes. But “Freedom” is the definition of a rushed McCartney song; it’s not catchy, its lyrics are as shallow as they come, and after the 20-year war on terror, his declaration of “I will fight for my right to live in freedom” has aged poorly. I think it says a lot that even in a country that spent the next few years obsessed with its collective 9/11 trauma, “Freedom” only ever made it to 97 on the US charts.

Though Driving Rain mostly got good reviews, it didn’t catch on and sold poorly. It gave him his worst sales yet in the UK, and not much better in the US. I’m giving it a 7/10 based on its strong reviews (I disagree with them); its sales bring it to 13, and its singles to 16.

George Harrison died on November 29, 2001. For most of 2001, George had been battling cancer that had been in remission in 1997, but had returned and metastasized to his brain. His death provoked an outpouring of grief and tributes by fellow artists and fans. He’d had a studio album in progress for a decade, but it would take another year after his death to finish it, so that release will wait until 2002.

2001 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 687 (+16)

2. George Harrison: 272

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 150

2002

In November 2002, Paul released a concert film and live album from his tour in support of Driving Rain called Back in the U.S. It’s yet another bog-standard Macca live album, and it gains him 7 points (it was certified platinum in the US, so someone was buying these).

George Harrison, Brainwashed: Also in November, George Harrison’s estate released his final album, a decade in the making. Brainwashed came a year after Harrison’s death, and 15 years after his previous solo album, the hugely successful Cloud Nine. Progress on the album had been delayed first in the early ’90s by legal troubles with George’s former manager, then by the Anthology in the middle of the decade, then by his throat cancer and attack in 1997 and 1999. While George was recuperating from the stabbing, he described his vision for the final form of Brainwashed to his son Dhani in great detail. This proved fortuitous, as it eventually fell to Dhani to execute that vision. When George found out his cancer was terminal in 2001, he devoted all his remaining energy to getting the album as close to completion as he could, and left a roadmap behind for Dhani and his old friend and producer Jeff Lynne to follow. The pair finished the album — George had booked sessions and musicians already, and Dhani and Jeff simply used them all without rescheduling a thing.

Brainwashed had strong sales (in 2000s Beatles terms) and generally good reviews. It’s a typical George album, laid back and catchy; it can get a tad monotonous, and suffers from its long production process — George’s music is strongest at its most immediate, and this was labored over. Still, it’s a gorgeous swan song, and there is great comfort in the knowledge that it was all made so precisely to George’s wishes. Brainwashed gets an 8/10; sales bring it to 16, and singles to 18.

2002 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 694 (+7)

2. George Harrison: 290 (+18)

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 150

George’s final 18 points solidify him into a second place that will be eternal, unless Ringo starts surprising us all real soon. And then there were two.

2003

Paul has another release in 2003 on a sheer technicality. His Back in the U.S. live album of 2002 had been primarily released in the US, and a slightly retooled version titled Back in the World was released internationally in 2003, where it gains him 8 more points. If we take these two live albums as one release, as we rightfully should, it got 15 total points, outperforming the sales of the album its tour supported.

Ringo Starr, Ringorama: Nothing really changed in Ringo’s career between the 1990s and the 2000s except that his lack of commercial and critical success ceased to negatively affect him. Maybe it was the nostalgia market, or the moneymaking tours that grew from it making any recording revenue redundant, but Ringo stopped needing to worry about drama over record labels dropping him or underselling his albums. He settled in to what he still is today: a figurehead, an ambassador of the classic rock past, one of the Two Remaining Beatles — he no longer has to prove himself, he is allowed to do exactly what he wants. And what he wants is to make really mediocre music: Ringo settled in and spent the next two decades recording identical-sounding records every couple of years. The track lists change, the collaborator lists shift ever so slightly, but if you’ve heard one of these albums, you’ve heard them all.

Ringorama features “Never Without You,” a touching George Harrison tribute with Eric Clapton. Its sound is consciously Beatle-ish, and the celebrity guest list is impressive as always: Willie Nelson, David Gilmour, Van Dyke Parks, and a posthumous Roy Orbison (Ringo obtained a sample of just Roy’s famous “growl” from his widow for the song “Memphis in Your Mind”). As usual for a Ringo album, the whole is considerably less than the sum of all these promising parts. The hidden track, “I Really Love Her,” was Ringo’s attempt to do a song where he plays all the instruments like Paul does, and the result is… an actual embarrassment. Ringorama gets a 5/10 on a couple tepidly positive critic reviews, and gains nothing further from sales or singles.

2003 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 702 (+8)

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 155 (+5)

Mostly quiet in 2004, except for a delayed release of a single from Paul’s old Rupert Bear project, “Tropic Island Hum.” Not honestly sure if I should count it or consider it an archival release and disqualify it, but it seems to have accompanied a new film release, which makes it murky for me. So I’m just going to allow him the 2 points.

2005

There’s an almost-Paul release in 2005, a remix album called Twin Freaks. It’s credited half to McCartney and listed in his full discography, but it’s actually the work of DJ Freelance Hellraiser, who opened for Paul during his 2004 tour by doing mangled live remixes of Paul’s songs. He released a recorded version of these in June, and though the record has Paul’s name on it, I’m not counting it for his points for the same reason I’m not counting the early Fireman records.

Ringo Starr, Choose Love: Both surviving Beatles have full-scale releases in 2005, and we start with Ringo in July. Choose Love is another album by the same creative team as Vertical Man and Ringorama, but with a lot fewer guest stars — the most notable are probably Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders and Billy Preston. It’s another okay and instantly forgettable Ringo album, and oh boy did he make a lot more of them. Critics had softened toward Ringo, allowing him his role as the fun-loving optimist grandpa with nothing new to say, and gave the album good reviews. But of course it did nothing commercially. It gets a 5/10 with no points from sales or singles.

Paul McCartney, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard: Next in September came Paul’s next major album. In a familiar move, Paul tapped a successful new producer (this time Nigel Godrich, known for producing Radiohead and Beck) to try to invigorate his sound and make himself relevant in a new era. Godrich moved Paul away from his inveterate songwriting habits and touring band. Paul wound up playing most of the instruments himself in the vein of his McCartney and McCartney II albums. Chaos and Creation is a departure for Paul, intimate and melancholy. It was received extremely well critically. The period of Flaming Pie (1997) to Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005) is generally regarded as Paul’s late-career peak. I do agree that this album is Paul’s best since the ’80s, even though it ultimately leaves me cold. It got him another Grammy Album of the Year nomination, which he lost to U2. It gets an 8/10; sales bring it to 20, and singles to 24.

2005 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 728 (+2 in 2004, 24 in 2005)

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 160 (+5)

Nothing to report in 2006.

2007

Paul McCartney, Memory Almost Full: Paul didn’t wait long to follow up on Chaos and Creation. Memory Almost Full was begun with his touring band in 2003, but paused for Paul’s fully solo sessions with Nigel Godrich. Paul finished the album playing all the instruments himself and weirdly released it on Starbucks’s Hear Music record label. Memory Almost Full got good reviews and sold well at the time, but has been mostly forgotten since — a lukewarm Macca album that got more credit than it deserved. It gets a begrudging 7/10; sales push it to 21, and singles to 25.

2007 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 753 (+25)

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 160

2008

Ringo Starr, Liverpool 8: Ringo’s 2008 album sees him back on EMI for the first time since his departure from Apple in 1975; both Beatles were now back under the label that had been their first home. Most of Liverpool 8 was completed with Ringo’s longtime collaborator Mark Hudson, but they had a falling out toward the end, and Ringo replaced him with Dave Stewart. The title track, “Liverpool 8” (which was Ringo’s postal code growing up), is a fun nostalgic review of Ringo’s career complete with a pleasant, Beatle-ish string section. The rest of the album is fine; it’s another light, optimistic Ringo confection; you get little new that you didn’t get from the last couple. It got mixed reviews for a 5/10, and sales add another 2. The single “Liverpool 8” was his first single to make the charts since 1998 — it made it to 99 in the UK, so just barely — and to date, it’s his last single to do so. So that adds 1 point for a total of 8. For Ringo, a pretty strong showing.

The Fireman (Paul McCartney), Electric Arguments: This is the Fireman’s third release, but the first to convince me to cover it like a regular Paul album. While the first two were ambient electronic music, this one uses pop song structures and prominent lead vocals for the first time, and Paul got out and promoted it with almost the same vigor as a new solo album. The album was made in a total of 13 days: each of its 13 tracks was conceived, written, and recorded in a single day (though those days weren’t contiguous; they stretched over the course of a year), with Paul deliberately not thinking about what kind of song he was going to make before going into the studio. Yet another Paul trick to avoid thinking too much about any of the songs he writes. The lyrics were chosen more for how they sounded together than to achieve any sort of sense or meaning. The result is a less substantial album than the ones released under his name in the decade, though it does have its moments. It got middling critical reviews (5/10) and didn’t sell great (1 point for a UK chart showing, nothing for singles) — it gains Paul 6 points.

2008 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 759 (+6)

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 168 (+8)

In a rare feat, Ringo outscores Paul in a year Paul actually tried. Not that it makes a heck of a lot of difference to our overall scores, which haven’t moved since George took second in 1988.

2009 brings another live album and DVD by Paul, Good Evening New York City, documenting Paul’s performances opening the brand new Citi Field in New York — Citi Field was the replacement for Shea Stadium, which was important in Beatles concert history, so there’s something pretty nifty about the whole thing. Billy Joel guests. Like most of Paul’s live albums, it was a sales success, earning him 6 points.

2009 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 765 (+6)

2. George Harrison: 290

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 168

With that, the Beatles close out the 2000s. In year 40 AB, we have two Beatles left, the most successful and the least successful, not that it makes a much difference at this point. Both are making middling albums that don’t get nearly the attention they got in the ’70s and raking in money through lucrative touring. The Beatles are living off their reputations now, and while that might have felt like a death sentence two decades ago, they both seem pretty happy. Will the next decade change anything? See you in part 8!

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Welcome back to my series that treats the Beatles’ solo careers as a horse race and tallies the scores. As I said in part 1, this is my quest to sort out not only who came out ahead in the aftermath of the breakup of the world’s biggest group, but also how and why. We’ve been through 5 parts so far: 1970–1971, 1972–1975, 1976–1979, 1980–1984, and 1985–1990. In part 6, we’ll cover the rest of the ’90s. I did 1990 on the last post because, with George’s last Traveling Wilburys album, it belongs more to the late ’80s than to the ’90s, a decade monopolized by Paul and Ringo. The ’90s see the blossoming of a nostalgic movement that restores popular interest in the Beatles after a decade and a half of relative irrelevance, which gives them a commercial (if not artistic) shot in the arm.

My method for tabulating these scores is as methodical as it is idiosyncratic. See part 1 to learn more about my scoring system.

1991

1991 (year 22 AB) was a boring year to be a Beatles fan. Paul played MTV Unplugged (then fairly new) and released an album of his performance on the show (now standard procedure, but he was the first to do it). It was called an “official bootleg” and styled after his last fake bootleg, the Russian Album. It did alright, earning him 6 points (no singles).

Paul also did a highly publicized classical concert called Liverpool Oratorio, which was released as an album. It topped the classical charts but didn’t do anything in the mainstream ones. Critics were split: the pop critics, reviewing it because it was Paul McCartney, found it lush and beautiful; the classical critics called it trite and bloated, the emblem of the popstar who thinks this classical thing must be easy. I’m with the classical critics on this one. I won’t be taking any of Paul’s classical work seriously (sorry), so this earns him no points, and I won’t bother to cover the other classical albums he puts out.

1991 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 604 (+6)

2. George Harrison: 272

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 133

1992

Ringo Starr, Time Takes Time: As I mentioned in the previous post, Ringo undertook a comeback tour in 1989 with his new All-Starr Band supergroup. The comeback followed Ringo and his wife realizing their alcoholism and getting sober together; Ringo decided to tour before heading back into the studio. After the successful tour, Ringo signed to the indie label Private Music, the only one that would have him. He pulled in four producers to work on different tracks and recorded Time Takes Time, a pretty solid power pop album. Everything was falling into place for him. He and his label kicked up massive publicity for the album, the lead single (“Weight of the World”), and the tour to follow; Ringo said it was the happiest he’d been with an album since Ringo in 1973 (his most successful). But the album bombed. “Weight of the World” managed to hit 74 on the UK singles chart, but that was all Time Takes Time had to show for itself. Private Music dropped Ringo, marking has fifth album in a row that got him dropped from his label. Critics were indifferent to the album. Some of the few who bothered to review it acknowledged it as his best since Ringo, but it garnered very little attention of any kind. I think it’s a slightly better album than this reception reflects, but only slightly. It gets 5/10, and the single’s chart appearance brings it to 6.

Also in 1992, George released Live in Japan, recorded during his brief tour with Eric Clapton in Japan the previous year. It’s a nice record, but it earns no points for charts or sales. It is worth noting that 1989–1991 brought all three surviving Beatles out on tour — the nostalgia market for their era was growing, and two of the three would find out just how lucrative playing basically the same concerts for decades could be. But George didn’t settle into touring life the way Paul and Ringo did. Aside from this one extremely limited tour of Japan with Clapton, George never really went back onto the road. A shame, given the excellence of the playing on this live album.

You know what this means, don’t you? Ringo finally won a year. Sure, it’s basically by default — if Paul or George had released any studio album, it would have been enough to eclipse Time Takes Time’s 6 points. But they didn’t. So in 1992, 23 years after the end of the Beatles, Ringo takes the crown of most successful Beatle of the year. Congratulations, li’l buddy.

1992 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 604

2. George Harrison: 272

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 139 (+6)

1993

Paul McCartney, Off the Ground: In 1993, Paul gifted us the world’s okayest album. It was recorded mostly live in studio by the band that had backed him up for his blockbuster tours of the last few years — tours that, as I’ve noted, banked on nostalgia for his old songs, not excitement over anything new. Off the Ground is the start of Paul’s resting-on-his-laurels era. Paul is a guy who needs to be recording new music, whether for his ego or just to channel his energy into something. He let go of the notion that he’d be creating a new hit album after his failures and middling successes in the late ’80s, and settled in to make music he was comfortable with. This particular album features some leftover songs cowritten with Elvis Costello during the Flowers in the Dirt sessions and some strident lyrics against animal cruelty (Paul even says “fuck,” which is jarring). There’s some fine songwriting and lots of pleasant playing, but if you skip it, you won’t have missed much.

Off the Ground got mixed critical reviews and sold well in the UK, underperforming in the US. Oddly, the album was a smash hit in Japan and Europe, particularly Germany — it was his highest-selling album ever there. Go figure. I give it a 4/10; sales bring it to 13 (that’s mostly the UK, since all those other countries don’t count), and singles to 18.

Naturally, Paul released yet another live album from his tour for the album. Paul Is Live is named after the infamous “Paul is dead” conspiracy theory and has an Abbey Road homage cover with some clever references — it gets full marks for design. As an album, it’s just another live Macca. It manages 3 points on sales.

