A new beginning: 100 Days of Beatles

In the spirit of someone else’s project I just read about, I am going to partake in a labor of love that’ll roll well into 2012, and in the process breathe new life into my oft-neglected baby here.

Due to weekends, vacation, things like that, I won’t pretend to pull this off as a once-a-day-every-day endeavor. But I’m going to take a look at every song listed in Rolling Stone: The Beatles 100 Greatest Songs.

I’ll start at the end of the list at #100 and work my way down. By no means do I intend to play music scholar any more than they already do in this RS special edition. Simply, as a fan of the band pretty much since birth, roughly two years after the Fab Four broke up for keeps, I’ll offer my take on the songs themselves. The highs, the lows, perhaps some personal anecdotes on the songs as I experienced them many times over in my lifetime.

Hope you enjoy, let’s get started!

#100: Hello, Goodbye



A fun tune to kick things off. By no means a Paul McCartney masterpiece, it's still a song that grabs me just about every time with it's bounciness. It's often documented that Ringo Starr's one and only drum solo was found in "The End," the Beatles final studio effort with Abbey Road, but his drumming here that accompanied the viola-laden bridge is somewhat quaint yet memorable. It's often that I air-drum it out. Back around second grade, the 1-2 punch of "Strawberry Fields" and "Penny Lane" were all too familiar, but Magical Mystery Tour in its entirety really opened some doors for me as to how much range the Fab Four wielded. One of the band's first full-length LPs that I was exposed to, you can only imagine how much my interest was piqued when I opened up the album's full-color booklet that showed the quartet portraying rabbits and walruses, wizards, and other eccentrics. While "Hello, Goodbye" was originally a single and not an original Magical Mystery Tour composition, it's still one of the highlights of the album for me.