Rubber Soul

Rubber Soul is an absolute classic and my 2nd favorite Beatles record behind Abbey Road. There's something about their first steps into truly becoming an "albums" band that resonates with me. The 'film' albums that preceded it were close, but this one is the whole package -- and stands on its own. It's easier to point out the flaws since they're so few. The track order doesn't really create the feeling that the album is supposed to make a complete statement (as Sgt. Pepper seems to). Tacking a weak track like Run For Your Life on the end means there's no final statement (like Day In the Life does for Pepper). In My Life is probably the closest they come to having something that could stand in here. As for my personal favorite moments, I'd have to give it to In My Life and Nowhere Man... though most of the running order is in the top 25% of Beatles songs. George's Think For Yourself is one I feel is particularly underrated. Easy 5/5.

It’s Rubber Soul. Just look at the iconic album cover! Amazing from start to finish-the songs are varied and complex, enhanced by wonderful sequencing. The incredible thing about the album is how vibrant and alive it remains today. Still a wonderfully entertaining and fresh sounding album. I spent the afternoon listening to the recently released super deluxe edition. Just wonderful!

mann who doesn't like the beatles be fr!! top 3; in my life, norwegian wood, michelle

Classic album nice to listen again. Special shoutout to Girl not really listened to it before but my current fave

Best song - Nowhere Man Favourite song - Michelle

Some of their very best stuff

Classic Beatles album

Supi dupi, klassisch Beatles, sehr cozy

What a Monday pull! This might be my favorite Beatles album. Just nothing but bangers front to back. Including one of my all time favorites in "In My Life." I was pretty familiar with a lot of the songs in the track list but those tracks I didn't know were awesome. I especially loved the country feel on "What Goes On." Easy 5/5 Side note: 311 albums in and this is my 6th of the 7 Beatles albums in this experience. We're moving quick

This the transition between the Beatles albums I don't like and the ones I do. As such it's a bit of a mixed bag, but overall has enough good stuff for me to like but not love it. It's important enough to deserve an entry but pales compared to what's to come

Not their best album. I thought Abbey Road was better. Easy to see why they’re so influential though

Yep this is a good album

Transcending from an extremely popular band to becoming one of the most important.

Maybe the most flawed 5. It sounds so ahead of its time for 1965, yet is the last album till Let it Be with substandard Beatles songs. Still any album with "Drive My Car, "Norwegian Wood", "Nowhere Man", "If I Needed Someone" and arguably the greatest song of all time "In My Life" is a top tier album of all time.

god

Top 3 de los beatles

The Beatles’ first Great Leap Forward

great album, i love the beatles. good vibes on this one here

Azz, non male… Whipsical The word Bella, aggiunta a rock Girl hit assurda

por más que no es el album más consistente y perfecto de los Beatles, marca una transición y tiene temazos re icónicos, además de que sin este album no existiría la versión de Michelle de Pedro Aznar (gracias) 8,5/10

Rubber Soul by The Beatles ———————————————————— 🟡 🟡 🟡🟡 🟡 90% Seminal, a keystone of early popular music ———————————————————— Album of the Day: 1001 albums to listen to before you die. A coming-of-age album from one of the most famous bands of all time. Released in 1965, Rubber Soul feels like one of the ‘last’ of the ‘early’ Beatles records, in which their song writing had matured, but before their music and production became so much more sophisticated - for example on the likes of Sgt Pepper and initiating/paralleling the huge change in popular music between 1965 and 1969. The album comprises 14 new short songs in only 35 minutes and therefore spotlights the Beatles songwriting ability - the tunes and lyrics - which stand up well and many of which have joined the pantheon of ‘great’ Beatles tunes. Be aware there are many different versions of the album - for example the original Mono as worked on by the Beatles and George Martin and different track listings in UK vs US. Then there are various hard-panned stereo mixes for the next 60 years - e.g. singing and drums in one ear - other instruments in the other - these mixes don’t work so well for headphones as they don’t seem balanced, and then finally a de-mixed remixed version which is much more conventional to the modern ear and puts the all sounds more centre of the soundstage. The original Mono is of course the collectors item. The Beatles are so talented that this is not my favourite Beatles album, but is still one of the best albums of all time and a key part of music history.

Before there were the grandiose studio works of Sgt Pepper’s or Abbey Road, there was simply a great rock ‘n roll band. While the Beatles’ later, more ambitious work has honestly never totally clicked with me, I really enjoyed Rubber Soul. There are hints of psychedelia and Eastern influences starting to appear in this record, e.g. the sitar in Norwegian Wood. However, the musical roots of the record are still clearly in African American R&B. There is no overarching concept - this is a collection of high quality songs performed well. But by its consistency and comparatively straightforward delivery, it earns classic status. 5 stars.

Sigh... It's The Beatles I guess

Currently, my favorite Beatles album

Possibly my favorite Beatles album, which puts it up there on my all time list. I consider this the culmination of the "O.G. Beatles" recordings. Fantastic songwriting and the fellas' musicality really starts to show through on this one. Track after track just sounds amazing.

a rustic pop vibe with european chord progressions mixed with lucious harmonies

i enjoyed this groove

I HATE THIS SHIT

I'm always going to be a fan of the Beatles. That being said, I need to make my next statement very clear. Rubber Soul IS a great album. It is NOT anywhere near my favorite Beatles album. This album is the band moving away from the standard Brit-pop sound that defined them in their start, and showed the first major signs of their experimentation and full creativity. To me, Rubber Soul is the rough draft of the fun, and at times kind of unhinged, albums that were to follow.