In the same month, Paul released the first album by the Fireman, his electronic duo with Youth. Strawberries Ships Ocean Forest is a remix album without Paul’s name on it, and it barely got any notice. Paul wasn’t so much a collaborator as a source; Youth built the album out of samples from Paul’s music. I mention it now because Paul will turn the Fireman into a more notable project in another decade, but this release doesn’t make our scoreboard.

1993 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 625 (+21)

2. George Harrison: 272

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 139

1994–1996

1994 was the first year with no new releases by any Beatles since 1963. Let us mark the solemn occasion.

1995 brought us one charity single cover of “Come Together” on which Paul was a contributing artist; it nets him 2 whole points for a running total of 627.

1996 is the next year with no new releases. There’s a reason for the lull: all three Beatles were contributing to the Anthology documentary series and albums, which kept them quite busy. December 1995 brought us the first new Beatles song since 1970, the dubious “Free as a Bird.” (It would certainly gain them all some chart points if I were to count it, but this series is about their solo works. Besides, it would be the same amount to all four — what would be the point?) EMI was releasing the Anthology compilation albums throughout 1996 and asked Paul not to release any new music so he wouldn’t have to compete with his own former band. Paul took the break to work on his classical music (yawn) and will make his return to pop music in 1997.

1997

Paul McCartney, Flaming Pie: The experience of working on Anthology brought back a lot of Paul’s memories; particularly, he said, the high standards the Beatles set for themselves. He considered the bar set for his next album — given Paul’s infamous tendency to release half-baked nonsense, this was a good sign. The result, the obscure-Beatle-reference-titled Flaming Pie, is certainly reminiscent of the Beatles in many places. Songs recall “Lady Madonna” or “Blackbird,” and the whole thing has a power pop underpinning that screams Beatles. But I wouldn’t say it comes close to the bar set by the fab four, as much as Paul wanted to believe it did. Critics were positive at the time, giving Flaming Pie Paul’s best reviews since 1982’s Tug of War, and it was nominated for the Grammy for Album of the Year. (It lost to another legacy artist, Bob Dylan’s much more significant Time Out of Mind.) But Flaming Pie hasn’t endured as much as Paul’s earlier material, let alone the Beatles. It’s a step above Off the Ground, but it’s still just an alright album that adds little to Paul’s reputation. I give it 7/10; charts bring it to 21, and singles to 28.

1997 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 655 (+28)

2. George Harrison: 272

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 139

1998

Ringo Starr, Vertical Man: 1998 brings us Ringo’s second album of the decade, and his own attempt at a comeback after the Anthology project brought the Beatles back near the forefront of pop culture. He was originally signed to Guardian, a subsidiary of EMI, but a few days after his signing EMI dissolved Guardian, a rare instance of Ringo losing his label before releasing an album on it. But Anthology brought new attention, and Mercury signed him.

Ringo involved himself much more heavily in the songwriting for Vertical Man than on any of his previous albums, and its sound has a power pop feel reminiscent of Paul’s Flaming Pie (though, to be perfectly fair, Ringo’s 1992 album Time Takes Time sounds similar, meaning Ringo was ahead of the curve this time). It has a cover of “Love Me Do,” which is a funny move since Ringo famously didn’t drum on the original Beatles recording. There’s a who’s who of guest musicians on this one, including Ozzy Osborne, Alanis Morisette, Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots, Tom Petty, Brian Wilson, Joe Walsh, Steven Tyler, and, naturally, Paul and George.

Despite that firepower, this is another middling Ringo record with mixed reviews and uninspiring sales. Better than many of Ringo’s, but still nothing to put him on equal footing with his bandmates. It’s a pleasant if unsubstantial listen, and he was notably not dropped from his label after releasing it, the first time since the ’70s. Vertical Man gets another 5/10; its Anthology-assisted sales (top 100 in both the US and UK) add 2 points and its single another 1, bringing its total to 8.

Paul also snuck out another uncredited album by the Fireman in 1998, Rushes. Unlike the first one, which relied completely on samples, Paul did create new music for this. He also did a little bit of promotion for it in a “ssssh it’s a secret but this is Paul McCartney” mode. Paul is so silly like this, he loves to release things that keep his involvement quiet, then he starts promoting them when it turns out no one cares if his name isn’t on it. I’m not inclined to count this as a proper Paul album for scoring purposes. The next one will change that.

1998 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 655

2. George Harrison: 272

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 147 (+8)

Ringo wins another year by default, which in the sluggish release schedules of the coming years will cease to be a rarity. Paul certainly doesn’t need a reason for a quiet year, but he has one anyway: 1998 was the year his wife Linda died of breast cancer. Paul processed his grief by working, and he began 1999 with an album that brought him back to his roots.

1999

Paul McCartney, Run Devil Run: The loss of Linda, after which Paul said he would never love again, sent Paul back to his childhood. He produced his second album of (mostly) covers of 1950s rock and roll songs, the first being the Russian Album in the ’90s. As another nostalgic Anthology influence, Paul cut the songs as quickly as possible like the Beatles did in their earliest recordings. The sessions were loose and enjoyable and featured David Gilmour of Pink Floyd on guitar. Paul’s mission was clear: not to make the next big move of his career, but to record songs he loved with his friends and get back to work after a personal tragedy. On those merits, the record succeeds. It’s certainly better than the Russian Album, but it’s still a covers album that doesn’t amount to a whole lot. Critics gave it muted positive reviews. It gets a 6/10; sales bring it to 13, and singles to 15.

Ringo Starr, I Wanna Be Santa Claus: Next up in 1999 is the first Christmas album ever made by a Beatle. I Wanna Be Santa Claus features half traditional Christmas songs and half Ringo originals, and it’s dreadful. Truly one of the worst things ever made by any Beatle, an album that made me regret ever starting this project about halfway through its runtime — and I’ve listened to some real dogshit records for this. Weirdly, it got solid reviews. Are we grading on a Ringo curve or a Christmas album curve? Either way, I don’t see it. But its sales were dismal because Mercury barely promoted it, causing Ringo to leave the label. It gets 3/10 and it can thank the contemporaneous reviewers for them, because I would have rated it even lower. No sales or singles points.

Before we leave 1999, year 30 AB, Paul squeaked out a charity single on December 31st in collaboration with model Heather Mills. Mills would become Paul’s second wife three years later: that’s right, the man who just last year swore he’d never love again is already making music with the woman he’d shortly marry. A moment ago I described I Wanna Be Santa Claus as one of the worst things ever made by a Beatle — that’s because “Vo!ce” by Heather Mills ft. Paul McCartney is the worst. Mills delivers a shallow monologue about disability over a techno beat with Paul vocalizing in the background, and they put the disabled icon rising out of its wheelchair on the cover, a tasteless and cringey attempt at awareness for a cause that deserves better. “Vo!ce” doesn’t stream anywhere except by illicit YouTube uploads, and Paul would probably prefer we forget it exists, but its sales net Paul another 1 point for its 87th place UK chart showing.

1999 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 671 (+16)

2. George Harrison: 272

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 150 (+3)

We end the decade on a pretty cringey year to be a Beatle. Sure, Paul’s covers album was alright, but Ringo as Santa Claus and Paul assisting a “charity” vanity project? Yikes. But George came out worst of all: after overcoming (he thought) a bout of throat cancer in the previous year, he was stabbed by someone who broke into his house on December 30th. An inauspicious end to the third post-Beatle decade.

Next week, we begin the new millennium. We’ll lose our second Beatle, avert our eyes from Paul’s embarrassing response to 9/11 then watch him resuscitate his career yet again, and reluctantly follow Ringo as he enters an era when he can release anything he wants. See you in Part 7!

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Welcome back to my series tallying the winners and losers for every year since the breakup of the Beatles. As I said in part 1, this is my quest to sort out not only who came out ahead in the aftermath of the breakup of the world’s biggest group, but also how and why. We’ve been through 4 parts so far: 1970–1971, 1972–1975, 1976–1979, and 1980–1984. In part 5, we’ll cover the end of the ’80s (I’m also tacking on 1990 for thematic reasons). This will be a shorter post, as the releases slow considerably: Ringo is silent and John is obviously absent, so these years are dominated by middling Paul releases and George’s great comeback. George is the Beatle to watch in the late ’80s; he makes some truly special music and is well rewarded for it.

My method for tabulating these scores is as methodical as it is idiosyncratic. See part 1 to learn more about my scoring system.

1985

Year 16 AB has a single lonely entry: a non-album single from Paul, “Spies Like Us,” produced for the comedy movie of the same name. It’s a very ’80s new wave single, and was Paul’s final top 10 hit of the century — he didn’t have another until his collaboration with Kanye and Rihanna in 2015. It gains him 5 points.

1985 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 523 (+5)

2. John Lennon: 248

3. George Harrison: 180

4. Ringo Starr: 133

We’re slowing down here in Beatle-land, so I will be a little more flexible with how I format the scores. Notice the parentheses noting Paul’s total points for the year integrated into the cumulative scoreboard, which didn’t change much in 1985.

1986

Paul McCartney, Press to Play: After the disappointment of Broad Street, a record largely dependent on his ballads and softer side, Paul leaned into a slick new wave pop sound for Press to Play. He enlisted the hot modern producer Hugh Padgham and collaborated extensively with 10cc guitarist Eric Stewart, along with a handful of big-name guest stars like Pete Townshend and Phil Collins. All to no avail. The album sparked one minor hit, the uptempo “Press,” but made little impact aside from that. Critics dismissed the album, another disappointing attempt to follow up on Tug of War with a new-wave-inflected pop album; another aimless, inconsistent album in which the tossed-off fluff overpowers the moments of catchy brilliance. It also delivered McCartney the worst sales of any of his solo albums yet. 4/10, 13 with sales, 20 with singles.

1986 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 543 (+20)

2. John Lennon: 248

3. George Harrison: 180

4. Ringo Starr: 133

Year 17 AB is a familiar refrain — a middling showing from Paul, and not much happening for the others. But 1987 is the year George shook things up, so let’s get into it.

1987

George Harrison, Cloud Nine: After five years producing films instead of music, George felt the itch to make a new album in 1986. He asked his friend Jeff Lynne of ELO to co-produce the project with him. He approached it with an enthusiasm he had been lacking for some years and recorded an exuberant and varied album full of wonderful songs (if quite mired in typical ’80s overproduction, thank you Mr. Lynne). He also energetically promoted the album after years of his projects underperforming because of his own inactivity. The first single was a cover of a little-known early rock & roll song, “Got My Mind Set on You;” it shot straight to #1, reestablishing George as a pop artist worth watching and building excitement for the forthcoming album. The album and subsequent singles did well too, injecting George’s career with some much-needed momentum. He didn’t tour for the album, but he did form a supergroup to make more music with — more on that next year. Critics were very positive toward Cloud Nine, calling it a late-career masterpiece and — oh look — his best since All Things Must Pass. (If you haven’t been paying attention, every good Harrison album gets called his best since All Things Must Pass. The fact that I think it’s true this time doesn’t diminish my vexation.) Cloud Nine gets a solid 9/10; sales bring it to 23, and singles to 39.

The only other activity for 1987 is another soundtrack single from Paul: “Once Upon a Long Ago,” written for (but not used in) The Princess Bride. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d think a sentimental McCartney song for a fairy tale movie would be. It gains him 3 points.

1987 Scoreboard

1987 Overall:

1. George Harrison: 39

2. Paul McCartney: 3

3. Ringo Starr: 0

It’s just so nice to see George on top, and he deserves it after that record. I almost wish Paul had released a full album so George could have beaten him fair and square. Can’t have everything.

1987 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 546

2. John Lennon: 248

3. George Harrison: 219

4. Ringo Starr: 133

George narrows the gap between him and John pretty considerably in 1987, year 18 AB, but he’s still at least one album behind him. Can 1988 deliver that album?

1988

1988 was another George year. He had always wanted to make a supergroup of his many musician friends, and in 1988 he finally did, almost by accident.

The Traveling Wilburys (George Harrison), Vol. 1: George needed to toss off a song to be the B-side for Cloud Nine’s last single in Europe, so he called Jeff Lynne to coproduce as he had the album. Their best option for recording on short notice was Bob Dylan’s home studio, so they headed there. Lynne was working on a comeback album for rock and roll legend Roy Orbison, who tagged along to the session because it sounded fun. George happened to be picking up a guitar he’d loaned Tom Petty and invited him along too. They all pitched in to write and play the song — at first Bob Dylan was only running the barbecue, but they convinced him to join too. The result, “Handle with Care,” they declared too good to be relegated to a B-side. So George booked some studio time for the five of them to make nine more songs and create an album.

They called themselves the Traveling Wilburys and invented pseudonyms. They recorded the album quickly but with the same leisurely atmosphere as that first cookout session. All five members contributed so heavily to the songwriting that they didn’t make any official distinctions between the songwriters. The whole album has a freewheeling feel of a bunch of superstar friends hanging out and trading ideas, the way supergroups are supposed to be and seldom are.

The album was a smash hit and came as a shot in the arm for the careers of Lynne, Orbison, and Dylan, who had gone decades without much success. Surprisingly, it was Bob Dylan’s most commercially successful record ever. It was also popular with critics, who praised its laid-back atmosphere and low ambitions. It gets an 8/10; sales bring it to 26, and singles to 33.

They wound up putting “All Those Years Ago” from 1981 on that B-side, by the way.

Paul McCartney, Снова в СССР: Paul released an odd little album in 1988. Unsure what to do after the disappointment of Press Play, Paul was jamming some ’50s rock and roll songs with a group of session musicians and wound up recording 20 songs live in the studio in only two days. He wanted to release them on an LP in the UK outside the usual distribution channels and styled like a Soviet bootleg. EMI refused, but Paul’s manager had a bunch of Russian-styled LP sleeves printed as a gag gift. Paul fixated on the idea, so in the Glasnost spirit of the late ’80s, he struck a deal with a Soviet record label to release the LP as a limited edition exclusive in the USSR, with no official exports allowed. They titled the record Снова в СССР, Russian for “Back in the USSR” and pronounced something like “Snova v’SSSR.” It sold out instantly and started to pop up secondhand outside the USSR selling for hundreds. After one more Russian exclusive pressing, the LP was finally given a global release (with an expanded track list) in 1991 — though over half of its songs had already been released as B-sides in the years between.

So obviously this album didn’t get the sort of big release that most McCartney albums did. As a result, we don’t have much in terms of critical assessment, and though it did chart, it did so as an archival curiosity rather than a new release. The music can be compared to John Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll: good song selection and solid performances, but nothing revolutionary, and quickly forgettable. I’m giving it 5/10; sales add a single point, and it had no singles.

1988 Scoreboard

1988 Overall:

1. George Harrison: 33

2. Paul McCartney: 6

3. Ringo Starr: 0

George wins this year handily — his Traveling Wilburys coup trounced Paul’s secret Soviet album. But the really significant thing about 1988 (year 19 AB) comes on the cumulative scoreboard…

1988 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 552

2. George Harrison: 252 (^1)

3. John Lennon: 248 (v1)

4. Ringo Starr: 133

That’s right, we’ve got our first change in overall standings since 1973–15 years! We must soberly acknowledge that this is the result of John’s assassination; no one knows how it would have played out otherwise. But we should also acknowledge the two tremendous years George had and the overdue appreciation he received. He hadn’t been a critical or commercial darling for over a decade and he came roaring back with some of the best work of his career. Welcome to second place, Georgie boy.

