Why did George Martin want The Beatles’ singles and albums to be separate?
There are only a handful of moments in their career where The Beatles justifiably struck out. Despite being driven around through Beatlemania and being burned out on nearly every facet of the music industry, you’d hardly hear it whenever they would head into the studio to cut a new cover tune or start moving outside of their comfort zone when making albums like Rubber Soul. While the singles market was their true wheelhouse, George Martin always had some thoughts on how they chose to separate their material.
When the band first started getting together, anything that sounded halfway decent didn’t take long to make it onto the record. That’s not to say that everything they did during their Merseybeat era was lacklustre, but listening to a song like ‘A Day in the Life’ or ‘Yesterday’ makes it a bit harder to judge songs like ‘Little Child’ and ‘Not A Second Time’ on the same metric.
Even when the band worked out songs as part of their live set, Martin was the unofficial boss of every one of the sessions. There were moments when the band would ask to add some extensions to their idea, but since Martin had the greatest musical knowledge out of everyone, he was usually the person working on the arrangements, like kicking up the tempo of ‘Please Please Me’ or suggesting using the extended outro found at the very end of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.
While that practice gave those first albums some cohesion, singles were a different story. The other bands coming out of the British invasion may have seen albums as collections of singles and deep cuts, but every one of the Fab Four’s greatest moments felt like them capturing a tiny bit of magic within the span of three minutes, with ‘She Loves You’ having enough hooks for three of four different hits across its runtime.
But Martin had an unspoken rule regarding the release of singles. Despite the American market doing whatever it wanted with the track listing of specific albums, the core British canon of Beatles recordings always kept singles as a separate entity. The producer said that they felt they were cheating the fans by making them pay for an album with a single that was already out in the world.
That might be the more noble choice, but it also doesn’t make much sense from a marketing perspective. The whole point of a single as we know it now is to serve as a teaser for an upcoming project, so anyone listening to a Taylor Swift that doesn’t turn up on an album is probably going to be more than a little bit pissed.
But seeing how The Beatles used this rule, it worked incredibly well. The whole point behind Rubber Soul and Revolver centred around them moving outside of their comfort zone, and hearing ‘Day Tripper’ and ‘Paperback Writer’ by each respective record’s stand-along singles were a great way to introduce people to the sonic world they were about to go down when they picked up the album proper.
Then again, that doesn’t mean some musical crimes weren’t committed in the process as well. The idea of not having ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ or ‘Penny Lane’ on Sgt Pepper is something that most Fab fans will have to live with forever, but maybe it’s better to give fans what they don’t know they want rather than filling up an album with the same tunes they already know.
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