It's the Beatles. Can one even argue or review this objectively? If you consider the best Beatles album as (10/5) and the worst Beatles album as (5/5), then this is a solid (8/5)

Enough has been said by others about the leap forward this album represents in their writing, performing, and studio recording techniques - and it’s true - but even without that context, this album would stand apart regardless of when it was made or who created it. RS is a treasured monument on the landscape of my imagination. Rating the album today was a good reason to finally check out the 2026 remaster - enjoyed the demos and outtakes, especially the early “Norwegian Wood”. 4.95 *’s because “Run For Your Life” is a rare misfire.

This is my mom's favorite Beetles album, and Jean Boyd is a saint so theres that. Where does it rank in terms of greatest Beatle albums? There is certainly an argument, heres the case 1. It has "In my Life" genuinely a perfect song. Its beautiful, perfectly structured (it even pulls of a harpsichord solo?!) One of those songs that they should use in physc tests to make sure someone is not a monster. 2. Not really a track to skip, every song is high quality, first Beatle album I can say that with utmost confidence 3. Its at a fasinating time in their career, right before they started to get weird, norwegian wood for example - such a weird jam, also a great example of how funny John was. "I have work tomorrow haha, I don't good night" makes me laugh everytime 4. Drive my car is a great swan song to the old pop Beatles, but hot take, the album would be better if you switched it with Taxman. With all of this said, I rank it 3rd Beatles ranking 1. Revolver 2. Abby 3. RS 4. Hard Days 5. Sgt Peps, 6. white and so on. 5 starts 9.8 out of 10.

What can possibly be said about *Rubber Soul* that hasn't already been said? It's probably the most reviewed, analyzed, and celebrated album of all time, and rightfully so. It's one of the greatest albums ever made, one of the most important albums in the history of rock and roll, and a masterpiece whose musical brilliance and historical significance are matched in equal measure. It's in the running for the greatest album ever made, by the greatest band that ever was. The accolades are endless, and frankly, they're all deserved. Personally, this might be my favorite Beatles album. It's certainly in my top four, but at this level, we're really just splitting hairs. What distinguishes *Rubber Soul* from some of their later albums, particularly *The White Album* and beyond, is its cohesiveness. You're hearing the Beatles as a musical unit, a band firing on all cylinders, rather than four increasingly distinct creative personalities sharing space on the same record. That's not to say you can't hear their individual identities. "Drive My Car" is unmistakably a Paul song, while "Norwegian Wood" and "Nowhere Man" have John written all over them. But there's something about the interplay here, the way they complement each other, that makes the whole feel greater than the sum of its already extraordinary parts. And the influence of this record is almost impossible to overstate. They're helping establish a blueprint for a kind of jangly, folk-inflected guitar rock that would resonate for the next half-century and beyond. Some of the sound is admittedly locked in that mid-'60s psychedelic folk era, but those chiming guitars, those melodies, those harmonies! You can hear their influence in contemporaries like the Byrds and trace it all the way through alternative rock in the '90s and beyond. The harmonies on a song like "Nowhere Man" are practically unparalleled. I want to highlight four songs, one for each Beatle, because each represents something I love about this album. And yes, I realize I just spent a paragraph praising the band's cohesiveness, but the fact that a song is unmistakably John, Paul, or George doesn't mean you can't hear the fingerprints of the others all over it. First, "I'm Looking Through You." This is an absolutely quintessential Paul McCartney song. He's taking that Little Richard-inspired rock and roll scream he'd perfected on covers like "Kansas City" and songs like "I'm Down" and incorporating it into his own increasingly sophisticated songwriting. The result is, as the kids would say, an absolute banger. That organ riff that comes in after the chorus is so infectious, and the whole thing is just an extraordinary piece of pop rock craftsmanship. Nobody did this stuff better than Paul. Next, "In My Life." This might be John Lennon's masterpiece. People often look to his post-Beatles career when discussing his greatest artistic achievements, but for me, this is it. This is a song that belongs in the pantheon of the greatest compositions of all time, not just rock songs, but music, period. There's something almost mythic, something approaching divinity, in its beauty. The melody, the arrangement, the lyrics, they somehow combine to produce this overwhelming emotional response that's difficult to even articulate. It's the kind of song that can make you well up with tears without entirely understanding why. And that's really the magic of music, isn't it? Why do these particular frequencies, arranged in this particular sequence, make human beings feel something so profound? What is it about music that allows it to reach into us and pull out emotions we didn't even know were there? "In My Life" possesses that mysterious quality in abundance. Maybe some of that is my own deeply personal relationship with Lennon and the Beatles, but I find this song devastatingly beautiful. It's why we listen to music. Then there's George's "If I Needed Someone." He's finally got one on the board that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the Lennon-McCartney material. It's not quite at the level of the masterpieces he'd produce later, but it's an incredible song in its own right. In fact, if I had to pick one track that captures the quintessential *Rubber Soul* sound, this might be it. Those gorgeous, jangling guitars, the folk-rock sensibility, the harmonies. It's a sound that countless bands would spend decades trying to recreate. And finally, Ringo's "What Goes On." I absolutely love when Ringo does country music. Love it. Can't get enough of it. And this is a terrific example of why. The band is just swinging here. It's loose, fun, infectious, and endlessly singable. I much prefer this side of Ringo to some of his earlier, somewhat awkward attempts at R&B and early rock and roll covers. This is his wheelhouse, and he sounds completely at home. Of course, there are a few things to nitpick. "Run for Your Life" is a bit of a bust for me, particularly as the album's closer. And a handful of tracks, like "You Won't See Me," "Think for Yourself," and "The Word," feel a little more anchored to their particular moment in the mid-'60s. But we're talking about the Beatles here. Even the lesser material is operating on a level that most bands could only dream of reaching. Is this the greatest Beatles album? Maybe. Is *Revolver* better? Maybe. Could you make the case for *Sgt. Pepper*, *Abbey Road*, or any number of the records that followed? Absolutely. We're talking about a band whose creative achievements over a remarkably short period of time are almost beyond comprehension. I'll end with this. It's October 13th as I'm writing this, a beautiful, crisp autumn day in New Jersey. The air is cool, the leaves are changing colors, and there's that unmistakable feeling of fall settling in. And as I listen to this record, I can't help but think that *Rubber Soul* is the ultimate autumn album. There's something about its warmth, its melancholy, its jangling guitars and gorgeous harmonies that feels perfectly suited to a day like today. Sixty-one years later, it's still magic. 10/10

it's the Beatles! I know for a fact they can do better than this

4.75

Is it a hot take to say that this is the only fully listenable Beatles album?