1989

Paul McCartney, Flowers in the Dirt: The Russian Album was always just a bit of play, not a true next Macca solo album. The next proper album was Flowers in the Dirt, a record that found Paul working hard to make up for Press to Play. He was preparing for his first big tour since Wings Across the World in ’76-’77 and collaborated heavily (and not always peacefully) with Elvis Costello. The result was Paul’s biggest commercial success since Tug of War, though it didn’t quite reach the early ’80s heights. The album hit #1 in the UK but underperformed in the US. Reviews at the time were favorable, though it has not held on to its standing too well. Flowers in the Dirt is a middling album, a minor return to form but nothing terribly special. It gets a 7/10; sales bring it to 20, singles to 32.

1989 Cumulative Scoreboard:

1. Paul McCartney: 584 (+32)

2. George Harrison: 252

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 133

Not much to report here in 1989, year 20 AB. Paul had a middling success, and George didn’t release anything. The real story of 1989, invisible to our figures, is Ringo: in the same year Paul mounted his first big tour since the ’70s, Ringo put together his first tour ever with a group he called the All-Starr Band, a supergroup of established musicians (Joe Walsh, Clarence Clemons, several members of the Band). The tour was a huge success in the just-beginning nostalgia market for ’60s and ’70s pop. Though it will take until 1992 for us to see it in the music charts and our scorekeeping, Ringo’s long-hoped-for comeback was gaining steam by the end of 1989.

1990

The Traveling Wilburys (George Harrison), Vol. 3: The four remaining members of the Traveling Wilburys (Roy Orbison died shortly after the release of Vol. 1) were quick to follow up on the success of their first album. They repeated its formula: an unambitious album of fun tunes written and performed collaboratively with the atmosphere of guys goofing around at a backyard barbecue. To reflect the lineup change, the remaining Wilburys took new pseudonyms, and the idea of calling the album volume 3 (as if the audience had missed volume 2 somewhere) was George’s joke. The album was well received, but not as much so as its predecessor since it didn’t have the same novelty. It’s a worthy sequel that treads no new ground; a fun listen but far from essential. I give it 7/10. Sales bring it to 17, singles to 18. The Wilburys recorded one extra song, a cover of “Nobody’s Child,” which they released as a charity single — it gains George a further 2 points. After this, George goes quiet again. 1987–1990 brought us three solid Harrison albums, and we won’t get another until after his death ten years later.

Also in 1990, Paul released a live album of his ’89-’90 tour called Tripping the Live Fantastic. It’s a perfectly fine tour souvenir that didn’t age well as he went on to release a version of the same album for almost every tour he did. But it was his first live album since 1976, and it made the charts, scoring 10 points for the album and 4 for singles.

1990 Scoreboard

1990 Overall:

1. George Harrison: 20

2. Paul McCartney: 14

3. Ringo Starr: 0

Another easy win for Harrison in year 21 AB, but again not competing against any serious studio efforts. It’s been a while since we had any real shootouts.

1990 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 598

2. George Harrison: 272

3. John Lennon: 248

4. Ringo Starr: 133

As the 1990s began, the Beatles were all playing true to type. George had just gifted us with his best music in over a decade and slipped back into his quiet, private life. Ringo was working hard to regain what little success he’d ever had. And Paul was still releasing a studio album every few years and a flurry of other projects between, hoping in vain to strike on something that would be his Next Big Thing (but raking in money anyway). Next week, the 1990s continue with a popular resurgence of interest in the Beatles and our heroes shifting from current hitmakers to kings of nostalgia. See you in part 6!

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Welcome back to the series where I keep score for the solo careers of all four Beatles. As I said in part 1, this is my quest to sort out not only who came out ahead in the aftermath of the breakup of the world’s biggest group, but also how and why. Part 1 covered 1970 and 1971, part 2 covered 1972–1975, and part 3 covered 1976–1979. We’ve seen big successes and big failures, watched John and George dominate the early years but then stumble, making way for Paul and Ringo to rise. But by the end of the ’70s, each Beatle had had his own individual fall: John in ’72, George in ’74, Ringo in ’76, and Paul in ’79. The pop culture landscape has also been moving rapidly away from them. Punk and new wave have captivated the youth, and the Beatles were increasingly seen as dinosaurs. As the ’80s began, John, Paul, George, and Ringo had their work cut out for them if they wanted to claw their way back to the top. But no one could have predicted what would happen next.

My method for tabulating these scores is as methodical as it is idiosyncratic. See part 1 to learn more about my scoring system.

1980

As I alluded to in my previous post, 1980 is a year that changed everything. It always would have been, because it was the year John decided to make his comeback after five years away. But it became the year we lost our first Beatle, drastically altering the careers of the other three and the legacies of all four. 1980 was John’s year, and we are all the worse off for it. But we start with Paul.

Paul McCartney, McCartney II: There is a neatness to Paul’s trajectory here. He opened the ’70s with McCartney, an aimless album of home recordings rejected by critics; he opened the ’80s with McCartney II, another album of home recordings and a successor in more than just name. The album is a major change in direction for Paul. With Wings on the rocks, Paul started to experiment with the synths and drum machines that were becoming popular in the dawn of the new decade. The resulting record does feel like play, and not all the experiments are successful — the fact that the aggravating “Temporary Secretary” was chosen as a single will always boggle my mind. But some of the songs are quite good. Critics at the time weren’t having it — they regarded it another slight and underbaked record from Paul; the work of a man who really thinks we want to hear every little passing musical fancy he produces. It has since become a cult classic, and heavily divisive: there are those who think it’s brilliant, an eccentric precursor to synthpop and the bedroom pop record, and others who still see it as a trifle that would have been best left a set of demos for a more fully realized album. I fall staunchly into the latter group, but I have to recognize the cultural cachet it holds in my critical score. It gets a 5/10; sales bring it to 19 (it had some success in the UK but had Paul’s worst performance since Wild Life in the US), and singles give it an extra 14 for a total of 33.

John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy: 1980 found John and Yoko contemplating a return to music after five years out of the industry. John’s confidence had built, and both felt encouraged and inspired by new wave bands like the B-52s, whose work John thought sounded like Yoko’s. They started recording a new collaborative album with a modern production style. Neither was signed to a record label, and they didn’t want to feel pressured to deliver if they weren’t confident in the result, so they paid for the sessions out of pocket and conducted them with strict secrecy — some of the session musicians didn’t even know who they were working for. The album is a loving, positive one full of songs about Lennon and Ono’s marriage. The big ’80s production, as dated as it might sound today, is very pleasantly employed. Of all the Beatles, I think John used this new pop sound best. Satisfied with the album, Lennon publicized that he and Yoko were looking for a label, and were immediately mobbed by offers — of course they were! The brand new upstart Geffen got them because of David Geffen’s shrewd idea to meet with Yoko first and to tell John that he regarded her contributions as equal to his. Double Fantasy was released with great fanfare in November.

But it wasn’t a success at first. Sales were sluggish; it didn’t crack the top ten before falling again. And the few critics’ reviews we have from before the incident were largely negative. Some criticized the album’s focus on John and Yoko’s marriage, and of course any time Yoko sings people have to crawl out of the woodwork to say she sucks (I hate people). But the narrative changed drastically less than one month later.

On December 8, 1980, John got a haircut and had a photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz for the cover of Rolling Stone (in which John appeared nude but Yoko declined to). Then he gave a short radio interview and returned to a recording studio to mix Yoko’s song “Walking on Thin Ice.” Late in the evening, he and Yoko returned home to say goodnight to their son Sean before an impromptu date night. As they walked into their apartment building, John was shot four times by a former security guard with a seriously wack interpretation of The Catcher in the Rye. He died almost instantly. The news shook the music world, inspiring an outpouring of love for Lennon and collective grief over his cruel loss. And Double Fantasy, which had been a critical failure and a lackluster seller, shot to #1 on charts around the world. Many publications had not yet run their reviews of the album and pulled negative reviews before printing. The album, which might have languished as a middling effort otherwise, was rewritten in the popular consciousness as Lennon’s final masterpiece. This, to me, is an overcorrection: I think Double Fantasy is a better album than the initial bad reviews, but I don’t think it quite lives up to the hype it got after his death. Recent reviews still exist in the shadow of the murder and praise it fairly unanimously, a status I doubt it would have attained if John had lived on. A fascinating pop culture case study.

In any case, we’re here to score these records, and score we shall. Double Fantasy gets a solid 8/10 (I do think that initial negative reaction needs to be reflected); its #1s and platinums in both the UK and US bring it to 27, and its singles to 53. In light of the circumstances it is crass to note, but Double Fantasy shatters the previous record (47 for Paul’s Band on the Run) to become the highest-scoring Beatle album on my chart. Nothing released in the 45 years since has come close to eclipsing it.

I’d rather he lived.

1980 Scoreboard

We all feel gross and uncomfortable about it in the wake of the tragedy, but let’s check the scoreboard for 1980, year 11 AB!

1980 Overall:

1. John Lennon: 53

2. Paul McCartney: 33

3. George Harrison & Ringo Starr: 0

1980 was, unfortunately, John’s year through and through. And even if it weren’t a posthumous tribute, he’d have deserved it. He was making his best music since the early ’70s, and I wish I lived in the alternate universe where we got more albums from him after this (other than the posthumous one, which we’ll get to in the final year of this post).

1980 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 395

2. John Lennon: 219

3. George Harrison: 158

4. Ringo Starr: 120

John’s score climbed quite a bit, but Paul remains unassailable at the top. There’s certainly a lot more air between John and George now after George spent the late ’70s chipping away at John’s lead. The ’80s are a time of diminishing returns on Beatle releases, so can George ever overtake John? We’ll have to find out.

As a style note, I will not feature John on the Overall scoreboards from now on (except for 1984) — it feels ghoulish. He will remain on every Cumulative scoreboard.

1981

The first year with only three Beatles was relatively quiet, by which I mean Paul didn’t release anything. Instead, we got records from the two lower-profile Beatles.

George Harrison, Somewhere in England: George actually delivered the first version of this album to Warner Bros. in 1980, but they found it too midtempo and rejected it, telling him to come back when he had some singles. John’s murder happened when George was tinkering with the album to create more commercial singles. George took a song he’d originally written for Ringo’s Stop and Smell the Roses album — they’d recorded the backing track, but Ringo had decided the vocal was too high for him — and rewrote the verses as a tribute to John. He invited Paul and Linda McCartney to record backing vocals, marking the first time Paul appeared on a song with George since 1969 and a mini-reunion, since Ringo had already done the drums. The result was “All Those Years Ago,” a touching tribute and George’s biggest hit single since 1973.

The album followed a month later, and was very successful in the UK, though somewhat less so in the US. Critics gave it middling positive reviews. It’s a catchy and enjoyable album, and “All Those Years Ago” is an all-timer, but the album doesn’t amount to a whole lot. It was also remarkably untouched by recent trends. In a time when both John and Paul were leaning into the modern ’80s pop sound, George made a soft rock record that sounded exactly like his albums had sounded throughout the late ’70s. We can call it a timeless George Harrison album or a stubborn, outdated one, depending on our temperament. Somewhere in England gets a 7/10. Sales bring it to 11, and singles to 17, continuing the trend of George’s albums: successful, but on a smaller scale than what he might be capable of in an alternate universe where he chased commercial clout.

Ringo Starr, Stop and Smell the Roses: October 1981 brought us Ringo’s latest comeback attempt. After three huge flops, Ringo returned to his original formula: varied collaborations from all over his musical rolodex. All three other Beatles were supposed to be involved, but John was murdered mere days before he was due to record his contributions. But Paul is there, and George contributed “Wrack My Brain,” the album’s one commercially successful song. Stop and Smell the Roses got muted positive reviews. Critics called it a welcome surprise and a minor return to form. But the album met little success outside “Wrack My Brain,” and Ringo was yet again dropped by the label that released it (RCA/Boardwalk), marking the first time he’d been without a label in both the US and UK at the same time. I’m giving this a 6/10, because it’s one of the best records in the whole non-‘70s Ringo discography. It gets another point for making it to 98 in the US, and another two for “Wrack My Brain,” bringing it to a total of 9.

1981 Scoreboard

1981 Overall:

1. George Harrison: 17

2. Ringo Starr: 9

3. Paul McCartney: 0

1981 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 395

2. John Lennon: 219

3. George Harrison: 175

4. Ringo Starr: 129

In year 12 AB, the year after John’s death raised the profile of all the Beatles’ work, muted success was all any of them got. Both of the successful singles of 1981 were collaborations between multiple Beatles — a reflection of these guys’ collective musical power always being more than the sum of its parts, but also (and probably more importantly) the power of the nostalgia that John’s loss provoked in the listening public.

1982

1982 was a Paul and George year, and their careers couldn’t have been on more different trajectories. George released yet another record with almost no fanfare and retreated from music for five years afterward. Paul released his biggest success since Wings’ glory days, a win he would try but largely fail to parlay into a multi-year, multimedia comeback.

Paul McCartney, Tug of War: As Wings formally dissolved and Paul figured out life with the massive security detail required in the aftermath of John’s assassination, he retreated to George Martin’s AIR Studios Montserrat (basically the tropical paradise recording studio he was picturing when he carelessly chose Nigeria to record Band on the Run). There he hung out with Stevie Wonder and recorded his first studio-made solo album. Tug of War is fully realized and finely crafted in a way that McCartney projects often aren’t — you can feel the good influence of George Martin, who produced Paul for the first time since the Beatles. It was Paul’s best work in years, and it was richly rewarded critically and commercially.

The lead single, “Ebony and Ivory” with Stevie Wonder, was a massive hit, #1 all over the world. Critics praised the album as the sort of masterpiece we all know Paul is capable of, even if he rarely delivers them. It was called his finest solo work yet, even better than Band on the Run (I’m not going that far). This gets a solid 9/10, and certainly belongs in the pantheon of the best post-Beatle records. Sales bring it to 25, and singles all the way up to 43.

But Paul’s massive 1982 doesn’t stop there. As he’d featured Stevie Wonder on his biggest single of the year, Paul was himself featured on the single “The Girl Is Mine” from Michael Jackson’s blockbuster Thriller album. It’s far from the best song on that album, but the single release adds a further 9 points to Paul’s 1982 total.

George Harrison, Gone Troppo: George’s 1982 album was a much more muted affair. He owed one more album to Warner Bros., but he was disengaged with and uninterested in the music scene of the time. So he recorded a quick, breezy sort of album, refused to do any promotional work for it, and disappeared into a five-year hiatus from music making. Gone Troppo is another stubbornly Harrison-like soft rock record, by then heavily dated. It received the same treatment from critics as the last time he’d dashed off a quick album to end a contract, 1975’s Extra Texture: it was considered insubstantial and forgettable, and due to its lack of promotion, it was quickly forgotten. In retrospect, it is often considered George’s worst album. But it’s got its moments, as any Harrison effort is bound to. It gets a 4/10. It was his first album to miss the charts in the US as well as the UK, so sales add nothing to the point total. The album’s lone single managed a 53 on the US charts and adds 1 point for a total of 5.

