Second only to the old “which songs would you put on a single-disc White Album” question, is the hypothetical “What songs would the Beatles have put on their albums if they had continued on instead of breaking up after Abbey Road/Let It Be? Many have tackled it in their own way. There’s a whole book, as well as numerous blogs dedicated to the subject.
Of course, just as revealing as which specific songs each of these people pick is the guidelines and rules they use to pick these songs. Are they looking for the tracks that are the most quote-unquote Beatle-y? Do they veto the songs that they imagine the other Beatles would’ve turned down if they were brought in for inclusion? (This probably means goodbye to “Mary Had A Little Lamb” as well as “Aü”.) Do they show a preference for any tracks that feature one or more ex-Beatle as a sideman? Do they favor the singles even if they don’t flow together? Or do they pick the deep cuts and B-sides that create more of an unintentional concept for the album? Are they just picking their personal favorites? Or are they looking the most popular songs? Do you put them in the order that flows best, or just make sure that it’s even-handed? As the songs all get longer and longer, do you try to keep the album’s running time to what would’ve been feasible on a single piece of vinyl at the time, or just load them up as if they were CDs? Or even start creating fake double albums to compensate for all the material?
Where do they cut off the song submissions for each album? If a song is rejected for one album cannot it be added to a further subsequent album? How does one handle all the non-album singles? Do we go by calendar year, and if so, what do they do if one Beatles released two albums, or zero, during on particular year? Are we talking the year the song was recorded or when it was actually released? Of course deciding where to draw that dividing line is a tricky proposition. You want to match it up with one McCartney album for each Lennon album to try and keep things somewhat equanimous and even-handed. The problem is that John and Paul weren’t releasing album simultaneously or even very concurrently. Take for example Imagine which came out on Sept. 9th, 1971, 115 days after Ram but only 89 days before Wild Life. Which album does that come closest to corresponding to?
Another big question is how many songs does each Beatles get? I used to go with what I called the “Revolver ratio”, which John and Paul each getting five songs, George getting three, and Ringo just one. Recently, however Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn revealed that there is a post-Abbey Road conversation where John, Paul, and George agreed that were going to get 4 songs apiece on any subsequent albums and Ringo could have up to two if he wanted them. This bit of news in fact help inspire my desire to look into re-organizing my hypothetical post-Beatle album lists again.
There are more adventurous/creative speculators out there who will come up with titles and Photoshop together some crude covers. Maybe they’ll even generate their own backstory about each album and speculate on the audience’s reactions to each album as it came out in the seventies. Like any other Beatle fanatic with too much time on their hands, and the ability to build playlists in Spotify, I have attempted my own creations; each with their own quirks and guidelines to try and bind them together. And like any of these other attempts, there are inevitable some fudging necessary to try create something cohesive, to which most people will have their disagreements, or at least quibbles, but it’s a fun thought-exercise and a good excuse to dig into some of the better albums of the former Fabs’ careers. Before we go on though… here are a couple of random examples I have found of others doing the same sort of thing:
Still the Greatest: The Essential Songs of The Beatles’ Solo Careers
Once There Was A Way: What If The Beatles Stayed Together?
Albums That Never Were – The 1970s Beatles Albums
Just a few notes on the listings of the songs I considered for each album… Any songs that are struck through are actually sung by someone else whether it is Yoko Ono or Denny Laine, so I would take that into consideration when adding them to my ultimate playlist. By the same token, songs in italics are instrumentals – which is also something we didn’t see a lot of in the Beatles’ career. On the other hand, songs with an asterisk were released as the A-side of a single. This probably means that the song is something the artist either felt strongly about or decided had good commercial potential. I will also weigh that when making my decisions.