Mid Beatles

Already listened to this one. It's epicccccc

oh giiiiiiiiiirl

Oh hey I know this one!

Hard to knock any track on this album (like a number of their albums) - hard to distinguish which were the singles and those that were album tracks as they are all so familiar and great songs

Can't beat a bit of Beatles! Not their best, but still has some classics on.

So joyful, fresh and bright. Sounds like it was recorded last week, not 60 years ago. Good head phones reveal all sorts of subtleties which I hadn’t picked up before.

I was assigned this album just a few days after the 2026 remastered edition was released. It was my third time listening to it in just a few days and I was happy to hear it again. Such a warm sounding album with a thick sort of organic texture, totally befitting the color palette of the album cover. Brilliant throughout, but Paul's melodies and vocals soar.

It’s incredibly good and incredibly annoying—the last song is stuck in my head.

Maybe the best Beatles album? That early poppy sound is starting to mature into something more interesting. Every song is great, even the last song where John is threatening to kill you if you don't toe the line, LITTLE GIRL! 5 out of 5.

Fucking classic

yeah i like the beatles but didn't love any songs on this album, i did like norwegian wood the most tho

In my opinion this is where it all really starts, with the release of this album they really take off and reach the whole new level and yet more is to come. Probably 5 stars. Though, admitetelly out of all 5 stars Beatles albums this might be the only one I have pondered between 4 and 5 for some reason..

Apparently according to their fans this is their turning point album. I really like it, some of the songs here were more complex and experimental than in their first albums.

For a lauded generational classic, this one was pretty okay to me. Nothing stood out as exceptional, I'm afraid. Maybe In my Life? Norwegian Wood? These are good songs but not exceptional. Maybe I need to give it another listen... 5/10

i prefer the american tracklisting….

Я пристрастился к Битлз довольно поздно, но сейчас я очень их люблю. Резиновая душа одна из моих самых любимых пластинок в дискографии. P.S. Четыре альбома Битлз в первые 70 дней из более, чем 1000 дней в общей сложности?! А альбомы точно в случайном порядке идут? Не осуждаю, но это крайне любопытная деталь

I think this is my favorite Beatles era, middle period Beatles. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) has grown on me. I love Nowhere Man too. I bet this was David Bowie's favorite album in 1965. Ringo isn't the lead singer often, but I generally like the songs he is the lead singer. In My Life is one of the best Beatles songs. I just can't get into the Beatles. They are very hit or miss for me. Run for Your Life is creepy as shit.

album generator thinks i haven’t listened to rubber soul😂😂

Not my favourite Beatles, but great track after great track. Even the non famous ones stand out to me after a run of such mid albums on this list. Run for your life is pretty bad though. 4.5 rounded down Heard before? Yes Owned: Yes, 109/433 (25%) Will I get: Already have

Rubber Soul contains a majority of classics. However, it is not without some clunkers, especially by Beatles standards. I would rate Rubber Soul a four in a Beatles-only list, But we are meandering in the land of 1001 Albums. That is why I am rating Rubber Soul a 4.75 and rounding up.

**sighs** ... i still have more of the four fat slut's albums to review and to pontificate my dislike for them... but i'm not feeling the hate in my heart to get into that much here. the one thing i will say: it's not that they're BAD... they're NOT... it just feels like their music is the lowest common denominator in so many arenas... like sure i liked and saved some songs... but a whole album of this stuff?? and i have several more to listen to??? :// "the word," alone, knocked down a star rating because it was so annoying. and those goofy ass haircuts on the cover....... 👎👎👎 highlights - drive my car, norwegian wood, you won't see me, nowhere man, i'm looking through you

I try to like the Beatles but they weren’t my generation and maybe because they had morphed into terrible solo bands like Wings, I just find them boring. Lazy triad harmonies and John Lennon’s strident nasal voice overpowering everyone else. Despite that, lots of singalong songs because they’re so familiar and the inclusion of a sitar means I can understand the attraction for listeners in the 60s.

Not ‘classic’ Beatles, imo, but an enjoyable phase on the way to it. Ruined utterly by the fucked up Run For Your Life, though.

Another Beatles classic.

9 - EXCELLENT

It has a number of strong songs, including one of my personal favourites in the Beatles catalogue: Norwegian Wood. Rubber Soul marks a turning point in their music style towards psychedelic music (Sitar!) and is a very important Album in their discography, but overall not one of their best.

ur not gonna believe it but i like the beatles

Existe o antes e depois de Cristo, mas também existe o antes e depois dos Beatles com Rubber Soul. Impressiona como aqui eles já não soam mais como meninos, mas como um grupo maduro que tinha absoluta noção do caminho que queria seguir. Ok, este já era o sexto álbum da banda, mas o que veio depois disso é histórico. Jamais haverá outro grupo como os Beatles. Não é o meu álbum favorito deles, mas é inegável a importância do que está acontecendo aqui. Achei "Michelle" uma faixa particularmente significativa. Não pela letra, mas pela melodia mais contida, mais refinada, bem distante daquela correria e euforia que marcaram Help! (álbum que amo com todo o coração). Os meninos cresceram, guys.