1982 Scoreboard

1982 Overall:

1. Paul McCartney: 52

2. George Harrison: 5

3. Ringo Starr: 0

1982 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 447

2. John Lennon: 219

3. George Harrison: 180

4. Ringo Starr: 129

Year 13 AB was a huge year for Paul and a very muted one for George (though I think that’s what he was going for). John still holds a respectable posthumous lead over George, who is fast losing interest in his own career. The other positions don’t look likely to change anytime soon either — Ringo continues to struggle for a foothold, and Paul is so far out ahead he is in another galaxy.

1983

Ringo Starr, Old Wave: After his return to the hodgepodge of collaborators failed him on Stop and Smell the Roses, Ringo wanted the consistency of a single producer. He chose ex-Eagle Joe Walsh, who crafted an album of soft rock reminiscent of his own solo work of the time. Old Wave does feature some high profile collaborators, including a jam with Eric Clapton and John Entwhistle, but it’s not another rolodex record. In 1983 Ringo was effectively persona non grata for mainstream record labels, so Old Wave was released by specialty labels in Germany, Canada, and a few more countries, but not in the US or UK (which should have been his two biggest markets). It was ignored by critics at the time (it was barely even released), and retrospective reviews are not kind. But I find it a charming little record, especially if you like Joe Walsh. It’s even got some pretty nice original rock & roll covers, bringing Ringo back to the songs he sang best with the Beatles and the Hurricanes. I’m giving it a perhaps-too-kind 4/10. Because it wasn’t released in either of the countries we track, it gains no points from sales or singles.

Paul McCartney, Pipes of Peace: Paul followed up his Tug of War success quickly with an album drawn largely from outtakes from the Tug of War sessions. Pipes of Peace is, in all ways, a little brother to Tug of War. It’s still got George Martin at the helm, its sound is similar, and it even has a pair of songs featuring an R&B guest artist (Michael Jackson in place of Stevie Wonder). And though some of the material is strong (especially “Say Say Say,” a perfect ’80s pop confection with MJ), overall Pipes is a lesser album than Tug. We get a lot more of the cringeworthy lyrics and tossed-off feel that often characterize Paul’s albums. Pipes of Peace was just as financially successful as its predecessor in the UK, but less so in the US, and critics were much more skeptical of the record. It gets a 7/10, pushed to 22 by sales and 40 by singles (it was 1983 and one of them had Michael Jackson on it).

1983 Scoreboard

1983 Overall:

1. Paul McCartney: 40

2. Ringo Starr: 4

3. George Harrison: 0

1983 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 487

2. John Lennon: 219

3. George Harrison: 180

4. Ringo Starr: 133

Another banner year for Paul, who is about to cross 500 points. Not a lot of change for anybody else in year 14 AB, not from lack of trying on Ringo’s part (nothing ever happens to me).

1984

John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Milk and Honey: Double Fantasy had released a creative dam for John from which he had arguably been suffering since the failure of Some Time in New York City in 1972, so it’s no surprise that he had already written songs for its follow-up and recorded rehearsal versions. Yoko took a few years to finish his songs and make her own, but she released the result in January of 1984 as Milk and Honey, John’s first posthumous album. John’s songs are obviously loose rehearsal takes, where Yoko’s are tightly polished and feel more modern (as in, ‘80s). It wasn’t as successful as Double Fantasy but it was well received; it got a muted positive response from critics at the time, but hasn’t had much of a lasting reputation. Still, it’s a fitting coda to John’s career, even if it falls short of being a true follow-up to its excellent predecessor. It gets a 7/10 critical score; sales bring it to 18, and singles to 29.

Paul McCartney, Give My Regards to Broad Street: Boy, Paul was busy. While he was getting Pipes of Peace out, he was also working on a feature film in the vein of the Beatles’ movies: a light comedy film with Paul playing himself in a fictionalized version of his life in the music biz. The movie turned out dreadful and flopped massively; the soundtrack fared a bit better, hitting #1 in the UK though it didn’t do much in the US. Most of the songs on Broad Street are re-recorded versions of Paul’s earlier work, including a bunch of Beatles classics and solo material as recent as Tug of War and Pipes of Peace. The one original song, “No More Lonely Nights,” is pretty good (but did we need two versions?) and did well as a single. Critics were quite negative toward the record of warmed-over rehashings of already-beloved songs. I am actually quite charmed by this album — I’m an easy mark when you’re offering slight variations on songs I already love. The arrangements are lush and smooth in that quintessentially ’80s way, and the song selection is heavy on his ballads and sweet, quiet songs, which are Paul’s strength. So I will be giving this album the same 4/10 as that last Ringo album that I like better than critics do. Sales bring it to 17, and singles to 25. This album also marks the end of Paul’s time with Columbia, a relationship that started on a sour note (Back to the Egg), climbed to a successful peak (Tug of War), and fizzled out.

Paul delivered one more single for 1984, this one also attached to a film project: he had bought the rights to the classic comic character Rupert Bear in 1970 (the day after the Beatles formalized their breakup) intending to make a film out of the character. The long-delayed project finally resulted in Rupert and the Frog Song, an animated short film added to the beginning of Give My Regards to Broad Street in theatres. The Rupert short was much better received than the live action film, and the original song from it, “We All Stand Together,” was released as a single. It adds another 6 points of sales to Paul’s year.

1984 Scoreboard

1984 Overall:

1. Paul McCartney: 31

2. John Lennon: 29

3. George Harrison & Ringo Starr: 0

If it weren’t for Rupert Bear John would have won one last year. Damn shame.

1984 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 518

2. John Lennon: 248

3. George Harrison: 180

4. Ringo Starr: 133

Paul breaks the big 500 here in year 15 AB. John adds his last points to the board — there are archival releases after this, but nothing that counts for our scoring. 248 is John’s final total. We’ll see if either of the other Beatles can eclipse him or if his second place is eternal.

Thus, we close out the first half of the 1980s. It started with a tragically significant year, contained one other year that was big for Paul only, but otherwise confirms the trend started in the late 1970s: the Beatles’ slow slide into cultural irrelevance. The late ’80s will only strengthen this trend. Will any of the Beatles ever correct the course of his career? See you in part 5!

Welcome back to the series where we treat the Beatles’ solo careers like a horse race and add up the scores. As I said in part 1, this is my quest to sort out not only who came out ahead in the aftermath of the breakup of the world’s biggest group, but also how and why. Part 1 covered 1970 and 1971, and part 2 covered 1972–1975. In part 3, we’ll bring the ’70s to a close and find the winners at the end of the first decade after the breakup of the Beatles. The late ’70s were a rough time to be a Beatle: John is on hiatus, George is on the outs, Ringo’s days of success are numbered, and Paul’s second band is about to crash and burn. Any goodwill they were running on from their ’60s heyday is running out, and the Beatles are rapidly becoming passé.

My method for tabulating these scores is as methodical as it is idiosyncratic. See part 1 to learn more about my scoring system.

1976

In previous posts, we tracked the Beatles through the competitive first years after their breakup, with George as the early favorite, John in a firm second, Paul cast as out of touch and irrelevant, and Ringo in an expected last place. But it didn’t stay that way: Paul surged with the third LP by his band Wings, Ringo made two hit albums, John faltered and took a hiatus, and George crashed and burned. We won’t hear much from John in this part, as it covers the exact years of his hiatus. As we begin 1976, we have three active Beatles: a hugely popular Paul, an optimistic Ringo, and a recently downcast George.

1976 was Wings’ biggest year — not only did they release another hit album, they also undertook a worldwide tour that was a huge success (breaking the curse of George’s tour and fulfilling the post-Beatle concert dreams of a generation of fans) and resulted in an extravagant triple live album. George partially rehabilitated his damaged reputation, but Ringo’s 1976 was less successful — he released his first flop since Ringo.

Wings (Paul McCartney), Wings at the Speed of Sound: First up in 1976 was another commercial home run for Paul. With Wings at the Speed of Sound, Paul wanted to address the (accurate) perception that Wings was just a solo vehicle, so he included singing and writing contributions from other members of the band. (He’d intended to do the same on Red Rose Speedway back in ’73, but the label had made him cut it down from a double album to a single, and none of the contributions from the others made the cut… this guy.) Speed of Sound got lukewarm reviews from critics, but with Wings at the pinnacle of their popularity and radio candy like “Silly Love Songs,” it didn’t need any help from critical acclaim. I’m giving it a 7/10; sales bring it to 23, and singles add another 20 points for a total of 43. (Sheesh! And for an album that is merely okay.)

Ringo Starr, Ringo’s Rotogravure: For his next album, Ringo repeated the formula that had brought him success with Ringo and Goodnight Vienna — a rolodex record full of songs written and partially performed by all his famous friends. It is notable for being the final album to feature contributions from all four Beatles while they were still living, though not on the same songs. John’s portions were the only thing he recorded for release during his long hiatus of the late ’70s. But none of it helped. Rotogravure didn’t have the magic of the prior two albums, or maybe the schtick had just run thin. It got an indifferent reaction from critics and fans alike and was quickly forgotten. It gets a 3/10 critic score; sales bring it to 5; singles to 8. It was a sad showing that would cause Ringo to reconsider his approach.

George Harrison, Thirty-Three and 1/3: Between Extra Texture and this one, George quit drinking and found new love. He collaborated with Eric Idle of Monty Python for “This Song,” and the comedy influence is palpable throughout the album. Thirty-Three and 1/3 was George’s happiest, most commercial record yet; critics welcomed it as a return to form and called it his best since All Things Must Pass. And yet, just like Living in the Material World, retrospective reviews call it a lost classic — another record that was well heralded in its day and then largely forgotten. This pattern will repeat throughout George’s career; every good album is called his best since All Things Must Pass, no other seems to lodge in the popular memory. Curious. In any case, it gets an 8/10; it goes to 14 with sales, 18 with singles. From here until the late ’80s, George will be much more popular with critics than with the buying public; his chart successes won’t come close to what he achieved at the beginning of the decade.

Wings (Paul McCartney), Wings Over America: As I mentioned in the introduction, Wings toured the world in 1976, delivering exactly the Beatle concert experience fans had been hungry for since the band left the road in 1966. Paul gamely worked Beatles classics in among his own hits, which were luminous enough that the crowd went wild for all of it. The ’70s was the decade of the double LP live album, but Paul one-upped all of those with a triple live album. It sold very well — to its credit, it’s a solid record, though the fact that sales figures are counted by the disc (meaning that every sale of a triple LP counts as three sales) certainly inflates its standing. Live albums don’t get critical scores, so we’ll tabulate its sales figures (15 points) with its single (he finally released the live version of “Maybe I’m Amazed” as a single after refusing to do so for the original, adding 5 points) for a total of 20 points. Big year. Remember me saying that 1976 was Wings’ pinnacle? It’s all downhill from here…

1976 Scoreboard

Let’s see how the boys did in 1976, year 7 AB, John’s first year off.

1976 Overall:

1. Paul McCartney: 58

2. George Harrison: 18

3. Ringo Starr: 8

4. John Lennon: 0

Paul delivered a sound thumping this year — he was in the stratosphere while the others were down in the sandbox; he delivered more than three times the points George did on an album that was more critically acclaimed. Ringo, as mentioned, had a dismal year. John was probably better off not competing.

1976 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 273

2. John Lennon: 166

3. George Harrison: 142

4. Ringo Starr: 114

Another year with no motion on the overall scores. Paul brings his lead to laughably insurmountable. George is gaining on John, and Ringo is still in the back of the pack.

1977

1977 is another low-scoring year for the Beatles. Paul rested on his laurels after a very busy 1976, releasing a few singles and some things from the vault. Ringo tried and failed to regain his earlier momentum. George took the year off to follow Formula 1 races around the world, and John continued to lie fallow.

Let’s deal with Paul first. In April, he quietly (and under a pseudonym) released Thrillington, an album of instrumental versions of Ram songs he’d recorded around the same time as the main album five years before but hadn’t released because he’d been busy forming Wings. The album went mostly unnoticed, and the few who noticed it assumed it had been Paul himself who made it. When Paul confirmed this in the ’90s, he solved the mystery no one was wondering about. It didn’t chart or get any sales certifications, and I’m not giving it any critical points because I don’t feel it should count. (Released under a fake name, archive material, just an alternate version of an earlier album… take your pick.)

Continuing the pseudonym game, in May Wings released the reggae-tinged single “Seaside Woman” under the name Suzy and the Red Stripes. Linda McCartney wrote and sang it for Red Rose Speedway, and had Paul not axed it, it would have been one of the best songs on that lukewarm album. His releasing it four years later under a fake band name seems to conform to Paul’s knee-jerk instinct to sabotage the people he’s closest to in order not to challenge his own greatness. (If you’ll forgive the editorializing.) “Seaside Woman” did make it to #59 on the US charts, gaining 1 point.

Near the end of the year, Wings put out a single with original material, the double a-side “Mull of Kintyre” / “Girls’ School.” “Mull of Kintyre,” a nostalgia-tinged ballad about Scotland complete with bagpipes, was a smash success in the UK. It didn’t make much of a dent in the US, which Paul blamed on the record label’s lack of promotion… seems to miss the obvious fact that it landed better in the UK because of, you know, Scottish people. In any case, this single gets Paul 9 very Commonwealthy points.

Ringo Starr, Ringo the 4th: The only proper Beatle studio album of 1977 was an ill-considered attempt at a course correction from Ringo. After the failure of Rotogravure, Ringo abandoned his method of getting all his musician friends to collaborate and hunkered down with a single collaborator, Vini Poncia (who had been contributing for a few years). For some damn reason (cocaine), they decided to try to hop on a recent trend and retool Ringo into a disco singer. Ringo the 4th (which might be a reference to Ringo’s perpetual status as the fourth Beatle, or just that this was his fourth mainstream album, with his standards and country albums of 1970 not counted) is a dreadful mess that bombed upon release. It missed the charts in the UK and only made it to 162 in the States, so it earns no sales points, the first Beatle LP not to do so. The singles didn’t chart either. Atlantic, his record label in the US, dropped him after it. Some kind critics picked out individual tracks to praise in their negative reviews, so I’m giving it a 3/10 critical score. And that’s all the points it gets.

1977 Scoreboard

Let’s take a look at our scoreboard for 1977, year 8 AB, and can I be the first to say? Yikes.

1977 Overall:

1. Paul McCartney: 10

2. Ringo Starr: 3

3. George Harrison & John Lennon: 0

Paul beats Ringo more than three times over with a pair of singles to Ringo’s full LP with promotional singles. And Ringo deserved it for this one.

1977 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 283

2. John Lennon: 166

3. George Harrison: 142

4. Ringo Starr: 117

Another year, another identical big board. And 1978 doesn’t have any surprises for us either.

1978

1978 is another year that sees Paul and Ringo busy and George and John lying fallow. George did return to recording at the end of this year, but the resulting album didn’t drop until 1979. The stories for 1978 are the partial decline of Wings and the continuing of Ringo’s doldrums.

Wings (Paul McCartney), London Town: After an exhausting 1976, Wings’ drummer and lead guitarist split, reducing the group down once again to its core trio of Paul, Linda, and Denny Laine. The last time this happened, they delivered Band on the Run, a triumphant album that restored Paul’s reputation. This time, they made London Town, an album that signaled the band’s coming irrelevance. It’s pretty typical Paul fare: an insubstantial album with a few pleasant little ditties and a handful of ineffectual rockers. It was poorly received by critics past and present: I give it a 4/10. Its first single, “With a Little Luck,” was a hit, but the others didn’t do much. It makes a further 16 points on sales and 16 on singles for a total of 36. Still an impressive showing, but not as successful as his earlier records, and a clear indication of cracks in his armor that will only grow worse.

Ringo Starr, Bad Boy: After the failure of his attempt at disco, Ringo and Vini recorded a more basic sort of rock album, featuring lots of covers. Where Ringo the 4th leaves me angry about its poor quality, Bad Boy leaves virtually no impression at all. Critics and the public alike rejected it — Ringo made a television special to promote it called Ringo, which also flopped, despite star power from Star Wars’ Carrie Fisher, Three’s Company’s John Ritter, TV legend Art Carney, and Vincent Price. 0 points for sales, 0 for singles, and an overly kind 3/10 critical score.

1978 was a year of forgettable releases; the music world wouldn’t have changed a bit if these had never been made. It is tempting to label this as the year the Beatles slid into irrelevance, and it is certainly a step in that direction. But these boys still have some star power left, even if the world will never again be looking to them all at once as it was at the beginning of the decade.

1978 Scoreboard

Here’s our scoreboard for the inconsequential year 9 AB, 1978.

1978 Overall:

1. Paul McCartney: 36

2. Ringo Starr: 3

3. George Harrison & John Lennon: 0

Paul racks up another bunch of points even with a mediocre record, and Ringo adds a few points to his total on a failure. Still crickets from George and John.

1978 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 319

2. John Lennon: 166

3. George Harrison: 142

4. Ringo Starr: 120

No motion. Ringo’s getting a little closer to George, but at the rate he’s going, that 22 points will be more than enough to hold him off. I’m more interested in the 24 points between George and John — that’s a gap that Harrison has potential to close. We’ll have to see what 1979 holds.

1979

1979 is a Paul and George year — it’s the last year of John’s hiatus, and Ringo takes an overdue break after three years of failures. This is a year that sees George making another respectable album that some forgetful critics called a comeback, and the death knell of Wings.

George Harrison, George Harrison: As I mentioned, George took it easy through 1977 and ’78. He got married, followed Formula One, became a father, and generally soaked up a lot of domestic bliss. He wrote much of his self-titled 1979 album during a 1978 holiday to Hawaii, and it has a beach vacation vibe to it. It’s mellow, happy, and in no hurry. George claimed he made the album out of a sense of obligation to Warner Brothers, who distributed his Dark Horse record label — he didn’t need the money, and they weren’t pressuring him. The image George projected at this time was of a semi-retired musician, someone who wrote a song now and then when the mood struck him. He said he saw himself as more of a gardener than a musical artist. The album projects an enlightened, aloof air, an artist apart from the stress of the larger musical scene… sometimes the songs’ mellow mood overwhelms their content, the whole thing developing into musical wallpaper. But the album does work well for the most part, and critics hailed George Harrison as his best since All Things Must Pass (gee, we’ve heard this one before… seems that to the music press, only two Harrison albums ever existed, his latest and All Things Must Pass). Commercially, the album was a mild success in the US and a relative flop in the UK, where Harrison did very little promotion, not that it would probably have done much good if he had: the listening public there was fairly fixated on new wave, and this version of George was anything but new and edgy. George was making millionaire rock, the opposite of hip. I give it an 8/10 critical score; it goes up to 13 for commercial performance, and 16 with its singles.

Wings released a pretty good disco-tinged non-album single called “Goodnight Tonight” a few months before their next LP. The single did well, proving that not every Beatle attempt at disco was doomed to failure and earning Paul 10 points. If only it was a harbinger of what was to come…

Wings (Paul McCartney), Back to the Egg: Oh Paul, Paul. Was there ever an album more overblown with less substance than Back to the Egg? (Don’t answer that; the rest of your career will be full of them.) 1979 was a very busy year for Wings: they were touring again and working on TV and film projects, as if they could fix the relative failure of London Town through sheer energy. They recruited producer Chris Thomas, who had worked with the Sex Pistols and the Pretenders, to make a big rock record. Where George reacted to new wave by ignoring the larger industry and making a record that sounded like him, Paul was seeking to bring the energy of the new scene to his band. He had just signed to Columbia records in the US in a deal that made him the highest-paid musician in the world, and he was determined to make good on that deal with a huge record.

He drew out the recording sessions, even recruiting a supergroup of rock royalty from the Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and others to back him on a few tracks. The entire time Wings was recording, they were convinced the record would be amazing. It wasn’t until mixing that the truth settled in: there was nothing there. All smoke and no fire. Just listen to “Rockestra Theme,” the first song recorded with the giant supergroup of some of the best musicians in the world… he got all those guys together and that’s what he did with them!? There’s nothing at all to it! (It won the Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, if you need more evidence that the Grammys are a sham.) It’s no surprise — Wings was always at its best when Paul strummed out sweet little ditties; they tended to fall flat on their face when they trotted out the rockers. A whole album of big Wings rock songs was bound to fail.

The album was savaged by critics as another lazy Paul album with no artistic vision. Its sales were on a scale that would have been a smash success for any other artist, but compared to Wings’ earlier releases — and especially for the man who had just signed the most expensive contract in the world — it was a flop. Finger pointing ensued between Paul and Columbia.

I give Back to the Egg a 4/10 for critical response (I do really like “Arrow Through Me”). It moves up to 18 for its commercial performance, 25 for its singles. This is the last Wings album; its relative failure and the disaster of the tour afterward exposed tensions within the band, and Paul felt a need to retool his career. Wings wouldn’t officially disband until 1981, but they didn’t do anything together after their 1980 tour was cut short by Paul’s marijuana arrest in Japan. 1979 marks the end of Wings, Paul’s don’t-call-it-a-solo-project second band.

But Paul wasn’t through with 1979 yet. He’d made some home recordings on a synthesizer in late 1979 and decided to release one of these tracks as a non-album holiday single — under his own name, not Wings. I’m referring, of course, to the inescapable “Wonderful Christmastime.” Whether you love this song or (correctly) find it irritating, it was certainly a success, and it adds another 8 points to Paul’s total.

1979 Scoreboard

It was an unusual year — let’s check out the scores for 1979, year 10 AB.

1979 Overall:

1. Paul McCartney: 43

2. George Harrison: 16

3. John Lennon & Ringo Starr: 0

Paul wins 1979 handily again. Even though George’s album was better received than Paul’s, he was working on a much different scale. By the late ’70s, George was a small cottage artist (by Beatle standards) while Paul was one of the world’s biggest superstars. Even a Wings flop was going to sell more records than a Harrison winner.

1979 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 362

2. John Lennon: 166

3. George Harrison: 158

4. Ringo Starr: 120

No motion on the big scores. Paul retains a commanding first, and while George gets closer to John, it isn’t enough to overtake him.

With year 10 AB, we bring the ’70s to a close. The decade began with a lot of jostling for position and a lot of surprising results, but in the middle of the decade we settled into a pattern: Paul as the runaway commercial success with mixed critical results, John as the formerly successful recluse, George as the modestly successful semi-recluse, and Ringo trying and failing to regain the foothold he briefly had. As the landmark year 1980 looms, I’m sure we can expect more of the same. I can’t imagine that a gigantic tragedy could possibly shake the music world to its core and alter the legacy and careers of the Beatles forever.

Er… see you in part 4 :/

More music writing:

Welcome back to my systematic survey of all the Beatles’ post-breakup releases. As I said in part 1, this is my quest to sort out not only who came out ahead in the aftermath of the breakup of the world’s biggest group, but also how and why. Part 1 covered the busy years of 1970 and ’71. Part 2 will tackle four years of the Beatles’ solo work: 1972–75.

This will be a multi-part series with updates every Wednesday until we reach the present day, so make sure you don’t miss one: subscribe to my Medium or Substack now!

My method for tabulating these scores is as methodical as it is idiosyncratic. See part 1 to learn more about my scoring system.

1972

After two very active years, 1972 was a relatively fallow year for the Beatles — just a handful of non-album singles and one studio album. Paul released three singles with Wings: “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” (4 points), “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (5 points), and the double A-side “Hi, Hi, Hi” / “C Moon” (7 points). None of them were knockouts, but Paul was gradually raising the profile of his new band. Ringo released “Back Off Boogaloo” for 7 points. George took the year off from music. Thus, the only new album from a Beatle in 1972 came from John Lennon.

John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Some Time in New York City: John’s third post-Beatle album was a commercial and critical failure. It was his most political album yet, with every song tackling some left-wing issue of the day. Critics found it shallow and insulting, a didactic and surface-level treatment of its topics instead of a full, honest engagement. I see their point, but I find the songs more endearing than they did. Time has not led to much of a re-evaluation of Some Time in New York City; it is among the least well regarded Lennon albums.

The album included a studio disc with the new songs and a live disc of older material. Given that John barely ever played live, and seldom as a traditional headliner (usually as part of a benefit or as a surprise cameo in someone else’s show), this single disc represents nearly the sum total of the time John had spent on stage since his 1969 live album. Side 1 is composed of two songs from a benefit show, one by John and one (much longer) by Yoko. Side 2 is the legendary recording of John on stage with Frank Zappa, whom faithful readers will recognize as my favorite artist. Frank and John agreed before the set that they would both be able to use the tapes in their own releases, but John took the tapes and prevented Zappa from doing anything with them for 20 years. His version edited out Zappa’s singers and retitled Zappa’s songs, removing Zappa’s composer credit from “King Kong,” one of his signature tunes — overall uncool behavior. The live disc is a bit of a mess, and morally compromised to boot.

Overall, I’m rating this album a 4/10. Its sales bring it up to 8 points, and its one single (widely banned due to its controversial title) adds one more for a total of 9. John was bitterly disappointed in the reception and performance of the album; it was another year before he returned to recording. His career would, arguably, never again reach the heights it did in 1970 and ’71 — all his albums from here until Double Fantasy were either failures or middling successes, but we’ll get to that.

1972 Scoreboard

Here’s our scoreboard for 1972, year 3 AB.

1972 Overall:

1. Paul McCartney: 17

2. John Lennon: 9

3. Ringo Starr: 7

4. George Harrison: 0

A very low-scoring year, and our first one with one Beatle completely silent. Paul takes the top slot, beating out John’s double LP with nothing but three singles. And Ringo isn’t far behind him with just the one single. Honestly embarrassing.

1972 Cumulative:

1. John Lennon: 95

2. Paul McCartney: 82

3. George Harrison: 62

4. Ringo Starr: 33

No motion at all in our quiet year. Paul is steadily gaining on John, who hangs on to the top spot for now. George is not in very much danger from Ringo, I’m afraid.

1973

In 1973, the Beatles are back in business, with studio albums from all four members (and two from Paul!) for the first time since 1970.

Paul McCartney & Wings, Red Rose Speedway: The first Beatle album of 1973 came in April, and was something of a relaunch for Wings. Reasoning that the middling sales of Wild Life had been because Paul’s name wasn’t prominent enough on it (rather than because it was a mediocre album), Apple credited this one to “Paul McCartney & Wings” and put Paul’s picture on the cover with no bandmates. Red Rose Speedway is more well thought out and complete feeling than Wild Life, but it still got mixed to negative reviews. Critics considered it facile and lightweight, another indication of Paul’s mediocrity. Retrospective reviews haven’t been much different, but I find it a very listenable album with plenty of gems. It is also my dad’s favorite album of all time, so I am obligated to be nice to it. I give it 5/10 as a critical score. It sold a little better than its predecessor, bringing its total to 19. “My Love” was a very successful single (not beating the “Paul is a mediocrity who only writes charming, insubstantial ditties” allegations), bringing in another 8 points for a total of 27.

George Harrison, Living in the Material World: Next in May was George’s long-awaited studio follow-up to All Things Must Pass, then considered the high-water mark of post-Beatle releases. Living in the Material World is a tighter record, shorter and with a much less cluttered production style. It reflects George’s twin obsessions at this time: Hindu spiritualism and cocaine. Critical reception was very positive — though most considered it lesser than All Things Must Pass, it was greeted as a worthy successor (though some objected to the preachy, holier-than-thou nature of some of the lyrics). But (and this is a trend that will afflict many of George’s albums) it seems to have quickly dropped out of people’s memories. Though it had sold well and been critically acclaimed upon release, it didn’t have the longevity of All Things Must Pass, and reviews of every rerelease since have called it a “lost classic.” Most unusual. “Lost” or not, I give it an 8/10 for critical response. Sales bring it to 19, and its one single (why did they only release one!?) to 26.

Between the next two albums come a pair of non-album singles by Wings: the monstrous “Live and Let Die” recorded for the Bond film of the same name (9 points) and the more modestly successful “Helen Wheels” (5 points).

John Lennon, Mind Games: Toward the end of 1973, the calendar gets full. Done licking his wounds after Some Time in New York City, John returned to the studio feeling a little lost. He wanted to write songs that would connect with his audience better than his political ones, but he was struggling with US immigration and the FBI, and his marriage to Yoko was in a rough patch. John was stressed and wrote a set of escapist songs. Between the writing and recording of Mind Games, he and Yoko decided they would separate for a time, and John took their secretary May Pang as his lover. This separation period, which extended through the end of 1974, is called John’s Lost Weekend, a time when John threw himself whole hog into high living and substance abuse.

All this turmoil did not create great art. Mind Games is a middling album, insubstantial (especially by John’s standards), aimless, and rather forgettable. It received mixed to negative reviews from critics, who considered it a step in the right direction after Some Time, but only a small one. I’ve given it a 5/10 critical score. Sales bring it to 15, and its single (the title track, one of the few good and memorable songs on it) brings it to 19.

Ringo Starr, Ringo: Ringo jumped back into the studio album game in November with his first big pop record — his two 1970 LPs were standards and country songs, so Ringo is Ringo’s rock & roll debut. For it he solicited contributions from all of his friends in the industry, so the songwriting and musician credits are a star-studded who’s who of the pop rock scene in the early ’70s. The album is also notable for being the first time all four Beatles appeared on one LP since their breakup — with the caveat that they don’t all appear on the same track together. John and George did some playing together on the record, but Paul, as the group pariah, was kept separate. The album was a commercial smash and a critical success. It isn’t the most memorable album of the ’70s in retrospect, but it is good fun, and chock full of hit singles. 8/10 critical score; sales bring it to 23, and the three singles (Apple was milking this for all it was worth) add an impressive extra 22 points. At 45 points, this is one of the highest point totals for an album in the Beatles’ discographies. Good on you, Ringo. If Paul hadn’t kept rolling, Ringo would have actually won 1973. But we can’t have that, can we?