Good Beatles album. Not their best but actually a nice shift from the jingly 60s bit. Adding a bit more to their sound here makes them better. Not many absolute classics but defo worth 4 stars.

Do you know what. I don't like this album nearly as much as some of their others. I feel like people cite this as their favourite the most but for me it's the weakest point in their career. Obviously some all-timers bring it to 4 but it's nowhere near a 5.

An extraordinary album, still.

I’ve never loved The Beatles, but admittedly have only heard the famous stuff so sitting and listening to a whole album was an overdue experience. I really like the guitars on this album and they definitely made me sit up and listen properly from track one. The Beatles are awesome at harmonising and didn’t disappoint, and I loved the genre mixing - bit of folk in there, classic rock n roll elements, Motown in places, then country! I found Nowhere Man a really interesting listen. I felt it captured modern life today exceptionally well for a song written in the 60s. Almost found it eerie that it could have been written today. I liked that the songs were short and snappy, but felt 14 songs was a lot and was ready to have a change by the end. Run For Your Life was where it fell off a cliff for me. Was going to give this album a higher rating but then this misogynistic drivel popped up. Seems completely at odds with “The Beatles” you’re presented in music history! Highlights: I loved McCartney’s and Starr’s voices on this album - it has opened my eyes and made me realise it might be Lennon I don’t get, rather than The Beatles as a whole?! Really liked the vibe on What Goes On and The Word. Lowlights: Girl was a complete whiny flop and that noise he makes when he breaths in makes my teeth on edge. Run for your life - WTF. Top tracks: Drive My Car, The Word, What Goes On Rating: 2.5

Not as bad as I was expecting. Definitely not a Lennon fan—Ringo Starr’s voice was lovely though. An interesting mixture of genres coming through throughout the album. Folk, country and maybe even a smidge of gospel. Then some of the usual rubbish as well. 2.5/5 - one or two tracks were a pleasant surprise, but overall very mid

I like it but it isn’t my style

It's just a bit boring

Two or three great tunes- I’ve loved ‘Norwegian Wood’ since I was very young so guessing we had this at home. Probably ground-breaking when released but quite a few slightly dull tracks that I’d now call ‘easy listening’ Ringo doing a sort of country song was hit with F though! 2.6/5

The platonic idea of a Beatles album and rock songs from the 1960s. Found my toe tapping despite myself. Didn't change the dial on my opinion of The Beatles.

Completely fine. A couple of good songs. I’d be unlikely to listen to this as an album again.

I do like the variety of music styles on this album, some up beat with some folky and country vibes creeping in later in the album. Drive My Car is undoubtedly very catchy and I like the melody in Norwegian Wood. Unfortunately this is far from the best of the Beatles and Run for Your Life is problematic enough to nearly ruin the whole album for me. It’s a 2.5.

still cant believe that they tried to do stereo like this back in the day. Beatles are actually clicking for me here though, it's all compositionally complex and well produced and fun.

The first few tracks were decent, but it then tails of into a land of clink and clang with no depth

favs: you won’t see me nowhere man the word in my life if i needed someone rating 1.7/5

goat de todos los goat

One of the best album's in the world

Definitely one of the best albums of all time. Low on big Beatles hits but a great listen all the way through.