Wings (Paul McCartney), Band on the Run: Paul recorded Wings’ next album in Nigeria. An inveterate rewriter of history, Paul later claimed that an affinity for African music brought him there, but in fact he was looking for an exotic, beach-vacation-esque place to record. He picked Nigeria from a list of EMI recording studios, not realizing that the country was fresh off a civil war and plagued by poverty, disease, and crime. Wings had just lost its lead guitarist and drummer, so Paul played both these instruments as well as bass and vocals on Band on the Run. In these less-than-ideal circumstances, Paul created not only his best post-Beatle record, but one of my contenders for the best overall. It’s got all of Paul’s trademark easy, catchy tunefulness, without too much of his self-indulgence or self-sabotaging unfinishedness. The songs, be they ballads or rockers, all hit perfectly.

The album was slow to find its audience. Years of subpar Paul product led people not to take it seriously. Though it was released in November of 1973, it wasn’t until it racked up a series of hit singles that it started to sell. After years of disappointment, it was exactly the record critics and fans alike had been waiting for Paul to make. Prior to Band on the Run, Paul was seen as the Beatle least likely to redeem himself (a bold claim with Ringo in the mix). But when Band on the Run hit #1 on both sides of the Atlantic, suddenly Paul replaced George as the Beatle most likely to succeed. It gets a critical 10/10; its sales bring it to 28, the highest album total recorded on my chart. Its singles push it to 47, beating George’s All Things Must Pass (46) for highest scoring album + singles so far. This started a string of success that would carry Paul through much of the rest of the ’70s and (spoiler alert) place him in an unassailable first place for the rest of the Beatles’ history.

1973 Scoreboard

Let’s take a look at our scoreboard after 1973, year 4 AB, a year that really shook up the status quo.

1973 Overall:

1. Paul McCartney: 88

2. Ringo Starr: 45

3. George Harrison: 26

4. John Lennon: 19

Paul dominated this busy year: two albums (one middling and one classic) and some of the biggest singles of his career (“Live and Let Die,” “Jet,” and “Band on the Run”) lead to his point total towering over the others’. In second place is Ringo, largely on the strength of having three singles excerpted from his LP (where most of these have one or two). George’s excellent-but-soon-forgotten LP (with only one single) gains him third, and John’s second disappointment lands him in last place.

1973 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 170 (^1)

2. John Lennon: 114 (v1)

3. George Harrison: 88

4. Ringo Starr: 78

John and Paul have switched places at the top, with Paul taking the top spot for the first time. Ringo’s biggest year ever isn’t enough to move him up from the bottom slot, but he sure is a lot closer.

1974

1974 was a weird and consequential year. Paul took it easy after a busy 1973 and released only standalone singles; George went on the first big concert tour of any of the former Beatles and crashed and burned; John made his last record of new music for the decade; and Ringo… did what Ringo always does.

John Lennon, Walls and Bridges: We have to wait until September to get our first new material of 1974, John’s next studio LP. Walls and Bridges is another small step up for John — it’s a workmanlike pop record that suffers from some of the same Lost Weekend aimlessness as Mind Games but also delivers some very solid songwriting. Most notable is the #1 single “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” a collaboration with Elton John that combines infectious pop with “fuck you” lyrics in a way that feels very Lennon. The album got mixed reviews but his most positive since Imagine. It gets a 7/10. Sales bring it to 18, and singles to 31.

Next up is a non-album single by Paul with Wings, the radio hit “Junior’s Farm” for 6 points.

Ringo Starr, Goodnight Vienna: Ringo’s next record is much beloved. He continued the formula of having his friends all pitch in and contribute songs — John Lennon and Elton John acquit themselves particularly well on it. Critics were quite favorable, just as they had been for Ringo; retrospective reviews are a bit less kind, but it remains a classic in Ringo’s terms. 8/10 for critical score; sales bring it to 16; singles (four of them!) to 28.

George Harrison, Dark Horse: Finally, let’s talk about George’s year, the year George Harrison fell from grace. You may recall that George ended 1973 still riding high — he had been the star of 1970, a veritable saint in 1971, and though he had lost ground to John and Paul, he was still a contender for most successful Beatle after a fallow 1972 and a mild 1973. So when he announced a tour of North America in 1974, expectations were sky high. He started recording a new album, Dark Horse, because it was an expectation that a touring musician should have something to promote. Unfortunately, nothing went according to plan. George’s wife Patti Boyd infamously left him for Eric Clapton, driving George further into his alcohol and drug use. His songs turned into a musical soap opera. His attention was split as he founded his own record label (also called Dark Horse) and helped the artists he signed record and promote albums. Finally, just before the tour, he contracted laryngitis, which destroyed his voice. Still, George pushed ahead with the tour and finishing Dark Horse for a December release.

The tour was a disaster. In press events George shied away from his legacy as a member of the Beatles, and his sets were dominated by solo material, which felt to many like an abdication. His voice was shot, so he extended the playing time of the traditional Indian musicians he was touring with and decreased his own, an unpopular choice. And to hear the diminished results of George’s poor voice, listen to the song “Dark Horse,” which he recorded after he’d come down with his laryngitis. It’s rough. This combination of a less-than-perfect show with a perceived shirking of his duties as a former Beatle, especially on the first major concert tour in the post-Beatles universe, led the press to absolutely savage the shows in reviews. When Dark Horse the album came out, the same vitriol carried over. Critics raked it across the coals. They were the worst album reviews any Beatle had received so far. Robert Christgau punned on the album name by calling George the Hoarse Dork, which is unfortunately devastatingly apt and funny. I would never have recovered.

Recent reassessments of Dark Horse have been far kinder. Modern critics recognize that the press’s condemnation of Harrison the fallen Beatle took on a life of its own, leading contemporary reviewers to overlook the merits of the album to take part in the feeding frenzy. The album is rawer than George’s previous work, but that lends it an emotional immediacy. His voice on some tracks is hard to listen to, but the songwriting is quite good, and some American R&B influences creep in that are very enjoyable (especially on “Far East Man,” my favorite track on the album). So despite the extremely negative early reviews, I’m giving Dark Horse a 6/10 — it’s not up to George’s earlier standards, but it certainly doesn’t deserve to be placed lower than, say, Walls and Bridges. Its difficult sales bring it to 14, and its singles to 20.

1974 Scoreboard

So how did 1974, year 5 AB, shake out on our scoreboard?

1974 Overall:

1. John Lennon: 31

2. Ringo Starr: 28

3. George Harrison: 20

4. Paul McCartney: 6

In a strange year, a middling album from John clinches him the top spot. Paul is all the way at the bottom because he only released the one single, and Ringo takes second. George, despite one of the busiest years of his career, takes an absolute beating in the press and washes up in third place.

1974 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 176

2. John Lennon: 145

3. George Harrison: 108

4. Ringo Starr: 106

No changes to our overall ranks this year. Paul built himself quite a comfortable lead in 1973 and hangs on to his top spot despite releasing only two new songs. John remains in second and George in third, and though still in fourth place Ringo is still gaining, now a mere two points short of George.

1975

1975 was an underwhelming year that mostly saw the Beatles continuing the trends set in previous years: Paul sustained his commercial success with Wings, George furthered his descent from the good graces of the music press, Ringo lay fallow. The one surprise of the year is John, who released a rather odd little album and took a hiatus from music for the rest of the decade.

John Lennon, Rock ’n’ Roll: The first album of 1975 (February) was primarily the work of 1973 and ’74, and actually predated Walls and Bridges. Rock ’n’ Roll is a covers album of the sorts of early rock songs that inspired John when he was a teenager. It came about as part of a settlement in a lawsuit about his homage/plagiarism of a Chuck Berry song in “Come Together,” and was plagued with difficulties in recording and release (the Wikipedia page is a pretty wild ride). The final product shows a bit of the disjointedness that created it. But overall, it’s a covers album. The song selection is pure dynamite, but the performances are merely passable — John’s trademark multitracked vocals feel very out of place on these songs. It got a lukewarm critical response; it was seen as lazy and a step backward, but also an enjoyable record when taken for what it is. I’m giving it 5/10. It sold decently, bringing its total to 17, and a single brings it to 21.

With the rushed release of Rock ’n’ Roll, John’s Lost Weekend ended. He reunited with Yoko and she became pregnant. Having lost pregnancies before, John and Yoko decided to take a professional pause and make a real attempt to be parents. Sean Lennon was born in October 1975, and John didn’t release more music until 1980.

Wings (Paul McCartney), Venus and Mars: Paul delivered his follow-up to the monstrous Band on the Run in May. Venus and Mars is a fairly unremarkable record, a cash-in on Wings’ new success. It received a lukewarm critical reception; a good record, but inferior to its predecessor, a 7/10. But it naturally sold extremely well. Its sales bring it to 25, and its three singles to 39.

George Harrison, Extra Texture (Read All About It): George hurried to complete his next album, which would complete his contract with Apple Corps and allow him to move to his own Dark Horse label. Extra Texture is an attempt at a redemption from Dark Horse, but it feels rushed and exhausted. It furthered the R&B influences that started on Dark Horse, and the lyrics furthered his dark and conflicted nature. This is the only Harrison record with no spiritual themes; instead, his heartbreak and substance use take center stage. George also voiced his gripes with the press, by whom he felt mistreated (accurately in my estimation). Critics at the time called it joyless and plodding, though they did pick out individual songs to praise. It gets a 5/10; lukewarm sales bring it to 12, and its single pushes it to 16.

1975 Scoreboard

Let’s take a look at our scoreboard after this mediocre year, 6 AB.

1975 Overall:

1. Paul McCartney: 39

2. John Lennon: 21

3. George Harrison: 16

4. Ringo Starr: 0

It’s no surprise that Paul takes the top spot this year; his album performed well even if it wasn’t remarkably good. John secures second with his contractually obliged covers album, and George takes third with his “someone give this guy a break” album. Ringo takes his first year off and gains no points.

1975 Cumulative:

1. Paul McCartney: 215

2. John Lennon: 166

3. George Harrison: 124

4. Ringo Starr: 106

Another year of no changes on the big board. Paul furthers his lead over the rest. John won’t have any new points until 1980, so we’ll have to see — can George (or even Ringo) overtake him to grab second place, or can John hold on through his hiatus?

Until next time…

And that’s where we are in the middle of the ’70s, 6 years after the breakup of the Beatles. Next, we’ll witness Wings climb to ever greater heights before falling, and George and Ringo both fall on musical hard times. See you in part 3.

Part 3:

More music writing:

In every breakup — whether it’s a couple, a band, or whatever else — there is some primal part of our brains that can’t help but ask… who won? Who thrived after the partnership ended, and who fizzled? The question is especially potent when it comes to the most influential band in 20th century pop music. Who won the breakup of the Beatles? And even more importantly, how did they get there?

All four Beatles had extensive careers after the breakup. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr have all had their triumphs and their low points. Furthermore, each of them has led their lives with a degree of attention and scrutiny that any other artist might long for or dread. It would be childish and simplistic to reduce these decades of artistic striving to winners and losers.

That’s why I’m going to go year-by-year, and with spreadsheets.

Who am I? Just a writer with a certain amount of enthusiasm for both music and Excel. I’ve been an obsessive Beatles fan since I was eleven years old — their discography is part of my DNA (the band discography, that is; I only came to the majority of their solo work as an adult). I am well suited to judge the Beatles’ output both through the subjective lens of a fan and the objective lens of a music writer, and to crunch the numbers like a musical accountant.

I also want it noted that I’m listening to all of these releases as I write these posts, many of them for the first time. Listening to the Beatles’ solo output in rigid chronological order has been a real odyssey. It was an enjoyable experience for the ’70s, but it gets pretty dang bleak.

So here it is, your definitive guide to the Beatles’ careers post-breakup, no further research needed. Who soared, who flopped, who won every year?

This will be a multi-part series with updates every Wednesday until we reach the present day, so make sure you don’t miss one: subscribe to my Medium or Substack now! (All the posts will be free in both locations.)

Part 1 covers my method and the years 1970 and 1971 — future parts will have more than two years apiece, but there is a LOT of music to cover in these years!

The Method

Art is inherently subjective, capable of containing a myriad of meanings for the creator and for the appreciator. It is the very definition of unquantifiable, and artists cannot be ranked in the manner of, say, professional athletes or show animals. Therefore, I have created a rigorous scoring system that will account for the relative artistic, commercial, and cultural success of each of the Beatles’ post-breakup releases, allowing me to quantify and rank them in the manner of, say, professional athletes or show animals.

Scoring shall be calculated as follows. Please feel free to skip this section if you (for some reason) are bored by data and want to get to the music.

Studio Albums

A studio album shall be defined as an album created as a discrete project by a Beatle (including collaborations and bands) and released in (more or less) the form intended. (See exceptions in the next section for more detail.)

• Chart points: 5 points for Top 5; 4 points for top 10; 2 points for top 50; 1 point for top 100 (US and UK album charts only — their two primary markets)

• Sales certification points: 5 points for US Diamond/UK Platinum; 3 points for US Platinum/UK Gold; 1 point for US Gold/UK Silver

• Critical response points: a subjective 1–10 rating based on both contemporaneous and retrospective reviews. Also swayable by my own opinion (generally correct).

Studio albums can gain points from 5 sources (US chart, UK chart, US certification, UK certification, and critical response) for a maximum total score of 30 (the closest we’ll get is 28, and I’ll let you wait to find out which that is) and a minimum of 1 (no one sinks quite that low, not that Ringo doesn’t try).

When presenting the scores for each album, I will also add in its singles (see below). The range of possible scores varies based on how many singles were issued (it’s generally 1–4), but for practical purposes, a total score in the 40s indicates a phenomenally successful album. The highest album + singles score any of the solo Beatle albums achieved was a 53 (I’ll let you wait and see about that one too).

Other Albums

Live albums shall be scored the same as studio albums, but without the critical response portion. This is because live albums — at least, live albums by the four artists we’re following — usually recycle studio material and thus do not stand on their own as artistic statements distinct from the artist’s studio albums. This is also a practical consideration. Paul and Ringo released an incredible glut of live albums in the CD era, many indistinguishable from each other, and it doesn’t seem fair to award each of these extra points. Let them count if the market decides they were significant, and otherwise add nothing. Therefore, a live album shall receive a score between 0 and 20, plus the scores of any singles.

Compilation albums shall not be considered.

Posthumous albums shall count as studio albums if they were begun during the artist’s lifetime and the final product represents an attempt to finish an album as the artist intended. (These are John Lennon’s Milk and Honey and George Harrison’s Brainwashed.)

Historical albums compiled from demos and/or archive material shall not be considered. (E.g., Lennon’s Live in New York City and Acoustic albums, Wings’ One Hand Clapping.)

Singles

Singles that come from albums shall be added to the overall album score and counted in the year of the album release, even if the single was released in a different year (i.e., advance singles released the year before, singles released after the calendar rolled over, and even singles not excerpted until years later [such as “Jealous Guy,” which was released on LP in 1971 and not as a single until 1985]). Non-LP singles shall be counted in the year of release.

• Chart points: 4 points for top 5; 3 points for top 10; 2 points for top 50; 1 point for top 100 (US and UK main singles charts only)

• Sales certification points: 3 points for US Diamond/UK Platinum; 2 points for US Platinum/UK Gold; 1 point for US Gold/UK Silver

Only studio albums shall receive critical response points; singles shall be considered as commercial products only. I have also slightly lowered the upper point values assigned to singles in order to privilege albums. No matter what the music landscape looked like before or after them, the Beatles reached their peak in the era when the album was king.

Singles can gain points from 4 sources for a maximum total of 14 points.

Any releases as the Beatles shall not be considered — this is a solo work competition. Within our frame of reference, that excludes Let It Be, the Anthology singles, and “Now and Then.”

Phew. That’s the methodology. Without further ado, let’s get into the history of the music world after the Beatles’ breakup and start scoring some releases!

1970

The Beatles informally agreed to dissolve after Abbey Road in 1969, and sharp-eyed observers had already picked up on this fact. But the world did not officially learn of the breakup until 1970 (under circumstances I will soon describe). There were some Beatle solo releases before the breakup: a handful of experimental albums by John & Yoko, some soundtracks by George and Paul. 1970, however, saw the beginning of the Beatles’ attempts to make commercial pop music under their own names. So for the purposes of our scoreboard, we will ignore the earlier records and take 1970 as the starting pistol in our race. And what a year 1970 was — 1970 was the year the solo Beatles released the most material by far.

The first release of 1970 was the non-album single “Instant Karma” by John in February. It went Gold in the US, hit #5 in the UK and #3 in the US, so it gets him 9 points.

Ringo Starr, Sentimental Journey: Perhaps surprisingly, first out of the gate with an album was Ringo in March. As soon as John told Ringo privately that he intended to leave the group in 1969, Ringo started working on his solo debut album — it seems to have been a sort of grieving process for him. Sentimental Journey is an album of Ringo’s renditions of pre-rock vocal pop standards, the “Great American Songbook” material that forms the canon for artists like Tony Bennett. Ringo only sings, he doesn’t drum; he is supported by the full orchestra that is traditional for these songs. The nostalgic song selection and the cover, featuring Ringo superimposed on a picture of an old Liverpool pub, show Ringo’s emotional state looking backward for comfort at the loss of his band.

The music is… rather tedious. Critics at the time largely panned then ignored Sentimental Journey, calling it “embarrassing.” Retrospective reviews aren’t much kinder, though they’re more likely to find it mildly charming. For myself, I enjoy just about any song on it in isolation, but strung together they make for a dull listen. And Ringo sincerely does not have the vocal chops these songs demand. I’m giving it a 3/10, which might be kinder than it merits.

But the album was released at a time when people were going to buy anything with a Beatle’s name on it (this does not last long), so it still gets 6 points for charting #7 in the UK and #22 in the US. No singles were released from this album, so no extra points there. Thus, Sentimental Journey nets Ringo 9 points, same as John’s single.

Paul McCartney, McCartney: Next in April was Paul’s solo debut, and it was a shitstorm. Paul was the villain of the Beatles’ breakup, both privately (among the other Beatles) and publicly (in the press). (History has since been rewritten to cast Yoko Ono — and by extension John — as the reason for the breakup, a laughable proposition. Ask anyone at the time and they’d have blamed Paul. Whether that’s fair or not is another question.) Paul further alienated the other Beatles by 1) refusing to move the release of his solo album to avoid competing with the Beatles’ final release, Let It Be, and 2) publicly revealing the Beatles’ breakup in prewritten interview segments released as promo for the album. The Beatles hadn’t yet decided how they were going to tell the world, and Paul’s unilateral decision to reveal it to stoke interest in his solo project both ticked off his former bandmates and made him look, to the public, like the one who was breaking them up. In the whirlwind of negative publicity that suddenly surrounded Paul, it would have taken a very strong album to convince people to listen to him kindly.

McCartney was not that album. It’s a home recording and has an unfinished, slapped-together feel, more like a collection of demos than a properly realized album. Paul learned the “lesson” from the Abbey Road medley in ’69 that he could smash together a bunch of unfinished musical thoughts and together they’d amount to something brilliant… it took years to break him of that bad habit, and it is used to much lesser effect on McCartney than on Abbey Road.

Critics ripped the album to shreds at the time. Retrospective reviews have been kinder only in comparison — they’ll allow “mediocre” instead of “dismal.” There is one track exempt from the carnage: “Maybe I’m Amazed” was singled out for praise at the time, and has since become a cultural mainstay and one of the biggest songs of Paul’s solo career. Though the song was played heavily on the radio, Paul (for some stupid reason) refused to issue singles from the album — a shame, because an official “Maybe I’m Amazed” single would have been top 5 at the very least. I’ve given this a critical score of 5/10, which would be much lower without that one song. It sold well enough too (that Beatle name recognition), netting Paul a total of 18 points on his debut.

Ringo Starr, Beaucoups of Blues: Next in September is another Ringo, what the hell? After years of covering rockabilly-leaning-country songs on the Beatles’ albums, Beaucoups of Blues was Ringo’s country album. Ringo had met a Nashville cat who bragged that, if Ringo just came to Nashville, he and his country musician friends could write and record him a full album in less than a week. Nashville in those days was indeed a factory, and Ringo took them up on the challenge. They wrote him ten fully original songs, put together arrangements, and recorded the whole thing in just three days. Just as on his last album, Ringo didn’t participate in the writing or the instrumentation of Beaucoups of Blues, he only sang. This is a country album of its era: it was produced by committee, and just about anyone could have been the singer. As such, while it’s a good record, it doesn’t feel much like a Ringo Starr record.

Critics responded more positively to this than to Sentimental Journey, but mutedly so. The album was a moderate success (more so in the US than the UK, unsurprisingly considering the genre), as was the title track when released as a single. I give the album a 6/10 (I happen to quite enjoy it), and with its sales and single it nets Ringo 8 points.

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass: Our next release came in November, and if you thought this year would peter to an end, get ready for a monster. Most of the songs on All Things Must Pass were proposed as Beatle songs and rejected — two LPs worth of it (the third disc of this 3 LP set is full of loose jams) — proving, if you ask me, deliberate sabotage on the part of Lennon & McCartney when George was in the Beatles. All Things Must Pass is a triumph, full of giant hooks, big emotions, and Phil Spector’s cacophonous wall of sound production. There are love songs George wrote with Bob Dylan, sad songs tinged with anger and regret over how the Beatles ended, and several massive hit singles. It is commonplace to call All Things Must Pass the best album any of the Beatles made after the breakup. If I were capable of such simplicity I wouldn’t have all these spreadsheets, but it’s certainly a big contender.

Critics adored the album and it instantly entered the pantheon of classic rock albums. This gets an easy 10/10 for critical response. It and its lead single, “My Sweet Lord,” hit #1 on both the US and UK charts, and the “What Is Life” single did very well too. Altogether, George’s debut gets 26 points for just the album (out of the possible 30) and a total of 46 for the album plus singles. Yowza.

John Lennon, Plastic Ono Band: It seems inevitable that each Beatle would get out a solo album in their first year apart — this is the time in their careers when they were most in competition with one another, and no one would want to be left out of the reckoning. John put his 1970 album out with no time to spare in December. Plastic Ono Band is often called John’s best solo record. Before making it, he and Yoko went to primal scream therapy and tried to find the root of John’s trauma, and his vulnerable trip through his own childhood heavily informs the songwriting here. The irony and wry detachment characteristic of John are nowhere to be found. He delivers gut-wrenching performances of songs full of pain over very minimal instrumentation (for the most part nothing but himself on guitar or piano, Klaus Voormann on bass, and Ringo on drums).

The result was an artistic triumph, if not the most radio-friendly of albums. It received a mixed response at its release — some critics got it, some found his introspection to be just as self-centered as what Paul had done on McCartney. But it is nearly universally beloved today, so I’m giving it a 9/10 as a critical score. Its sales grant it a further 10 points, and a pair of singles net another 4 for a total of 23.

1970 Scoreboard

This brings us to the close of 1970, year 1 AB,* so let’s have our very first scoreboard check. The boys will be ranked in descending order.

*After Beatles; or, if you prefer, Anno Beatlorum

1970 Overall:

1. George Harrison: 46

2. John Lennon: 32

3. Paul McCartney: 18

4. Ringo Starr: 17

A very strong showing from George, which was a surprise at the time — no one expected him to be the most successful Beatle, but he absolutely was in their first year. John comes in a respectable second, and the other two are way back in the dust. Paul’s one middling album puts him ahead of Ringo’s two flops, but only by one point! It’s a shame, because 1970 could conceivably have been the only year Ringo wasn’t in last place… hope you like it down there, Ritchie, because you’ll be there a while.

1971

1970 was a year of staking claims: George and John both succeeded well, Ringo had a more respectable showing than might have been expected, and Paul fell flat on his face (aside from one hit song). 1971 sees George applying his celebrity to a cause, Paul trying to correct course, John taking potshots and racking up successes, and Ringo mostly supporting the others.

The year started with three non-album singles, all fine songs well received by the public: Paul’s “Another Day” (8 points), John’s “Power to the People” (5 points), and Ringo’s “It Don’t Come Easy” (9 points for one of the greatest songs in his solo career). We have to wait until May for our first album, but I’ll also mention George’s double A-side “Bangla Desh” / “Deep Blue,” which hit in July and gains him 5 points. If we use this set of non-album singles as a shootout, Ringo wins. (I need to acknowledge this man’s wins when he has them.)

Paul & Linda McCartney, Ram: Paul’s next album, and all the songs on it, were credited to Paul & Linda McCartney. Given that Paul still owed a portion of all his songwriting royalties to his fellow Beatles through Apple Corps, many observers saw him sharing billing with his wife less as a genuine musical partnership and more as a way for Paul to take home more money for the songs.

With Ram, Paul tried to address the criticism of McCartney by creating a much more polished, professional album. Unfortunately, his name was still mud in the music press at the time. Critics largely dismissed Ram as overworked and mediocre, and Paul as irrelevant. I think that’s a real shame — Ram is a great album, actually. I would certainly place it in contention for best post-breakup Beatle album. Modern critics agree: in hindsight, Ram is celebrated as a landmark, some calling it a forefather of the indie pop record. I’m privileging its later reception and giving it an 8/10. It also sold well, reaching #1 in the UK and #2 in the US, and spawning a hit single in “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey.” Still, the critical response hurt, and Paul would spend the next few years trying to reclaim the respect of his industry. Ram nets Paul 29 points.

John Lennon, Imagine: Our next studio album is another classic, which arrived in September. While Plastic Ono Band is John’s best album according to most critics, Imagine was a more commercial record, and is certainly the other contender for his best. It has a fuller sound than Plastic Ono Band, including orchestral overdubs on some tracks. Besides the obvious (and sometimes eyeroll-worthy) cultural impact of the title track, it sports one of John’s absolute best (“Jealous Guy”), and a few swipes at Paul McCartney. John thought that several of the songs on Ram were about him — in reality, only “Too Many People” was; the other insults were directed at others. John retaliated with “How Do You Sleep,” which George notably contributed guitar to. The image of three Beatles vs. Paul is enhanced by the fact that John, George, and Ringo were all over each other’s solo material in this period, but Paul had yet to appear on another’s recording or feature one of them.

Imagine’s reception at the time was quite positive. Over time, the sentiment has cooled somewhat; retrospective reviews note that it is somewhat uneven and lesser than Plastic Ono Band. I’m giving it an 8/10. Its success (and especially the enduring success of the song “Imagine”) nets John an impressive 40 points.

Wings (Paul McCartney), Wild Life: Yes, Paul got out a second album in December of 1971. After the disappointing reception for Ram, Paul decided that rather than continuing as a solo artist, he’d start a new band. Wings started with Linda, Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine (who remained the group’s only other stable members), and a session drummer who didn’t stick around long. The band would consistently be an obvious solo vehicle for McCartney with occasional gestures toward the other members’ contributions. In short, you aren’t fooling anyone, Paul.

For Wings’ first album, Paul went for a live-in-studio, raw, vital sound inspired by Bob Dylan. He got “raw;” he missed “vital.” Wild Life sounds like a tossed off set of loose jams, the sort of thing one expects from a demos collection, not the debut album by a new project. There are a few worthwhile songs (one of those a cover), but overall it’s insubstantial, rushed, and instantly forgettable.

Wild Life had a lukewarm reaction from both critics and the record-buying public. Paul’s name was not prominent on the release, which couldn’t have helped it commercially, but I doubt it would have changed much if Paul had released it as a solo record. There just isn’t much to it. 4/10, total of 11 points.

George Harrison, The Concert for Bangladesh: George didn’t make a studio album in 1971, but he wasn’t dormant. He was organizing a massive pair of charity concerts for the humanitarian crisis in Bangladesh — such concerts are a cultural staple today, but this was the first, and George can reasonably be called their godfather. The concerts featured George with a host of the huge musicians in his orbit, such as Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Billy Preston, and Ringo Starr. He released an album culled from the concerts, The Concert for Bangladesh, in December. Its success gains George 11 points.

We’ll finish the year with one more non-album single, John’s Christmas single “Happy Xmas (War is Over).” Not his strongest work, but iconic, and gains him another 9 points.

1971 Scoreboard

Let’s check in on our scores for 1971, year 2 AB. We’ll also get our first peek at the cumulative scoreboard, 1970 + 1971.

1971 Overall:

1. John Lennon: 54

2. Paul McCartney: 48

3. George Harrison: 16

4. Ringo Starr: 9

John wins 1971, which feels right — he released the biggest album of his career. Paul comes in a respectable second despite releasing two albums — only one was a classic, and it didn’t reach quite the heights that John’s did. Honestly, the 1971 scoreboard looks exactly like what a Beatles fan might have expected in 1969: John and Paul as the stars (but John slightly more so), George as a supporting act and the moral center of the group (what with the charity), and Ringo with one song (he’s just happy to be here).

1971 Cumulative:

1. John Lennon: 86 (^1)

2. Paul McCartney: 66 (^2)

3. George Harrison: 62 (v2)

4. Ringo Starr: 26

The cumulative rankings match with the 1971 ones. By spending the year on charity, George falls from the top spot (no good deed goes unpunished). John takes the lead, and Paul is doing his best to catch up, but it’ll take him some more work.

Until next time…

1970 and ’71 were busy years for the former Beatles, but they won’t keep going at anywhere near this pace — future posts will include more years. (I am dividing them by approximate length for easy consumption, not by year.) What does 1972 hold? I’ll see you in part 2.

Read part 2 now:

More music writing:

Listen, Ghost. You’re one of my favorite bands, and I love you. Your Broadway showstoppers with metal trappings, your Satanic lore, your Nordic swagger — I’m here for every bit of it. And as a Latin teacher of 15 years’ experience, I have to enjoy all the fun little Catholic/Satanic Latin references you sprinkle into your songs. But sometimes your Latin is… very wrong. So it’s time for a reckoning. It’s time to grade the Latin in Ghost songs.

Who am I? Well, I’m a Latin educator and writer — I’ve published numerous books in Latin and I teach the language to people of all levels all over the world. But most importantly, I’m a Ghost fan and a pedantic little nitpicker. So please indulge me while I unleash my neuroses on the discography of Ghost. You might just learn something.