*Rubber Soul* sounds like a band being given the same job they have done several times before and discovering that they are now constitutionally incapable of doing it normally. The Beatles are still a touring group in 1965. They are still expected to write some songs, make another album, promote it and get back out on the road. The machinery that created Beatlemania is still functioning. Brian Epstein is still there. The film-and-record-and-tour cycle is still there. Nobody has yet formally announced that the Beatles are going to stop being the kind of band that can stand on a stage and reproduce what they have recorded. What has changed is the people inside the machinery. The breach really begins on *Help!*. That album still belongs unmistakably to the old Beatles industrial system, but exceptions have started appearing everywhere: “Ticket to Ride”, “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”, “Yesterday”, “I’ve Just Seen a Face”. The group can still fulfil the brief, but increasingly they cannot help producing things that exceed it. By *Rubber Soul*, exceeding the brief has become habitual. Even the sleeve seems to understand this. Robert Freeman’s accidentally stretched photograph, with its greenish cast and elongated faces, is not yet psychedelic art in the later, codified sense. There are no day-glo colours, fractals or Victorian engravings being fed through a cosmic mincer. It looks more like a mild trip. The Beatles are perfectly recognisable, but reality has shifted by about five degrees. For at least Lennon and Harrison, by this point altered visual perception was no longer purely theoretical. When Freeman mis-projected the photograph and the faces distorted, the reaction was not simply “interesting photographic accident” but, in effect, “we know that”. Something familiar had behaved strangely and the strangeness was worth preserving. Then Charles Front’s typography — Charles Front being, in one of those pleasing British cultural footnotes, Rebecca Front’s father — performs a related trick. The lettering swells, bends and seems almost organic. Front’s own starting point was apparently much more literal than psychedelic: rubber, sap, something narrow expanding into a globule. But the result belongs unmistakably to the visual vocabulary that psychedelic poster artists would shortly make ubiquitous. That matters because it puts the sleeve in exactly the same historical position as some of the music. Freeman does not set out to make an LSD hallucination. Front does not consciously invent psychedelic typography. They arrive at forms which later culture will codify as psychedelic before the code has properly been written. Something similar happens when Harrison picks up a sitar. The sleeve is therefore not merely packaging that looks slightly trippy in retrospect. It is already helping establish how the next couple of years might look, just as parts of the record are accidentally establishing how they might sound. That turns out to be a useful model for the album. There are at least two ideas hovering behind *Rubber Soul* which never quite become organising principles. One is soul. McCartney’s “plastic soul, man” remark during an earlier session shows that the phrase, and the self-consciousness behind it, was already in circulation. These were white English musicians who knew perfectly well that they were borrowing from black American music and were capable of joking about the inadequacy of their imitation, but that self-consciousness did not stop the desire to get deeper inside the music. They were still interested enough in the idea that the following album was, at one stage, considered for recording in Memphis. The other abandoned organising idea was comedy. Lennon and McCartney had discussed songs based around comic stories, characters and environments. The idea never coheres into a comedy album, but its instincts survive everywhere. There are traps, strange narrators, reversals, stylistic impersonations, little fictional worlds and, repeatedly, introductions that seem designed to make the listener stumble on the way in. This suggests something quite fundamental about the Beatles. At song level they could be ferociously concentrated. At album level they were easily distracted. Give them a concept and they would exploit it until another possibility looked more interesting, then wander off after that instead. *Sgt. Pepper* would later exhibit much the same behaviour. The overarching idea matters until the individual songs begin asserting their right to be something else. “Drive My Car” establishes almost all of this immediately. On its own, and particularly when encountered in sequence on the Red Album, it feels like a sudden change in Beatles consciousness. The earlier records have already been evolving rapidly, but a chronological compilation compresses that evolution and restores some of the original shock. “Drive My Car” does not simply sound better recorded than what came before. It sounds like a group that has become newly self-conscious about the fact that it is making Beatles records and can therefore begin playing games with what that means. The basic ambition is soul. This is their attempt to get somewhere in the vicinity of Otis Redding. Yet before they have even properly started, the arrangement plays a joke on the listener. The opening sounds simple until you try to locate the beat. The first figure gives the ear just enough information to form the wrong hypothesis before the rest of the band clarifies where the floor actually is. That becomes a recurring *Rubber Soul* trick. “You Won’t See Me” feels as though it has already started before you arrive. “The Word” sounds like somebody has opened the door onto a room that was already grooving. “I’m Looking Through You” begins halfway through a gesture. The songs often behave perfectly normally once you are inside them, but the doorway is crooked. The clipped piano part on “Drive My Car” adds another comic element, while the guitar solo is fearsomely angular for such a supposedly cheerful record. The personnel on those parts are sufficiently disputed that I would rather describe what is audible than pretend the paperwork has finally won the argument. Lyrically, it is a comic boy-meets-girl situation in which the girl appears rather more advanced than she actually is. She projects glamour, status and confidence before admitting that one fairly fundamental part of the projected future — the car — does not yet exist. There is some metaphorical slipperiness in “drive my car”, certainly, but the central joke is simpler and funnier: this is a woman whose image has outrun her circumstances. The Beatles have therefore opened their supposedly more mature album with a serious attempt at soul wrapped around a silly comic story and introduced by a rhythmic practical joke. That seems about right. “Norwegian Wood” is one of those moments where musical history seems briefly to fold in on itself. Lennon has fully absorbed Dylan and is attempting to write something stripped-back, acoustic and meaningful at almost precisely the moment Dylan is putting down the acoustic guitar and picking up an electric one. Lennon is moving towards the version of Dylan he has internalised while Dylan himself is already departing. Then Harrison puts a sitar on it. This is one of the great accidental moments in pop development. The instrument is not yet being used to say PSYCHEDELIA because psychedelic rock has not yet settled into a recognised vocabulary. Harrison has encountered the sitar, become fascinated by its sound, and is trying it inside a Lennon acoustic song. One of the sounds which will subsequently become shorthand for psychedelia arrives before the shorthand exists. That makes Harrison’s sitar the musical equivalent of Charles Front’s lettering. Front starts from rubber and accidentally arrives at a graphic language that will soon signify psychedelia. Harrison starts from simple fascination with an unfamiliar instrument and arrives at a sound that will soon do the same thing in music. Neither is consciously filling in a box marked PSYCHEDELIC. They are helping create the box. The irony behind Harrison’s interest is considerable. His first meaningful exposure to the instrument came through the production of *Help!