Opus Eponymous (2010)

Most of Ghost’s album titles are Latin. Opus Eponymous is half Latin and half English — “Eponymous Work,” which I love as a joke because by titling it this the album is not, in fact, eponymous. “Opus” is a word you might recognize from the term “magnum opus” (“great work”), and it is well used here.

The first song, an instrumental, is called “Deus Culpa.” This seems to be taken from “mea culpa” (“my fault”), but to do that right you’d want “Dei Culpa” — dei is the genitive (possessive) of deus. As it stands, this is more like “God fault” than “God’s fault,” which doesn’t work in Latin.

“Prime Mover” features the phrase “Spiritus Non Sancti.” The phrase is lifted from the famous Catholic formula “in nomine Patris et Filius et Spiritus Sancti,” “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” They’ve added “non” to make it “spirit not holy,” which I enjoy. But because it’s removed from its original context, the genitive here is nonsensical — it says “of the spirit not holy” for no reason. I’d prefer it to be in the nominative or vocative (“Spiritus Non Sanctus” or “Spiritus Non Sancte”).

A quick note that the extensively used Romance language in “Con Clavi Con Deo” is Italian, not Latin. I find this worth pointing out because in the next album, we’re going to see a lot of half-Latin half-Italian lyrics… the languages are separated on the first album, but hopelessly confused on the second.

Opus Eponymous Grade: B. What’s here is close to correct, though this album’s use of Latin is considerably less ambitious than some of the later albums’. I’d really like to see you applying yourself more, boys.

Infestissumam (2013)

Here’s where the mess happens. Track 1, the title track, is entirely in “Latin”… let’s break it down:

Il Padre
Il Filio
Et Lo Spiritus Malum
Omnis Caelestis
Delenda Est

Anti Cristus
Il Filio De Sathanas
Infestissumam

First, “il Padre” and “il Filio” are Italian — Latin doesn’t have articles (these Italian ones mean “the”). Then in the third line we get “et lo Spiritus Malum,” an attempt to say “and the evil spirit,” but it uses the Italian “lo” with the Latin “et” and “spiritus” (Italian would have been “e lo Spirito Malo” if I’m not mistaken). To make matters worse, “malum” is given in the neuter, and therefore does not agree with the masculine “spiritus.” Nonsense.

Then we have “omnis caelestis delenda est.” This plays with the infamous (to ancient history dorks) Cato the Elder catchphrase “Carthago delenda est,” “Carthage must be destroyed.” According to Ghost it’s the Trinity, not Carthage, that must be destroyed. “Omnis caelestis” means “every sky-dweller,” an odd little phrase but not an incorrect one. But since it is masculine where Carthage is feminine, we need to switch “delenda est” to “delendus est.”

Next we get “Anti Cristus” (acceptable Latin) and “il filio de Sathanas” (back to Italian). Pick a language guys.

Finally, we get the title of the album, “infestissumam.” This is “most hostile” in Latin, but there’s a lot going on. First, why is this feminine? I assume it’s the son of Satan we’re describing as most hostile, but even if it isn’t, what hostile feminine word could this be? Second, why is it accusative? Accusative is the case for direct objects (among other things), which makes no sense here. Finally, that superlative “issum” in the middle is archaic — it was in use in the third century BCE but was out of fashion by the first. I like a little archaism for style, but given that Satanic Latin usually imitates Medieval Christian Latin, it’s odd to see a form from the middle Roman Republic pop up. One would expect “infestissimam” (to preserve the nonsensical “am” ending). As an album title, Infestissumam is a baffling bit of Latin. Given Ghost’s habit of pilfering Latin from known phrases and modifying it, I can only assume it came from a Latin text. A brief look in the PHI Word Search turns up a passage of Sallust’s Catilinarian Conspiracy — not an obscure Latin text for those of us who study history, but not nearly as immediately identifiable as the other Latin Ghost tends to use.

An attempt to render this entire song in proper Latin would be:

Et Pater
Et Filius
Et Spiritus Malus
Omnis Caelestis
Delendus Est

Antichristo
Et Filio Sathanae
Infestissumo

Which would mean “Both the Father and the Son and the Evil Spirit, every sky-dweller must be destroyed by the Antichrist and most hostile son of Satan.”

I’ve used correlative “et”s to replace the Italian articles and preserve the sung rhythm. I decided to link the last bit to the first by making the antichrist the dative agent of “delendus est.” I did keep the archaic “infestissumus” — it’s cool because it’s weird.

And that’s only one song.

“Per Aspera Ad Inferi” is another modification of a known phrase: “per aspera ad astra,” “through difficulties to the stars,” is a well-worn Latin phrase often used for mottos and sci-fi titles. Ghost has modified it to “through difficulties to hell,” but they’ve kept “inferi” in the nominative instead of changing it to accusative to go with “ad.” (Exactly what one would do if one were just looking up Latin words in a dictionary without knowing any grammar.) The phrase should be “per aspera ad inferos.” The first time I saw Ghost live (20 November 2018 at Bass Concert Hall in Austin, Texas) this chorus was a big singalong with the audience. I sang “per aspera ad inferos,” my need for grammatical accuracy overriding any wish to sing the song as written. I don’t think they heard me.

There’s one bit of Latin in “Ghuleh/Zombie Queen,” “haeresis dea,” “goddess of heresy.” I think they got this one right on accident — I think they were trying to make “heresy goddess” by simply placing two nouns together (as is the habit of speakers of Germanic languages) instead of inflecting one into the genitive “of” case (as one must in Latin). But the nominative and genitive of haeresis are identical, so the phrase does say “goddess of heresy” regardless of their intent.

The title “La Mantra Mori” is another nonsensical Latin/Italian blend. “La” is Italian of course. “Mantra” is rooted in Sanskrit and didn’t reach Europe until the 1800s; Latin naturally does not have it. “Mori” is Latin for “to die,” probably lifted from the phrase “memento mori” (often translated “reminder of death,” but literally the imperative “remember to die”/“remember [you will] die”). I think the intent is “the mantra of death,” but mori is a verb, not a noun, and this infinitive form cannot couple with a noun in any way that would make this phrase make sense. For true Latin I’d use “carmen mortis;” if we’re giving them mantra as a neo-Latin word, “mantra mortis.” Perhaps even “mantra mortuorum,” “mantra of the dead,” which has a much cooler ring to it in Latin.

Infestissumam Grade: D. This has the most Latin of any Ghost album, which I do like, but it’s just such a mess. See me after class.

Meliora (2015)

The title of Meliora is Latin for “better things,” and it’s perfectly correct. “Ad meliora” (“to better things”) is a motto in use, so I imagine that’s where they got it.

“From the Pinnacle to the Pit” references the term “cruciger globus,” which is the term for the common Catholic and Orthodox icon of the orb with a cross on it — it literally means “cross-bearing orb.” The usual term is actually “globus cruciger,” meaning that Ghost has inverted the word order, but this inversion would create no difference in its Latin meaning. (Latin has highly flexible word order.)

In “He Is,” there’s the partial Latin line “He is nostro dispater, nostr’alma mater.” This is very close to fully correct. It means “our Underworld father, our nurturing mother.” The only issue is “nostro,” which should be “noster” to match with the nominative of “pater.” “Nostro” would be the Italian term, so probably this is a similar Latin/Italian confusion to what we saw in the previous album. Other than that it’s a great bit of Latin. I particularly like the elision, “nostra alma” changing to “nostr’alma.” Latin poetry does do this.

Finally, we have the final track, “Deus in Absentia,” God in absence. Ghost is again pulling Latin from well-known phrases and modifying it for their purposes. This time it works perfectly; this phrase is correct.

Meliora Grade: A-. Less ambitious than the prior one, but only one small mistake.

Prequelle (2018)

The French title of Prequelle breaks the pattern of Latin album titles. At the time I thought that was quite clever — this album is the only one whose frontman has been a cardinal rather than an antipope, so he would be using the vernacular of his see rather than the Latin of the high church. Then this year they put out Skeletá, an album fronted by a pope with a non-Latin title. (I think it’s supposed to look Italian, but it isn’t. If you put it in Google Translate it says Slovak, but I can’t imagine that was the intent.) So, that kills that theory.

The song title “Pro Memoria” aims to mean “for memory” as near as I can tell, to complement the lyrics “don’t you forget about dying/don’t you forget about your friend death/don’t you forget that you will die.” But “pro” is the wrong word here… it can mean “for” in the sense of “on behalf of” or “instead of,” like “I’ll go to the meeting for you.” But most uses of the word “for” are rendered with a dative and no preposition in Latin. So “Pro Memoria” isn’t terrible Latin, but it would be far more idiomatic to say simply “Memoriae.” Or, since they’ve played with “memento mori” before and that phrase perfectly encapsulates what the song is about, I think they really should have named it that.

Prequelle Grade: Incomplete. Come on. One Latin phrase in the entire album and it’s not even sung? You can do better than this.

Bonus: Seven Inches of Satanic Panic

“Kiss the Go-Goat” (the A-side of the non-album single that also contains their unexpected viral hit “Mary on a Cross”) features the phrase “osculum obscenum,” or “obscene kiss.” This is a reference to the old belief of the “osculum infame” (“shameful kiss”): that as witches arrived at their sabbaths, they kissed the devil’s anus. Ghost has swapped out “infame” for “obscenum,” a dirtier word that gives the kiss a much more sexual connotation. They even used the correct neuter ending to match “osculum.” I’m here for it.

Impera (2022)

Impera returns us to Latin titles, and this one is a little off. The whole album is about falling empires, so the Latin words “imperare” (to order) and “imperium” (power, command, empire) are a great thematic fit. But what they’ve used is the imperative form of “imperare:” “impera” is what you would say if you were ordering someone else to give an order. This is balderdash. If I’d titled the album, I’d have gone with Imperium in a heartbeat. However, bonus points for the tour for this album being called the Imperatour: “imperator” is Latin for emperor; delightful pun.

“Kaisarion” is a delicious classical reference. The word itself is Greek, not Latin, but it’s the Greek transliteration of the Latin “Caesareum,” a temple to Caesar in Alexandria, Egypt. The early church converted the Caesareum into a Cathedral, which the song depicts as “building our empire from the ashes of an old.” The song also prominently features Hypatia, a mathematician from Alexandria who in 415 CE was murdered by an angry mob at the Caesareum for the crime of being a female pagan intellectual in a time of rising Christian dominance. So we have a new empire (Christianity) rising out of the hollowed out bones of the old (the Roman Empire), and enforcing their new rule through violence against women (the murder of Hypatia). Gives me goosebumps. Ghost’s deepest song.

“Spillways” uses the phrase “corpus Dei,” an established phrase for the body of Christ (“body of God”). No complaints.

“Hunter’s Moon,” Ghost’s song for Halloween Kills, has a short passage entirely in Latin:

Celare soror mea
Mors tua, vita mea
Celare soror mea
Mors vincit omnia

“Celare soror mea” means “to hide, my sister” — the infinitive makes no sense here. I think they meant it to be imperative, which would be “cela soror mea,” “hide, my sister!” “Mors tua, vita mea” means “your death, my life.” I suppose these are vocative, meaning that the sister is the speaker’s (Michael Myers’s?) life and death. They definitely get credit for making the two instances of “mea” feminine to agree with “mors” and “vita.” Finally, “mors vincit omnia” (“death conquers all”) is a play on the Latin cliche “amor vincit omnia” (“love conquers all”). That line is perfectly correct.

Impera Grade: B+. As in Meliora, this album’s Latin succeeds when it copies preexisting forms and falters lightly when it innovates. Huge improvement over Infestissumam. “Kaisarion” is such a great bit of classical reception that I feel bad not giving it an A, but then I look at the title again and think that a B+ is plenty generous.

Skeletá (2025)

As I mentioned before, I don’t know what the title of Ghost’s latest album is supposed to be. Most of what they play with is European Catholic imagery, and that accented á at the end screams Italian, but skeletá doesn’t seem to be an Italian word. Perhaps the intent is nonsense Italian-esque, or perhaps there’s something I just don’t know. In any case, it isn’t Latin.

The first single, “Satanized,” has a lengthy passage in Latin:

An nescitis quoniam membra vestra
Templum sunt Spiritus Sancti
Qui in vobis est
Quem habetis a Deo?
Et non estis vestri

The first time I saw it I thought “oho what’s this?”, because it is considerably more grammatically elaborate than anything I’ve seen Ghost attempt before. But it turns out to just be a direct quote from the Vulgate Bible — specifically 1 Corinthians 6:19, “Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? And you are not your own.” A well-deployed homage in a song about Satan taking possession of your body, but not the band’s original Latin.

“De Profundis Borealis” is meant to mean “from northern depths” (or, perhaps, “about northern depths” in the style of ancient titles). It’s close to correct, but because “borealis” is third conjugation, that’s the wrong ending for its ablative — it should be “De Profundis Borealibus.” This song has a bit of Latin in its refrain, “mergi in profundis,” “to be sunk in the depths.” It’s pretty good; the infinitive is a little meaningless, but it’s well inflected.

The title of “Missilia Amori” is an attempt to translate the chorus of the song, “love rockets.” “Missilia” is neo-Latin, and it is pluralized correctly. They also get points for not just trying to ram the words together — “amori” is an attempt at the genitive, “rockets of love.” But -i would only be the correct genitive for a second declension word — “amor” is third declension, so “rockets of love” would be “Missilia Amoris.” Still, notice how small the prior two mistakes were. I do think they’re starting to talk to someone who knows some Latin, but whoever it is isn’t terribly precise. (Unless they’re using AI. I hope they aren’t but they might be. Cool kids ask the nerds instead of using AI.)

The title of “Umbra” is the Latin word for “shadow,” a word prominently featured in the song, and in certain situations it can also be translated as “ghost.” No notes, just an excellent thing to call a Ghost song.

The title of “Excelsis” is likely pulled directly from the common hymn “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” (“glory to God in the highest”). On its own, the word “highest” in the ablative plural doesn’t mean a whole lot. But it’s there to echo the refrain of “excel!” in the lyrics and it’s there as an allusion, i.e., to call to mind the source material. So I’d say this is well used.

Skeletá Grade: A-. There’s still room for improvement here, but the errors are less “I’m simply combining words from the dictionary incorrectly” and more “I’ve confused similar endings to arrive at something just slightly off.” I think the intensifying spotlight is making them more conscious of getting their lyrics correct, and boys, you’re very close.

Latin in Ghost Songs

Ghost uses Latin as an ornament for many reasons: metal, Satanism, Catholicism… it’s Latin all the way down, baby! Throughout, they have favored pilfering Latin from well known phrases over creating Latin from scratch, which is a great method: their Latin is more homage than dictionary, and the allusions add flavor to the songs for everyone who catches them. Ghost’s Latin has also gotten better over the 15 years they’ve been active. But it’s not perfect yet. For all of Ghost’s success, they could certainly afford to contract with a Latin speaker for the 20 minutes it would take them to craft grammatically correct versions of all these great lyrics and titles.

(Psst. Tobias. My rates are quite reasonable.)

All album covers taken from their Wikipedia articles and used here, as there, as fair use.