*, a film whose representation of Indian culture now looks broad, exoticising and frequently crass. A film treating another culture partly as comic scenery nevertheless helps push Harrison towards taking the actual music increasingly seriously. The finished “Norwegian Wood” is also a product of subtraction. Earlier attempts gave the sitar more of a call-and-response role against Lennon. The problem is that this makes the instrument itself the event. Once much of that is stripped away, the sitar becomes part of an intricate acoustic texture rather than an exotic novelty being demonstrated to the listener. The guitars, sitar and unusually restrained tambourine create a very delicate environment. Ringo could elaborate enthusiastically on tambourine when given half a chance, but here the pulse is light enough that the whole thing seems suspended. The lyric benefits from the same restraint. Lennon gives us very little: a room, a chair, wine, talk, sleep. Yet these are exactly the kinds of mundane details that make the song feel as though it began with an actual encounter from which identifying information has been carefully removed. It is less a confession than somebody recounting an incident while making sure it does not quite become one. Then comes “I lit a fire”. I do not remotely take this as documentary evidence that John Lennon burned somebody’s furniture or flat down. What interests me is the imaginative mechanism. A plausible, slightly furtive adult encounter suddenly receives one of those disproportionate cruel twists familiar from Lennon’s writing in *In His Own Write* and *A Spaniard in the Works*. The world appears ordinary until one detail makes it grotesque. It is nursery-rhyme cruelty delivered as deadpan. “You Won’t See Me” introduces another significant strand: all is not well in Jane-and-Paul land. McCartney is living in an increasingly peculiar social reality. Almost everywhere he goes, the world is learning to accommodate the fact that he is Paul McCartney. Crowds bend. Hotels bend. Transport bends. Studios bend. Within two years he will be able to get remarkably far across Europe without the sort of identification normally considered useful at international borders because his face itself functions as documentation. Jane Asher, inconveniently, has a career and a life. That gives “You Won’t See Me” an interesting emotional undertow. It does not sound primarily heartbroken. It sounds exasperated. I call, you should answer. I want to see you, you should be available. Why is this one part of the world refusing to operate according to the assumptions that increasingly govern everything else? Musically, McCartney reaches for an almost ready-made Motown chassis. The harmonic movement owes a conspicuous debt to the Four Tops’ “It’s the Same Old Song”, which creates a rather wonderful accidental joke: McCartney has genuinely new emotional material to explore and puts it on the same old song. The problem is that he then keeps wringing the thing long after it has stopped yielding information. Somewhere around 2:20 the argument is complete. We know the tune, we know the emotional state, we understand the groove. Yet the record carries on towards 3:22. More backing vocals arrive. The same material comes round again. Mal Evans makes his immortal contribution to keyboard technique by heroically holding down an organ note. Even the tempo starts to sag. That matters because the Beatles’ tempo drift can be expressive. Ringo pushes forward when the group are excited. Here the opposite effect is audible. I cannot prove that the band were consciously bored, but the performance increasingly communicates that sensation. McCartney keeps augmenting the arrangement while the underlying group seems gradually to stop leaning into it. The repetition would be less irritating if the next track were not “Nowhere Man”. “You Won’t See Me” has spent much of its excessive final stretch using the same “ooh-la-la-la” backing-vocal colour that “Nowhere Man” immediately wants for itself. The weaker song therefore spends some of the stronger song’s surprise before it arrives. That is a genuine sequencing flaw. *Rubber Soul* is more advanced in songwriting than it is in sequencing. This is not yet the group who will spend an entire marathon session obsessing over how the White Album’s four sides fit together. “Nowhere Man” survives the handicap because it is such an accomplished record. Its opening showcases one of the Beatles’ deepest pre-studio strengths. Before the orchestras, tape loops, Indian instrumentation and experimental recording techniques, they were an exceptional three-part harmony band with guitars and, eventually, a drummer. Lennon’s harmonic writing in particular often seems to emerge from his guitar-playing process: chords changing underneath a tentatively discovered melody, passing notes and moving inner voices creating harmony lines that twist rather than simply sit in obedient thirds. You can hear that instinct as far back as “This Boy” and “Yes It Is”. “Nowhere Man” is its mature form. There is also a tiny pitch event at the beginning which I have noticed since childhood. When the instruments arrive beneath the exposed voices, there seems to be a slight microtonal lurch, as though the voices and backing are not living at exactly the same reference pitch. The pristine opening suddenly reveals itself as three actual men singing. Lennon later described “Nowhere Man” as a form of veiled autobiography. This is still near the end of the period he retrospectively described through the “fat Elvis” image: fame, inertia, dissatisfaction, the sense of being stuck in a role. One part of the song resonates with me personally, though not in the sense that Lennon’s character describes me wholesale. I can be full of large plans which, for a period, feel almost obsessive. I can see the finished thing. I can see how interesting it would be. Then the practical route turns out to require time, money, collaborators or dozens of intermediate steps, and gradually the plan gets shelved. The line about not knowing where one is going does not fit particularly well. Often I know exactly where I would like to go. Building the road from here to there is the difficult bit. Meanwhile Harrison gives the song one of the most beautiful guitar sounds on the album. The treble is pushed almost until it physically hurts, ringing and chiming with extraordinary brightness before that cheeky harmonic at the end. Lennon is singing about stasis and disconnection while Harrison makes stasis sound like sunlight hitting chrome. Then Harrison gets a song of his own and the colour changes completely. “Think for Yourself” is the sour Harrison of “Don’t Bother Me”, except now he is very much bothered. The minor-key cast, his slightly pinched delivery, the unexpected chord changes, McCartney’s fuzz bass and the syncopated rhythmic writing all produce discomfort. Harrison’s chord changes increasingly feel less like conventional harmonic navigation than the use of harmony as expressive colour: what chord makes this particular sentence taste more bitter? The fuzz bass does not merely demonstrate a new effect. It nags. Around “go where you’re going to”, the rhythm itself seems to stretch, with Ringo’s fill pushing through the expected beat structure. The result is a song of disorientation whose lyric is telling somebody to stop accepting received ideas and work things out independently. It withholds reassurance. This is not the comforting Beatles. “The Word” changes the weather completely and may be one of the most consequential songs on the album that rarely gets treated as consequential. It is light, jinky, funky and soulful. McCartney’s bass is particularly beautiful, bouncing and syncopating through the track, while the vocal arrangement has the looseness of something almost communal rather than presentational. More importantly, the lyric has changed the object of Beatles love. “She Loves You” is interpersonal. Love happens between identifiable human beings. “The Word” makes love transferable. Love is something one discovers, learns, spreads and tells others about. “All You Need Is Love” will eventually make it doctrine. This is late 1965, nearly eighteen months before the Summer of Love, yet much of the vocabulary the Beatles will publicly inhabit over the next two years is already present: looseness, openness, collective feeling, mild mysticism, colour, the idea that love can function as an organising principle rather than simply romantic emotion. Lennon and McCartney were sufficiently taken with the song to produce a multicoloured lyric sheet. They appear to have understood that something in it extended beyond an ordinary album track. It also feels to me like the ur-text for a particular film and television trope that became extraordinarily common. The protagonist enters a party he is socially or temperamentally unequipped to enjoy. Everybody around him is grooving. The promise of easy sex is probably somewhere in the room, but it would distract him from his mission. So he must work his way across the party with increasing discomfort. Excuse me. Sorry. Very nice. Thank you. No, I just need to get through. Lovely kaftan. Has anybody seen Professor Henderson? “The Word” is the music playing in that room. The tiny piano jink at the beginning once again makes the song feel already in progress before we have entered. The spectral organ suspensions at the end are gorgeous, leaving a faint after-image once the groove has finished. Plenty of bands could have built their identity around this one sound. The Beatles use it for a couple of minutes and throw it away because something else is coming. “Michelle” is almost an archaeological object embedded inside *Rubber Soul*. Its roots go back to McCartney’s pre-fame social repertoire: the faux-French guitar party piece used to amuse and charm art-school girls. This is not simply a new song written in an old style. The central guitar language has years of familiarity behind it. You can hear that polish. The part feels inhabited. In particular, the descending figure under “I will say the only words I know that you’ll understand” is absolutely beautiful. It sounds like music that had been waiting around for years for a sufficiently good lyric to arrive. The finished song is Beatles bricolage: old McCartney routine; Jan Vaughan supplying useful French; Lennon contributing the repeated “I love you” idea from the inspiration of Nina Simone’s “I Put a Spell on You”; George Martin effectively designing the painfully deliberate guitar solo that Harrison executes. The old comic instinct survives too. By the final verse McCartney has progressed to “I want you, I want you, I want you”, only to add the wonderfully dry “I think you know by now.” Yes, Paul. She may have noticed. After all the continental sophistication, the understatement punctures the performance just enough to stop it becoming precious. Side two opens with “What Goes On”, which is Carl Perkins by numbers. That is absolutely fine. It works as a palate cleanser after the density of side one. Ringo sings it, Harrison deploys the country-rockabilly vocabulary almost on autopilot, 169 seconds pass and nobody gets killed. Nobody needs every album track to announce the future. “Girl”, though, is another odd fish entirely. There is a recurring type of woman in Lennon’s songwriting who seems less an ordinary human being than a wistful apparition. “Yes It Is” contains one. “Girl” contains another. “Julia” will later take the idea almost completely into the realm of dream, symbol and memory. In “Girl”, Lennon seems simultaneously fascinated, resentful, desirous and suspicious. He elevates the woman while also objecting to the power that elevation gives her. The arrangement contributes to the strangeness. It has a folk-continental rhythmic character at times, somewhere around Mediterranean or European folk gesture without becoming a clear imitation of anything. Then Lennon delivers those peculiar breathy inhalations around the hook: half desire, half seethe. The body says want. The lyric keeps trying to explain why wanting her is such a nuisance. “I’m Looking Through You” brings us back to Jane and Paul. By now exasperation has sharpened into accusation. The track initially sounds like a bright, breezy acoustic McCartney song, but it is surprisingly well constructed around irritation. An almost insect-like figure keeps scratching underneath. Organ and guitar honk while a twiddly little country-guitar line nags away. The arrangement is cheerful on the surface and annoyed underneath. “Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight” is particularly good. It sounds like one of those instant McCartney aphorisms, but there is a warning folded inside it. Do not assume that my affection is permanent if you continue behaving like this. Then we arrive at “In My Life”. I fucking hate “In My Life”. This requires qualification because I am not remotely suggesting that my inability to respond to it somehow invalidates the millions of people who find it profoundly moving. I am not deducting anything from the album’s overall judgement because of it. On this occasion, part of the problem is plainly the listener. This song does not resonate with me. But I also think Lennon’s usually extraordinary gift for language briefly deserts him. “Of all these friends and lovers / there is no one compares with you” is grammatically ungainly, and much of the rest feels assembled from generic commemorative nouns: places, people, friends, lovers, memories. The contrast with “Norwegian Wood” is severe. That song gives me a room, a chair and some wine, then trusts me to build the rest. “In My Life” announces MEMORY AND SIGNIFICANCE in large tasteful lettering. Live. Laugh. Love. It reminds me of those earnest reader-submitted poems newspapers print, and Lennon’s delivery does nothing to help because he sounds aware that this is an Important Song. Then George Martin’s half-speed keyboard solo arrives. I understand perfectly well why people love it. To me, its closing flourish feels so self-satisfied that once I am already resisting the song, it makes the entire thing worse. This remains primarily a mismatch between song and listener. There is a deeper argument about certain kinds of Lennon writing which I suspect will become clearer elsewhere in the corpus, but I am not going to manufacture objectivity merely because I dislike something very famous. “Wait” suits me much better and is, I think, underrated. It also repeats itself, yet leaves after 135 seconds. That demonstrates exactly why my problem with “You Won’t See Me” is not repetition itself but proportion. The song feels like one of those Lennon-McCartney constructions whose sections contain slightly different emotional logics. The verse pleads for somebody to wait. Then McCartney suddenly becomes actuarial: I feel you ought to know that I have been good, as good as I can be, and therefore I trust that you will behave correspondingly well. Love as contractual reciprocity. Ringo is magnificent on tambourine, and Harrison’s volume-pedal guitar is particularly important to me. The technique removes the initial pick attack, allowing the guitar notes to bloom into existence rather than sounding plucked. That sound takes me back to “Yes It Is”, which was my gateway into the Beatles. My eldest sister Linda owned “Ticket to Ride”. I flipped the single and found this strange, mournful song on the other side which I had never heard on the radio. I listened in something approaching hushed adoration. Harrison’s volume-pedal guitar produced this keening sound unlike what I expected a Beatles record to sound like, and it hooked me. That may explain why “Yes It Is” has been cited repeatedly during this listen. It helped establish my model of what the Beatles could be. My gateway was not simply one of their enormous public hits but a weird B-side where Harrison made a guitar stop behaving quite like a guitar. Perhaps that is why I remain particularly alert to the moments when the Beatles disturb their own normality. “If I Needed Someone” gives Harrison another excellent song and another lesson in guitar economy. The Byrds influence forms a circular feedback loop. Harrison helps inspire the sound; the Byrds develop it; Harrison hears what they have done and feeds that language back into the Beatles. If “Nowhere Man” gives them a lesson in jangling guitar, “If I Needed Someone” extends it across an entire song. The nominal lead guitar behaves almost like rhythm guitar, a repeated chiming architecture rather than a platform for virtuosity. McCartney’s ostinato bass nags away underneath, while the middle-eight harmonies become an atmospheric pad. The lyric is beautifully cool. It does not say, “I don’t want you.” It says, essentially, “if our universes were better aligned, perhaps this would have happened.” Somebody else got there first. In another life, with more time, perhaps. Possible in theory; unavailable in practice. Then, unfortunately, “Run for Your Life”. There really is no excuse for “Run for Your Life”. The opening line comes from “Baby Let’s Play House”, but Lennon takes the ugliest implication of the borrowed line and chooses to build upon it. The result is a possessive threat sustained across an entire song without being complicated, interrogated or made psychologically interesting. It does not stand up to hindsight, but that is only half the problem. The song itself feels unusually knocked off by Beatles standards. Even the acoustic guitar sounds slightly out of tune. The central idea does not develop. Eventually the first verse has to come round again because the song has effectively run out of things to say. Where “You Won’t See Me” contains too much record for the amount of material it possesses, “Run for Your Life” contains too little material for the record it is trying to make. This is not simply an old song whose attitudes have aged badly. It is weak Beatles songwriting that has also aged badly. A genuine blemish on an amazing album. And *Rubber Soul* remains an amazing album. That is why the five-star judgement requires the flaws rather than requiring me to pretend they do not exist. “Run for Your Life” is dreadful. “In My Life” leaves me cold to the point of hostility. “You Won’t See Me” seriously needs somebody with scissors. The sequencing occasionally fails to recognise that adjacent songs are competing for the same sonic territory. None of that changes the scale of what happens elsewhere. Sitar enters Beatles music almost casually. Fuzz bass becomes an expressive irritant. Volume-pedal guitar erases the physical attack of the instrument. Harrison discovers new kinds of treble. McCartney increasingly treats bass as an independent compositional voice. Three-part harmony is redeployed as atmosphere. Lennon moves between character writing, abstraction and grotesque narrative. Soul, folk, country, European gestures and the first vocabulary of psychedelia coexist without the album sounding like a checklist. Even the way songs begin becomes available for experiment. And outside the grooves, Freeman’s distorted photograph and Front’s swelling typography are doing the same thing visually: discovering pieces of a psychedelic vocabulary before psychedelia has properly settled on what it is supposed to look like. The standard historical formulation is that *Rubber Soul* is where the Beatles “grew up”. That is too tidy for what I hear. I hear a touring pop band still operating inside the old machinery and increasingly incapable of obeying its terms. They are still trying to become better soul musicians. They still have old party pieces lying around. They can still knock out Carl Perkins when required. They are still producing songs quickly enough to feed the machine. But every few minutes somebody gets curious and quietly breaks another rule. They are still recognisably the Beatles. They have simply become too interested in what else the Beatles might be.

Great album. Norwegian Wood and In My Life being my favorites on this entey definitely make it a must listen for me. Its pretty consistent in quality and has the great lyricism these boys are known for. Anytime I've sat down with this album I find myself grinning.

Beep beep m beep beep yeah

SPEAKING OF BEATLES!! AMAZING ALBUM

Concise. The good songs last just as long as they need to, and the skips are done quickly enough. Also, the album title is cool.

I love the album in its entirety. Such variety and experimentation on one album, yet so successful

Is this a five-star Beatles album? The answer is pretty clearly no as this album definitely has a few more songs that are just good instead of great or fantastic. But that's not the question and that's not the bar this thing needs to clear. It needs to clear is it a five-star album on a list that includes things like Kid Rock and The Mother of Invention. And with the bar being just "Is this a five-star album?", the answer is clearly yes.

Amazing album for the year it was made

its the beetles isnint

I mean, what do you want me to say? It's Rubber Soul!

Sounds like 60's pop. I still don't understand why people still care about the beatles

It really is quite funny how almost all these 60s pop albums sound exactly the same. This one does have some great hits at the start, but after that it just falls in the same category as all pop albums of this time. Not bad but just outdated and not particularly interesting to a modern listener.

I think this is my favorite Beatles album. I especially like that the vocals aren't just L or R.

Kind of a challenge. I remember rifling through my uncool parents record collection and looking at the cover as a kid with no idea about the band or the album. I love SPLHCB but this one just doesn't get me going. A classic and groundbreaking for sure but just doesn't click for me personally in a powerful way. Hold on - just listening to Run For Your Life for the first time. I just had an Outkast album and everyone was clutching their pearls about misogyny but Rubber Soul is four greats at the peak of their game? Negro por favor.

Almas de oro y suelas de plástico

I like most of the album except the one track they say they would kill a woman if they didnt have sex with them, that one is so fucked up.

(1/1089) I've enjoyed listening to this album. It has many interesting and memorable songs. Favorite: Norwegian Wood, Nowhere Man, In My Life Least favorite: The Word 8/10

Loved it. One of my favorites. Michelle is top 20 all time for me. Not my fav Beatles album, might not even be top 3. However, there aren’t many albums that can hold a candle to anything in the second half of their discography. Gotta be 5⭐️