The Beatles, "We Can Work It Out" / "Day Tripper"

"We Can Work It Out," like most great songs, mostly speaks for itself. There are few songs in the catalog more Beatley: it's brimming with the personalities McCartney and Lennon supposedly embodied, Paul's sunny optimism in the verses and Lennon's gritty realism in the middle eight.

It's an important single not just because it sounds awesome but because it sounds so distinct from every previous Beatles single. It's identifiable as pop, but doesn't quite follow that classic Beatlemania formula for a hit. It's not really in the mold of "I Want To Hold Your Hand" or "A Hard Day's Night" or the recent "Help!" and "Ticket To Ride." This single's release marks one of my favourite periods for the Beatles, as the drive to be creative and seek out new forms for their music kicks into high gear, but before experimentalism overtook them completely.

It comes back a bit to what I was saying about authorship and "authenticity" in rock and roll. Part of what makes rock and roll so good is that the audience wants to feel like the band is playing their own music: being a good musician isn't enough, you have to be an originator, finding your own voice. 1965 was more or less the year that songwriting itself became an instrument for the Beatles, moreso than it was already.



The on the other side of this double-A single is this riff-based rocker, not totally dissimilar to the Stones' "Satisfaction" or Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman." But the riff is friendlier than the Stones', and the song rocks harder than "Pretty Woman" (with due respect to Roy.) The lyrics, about a "weekend hippie," find a nice balance between detailed observation and vague allusion, the kind of song where you might not quite know what it's about if you didn't already somehow know. They couldn't be mean like the Stones, but they could be cheeky and fun.

Anywhere. Here, more or less, is where they start making music that escapes the times. I love the early Beatlemania songs, they are perfect, catchy pop tunes that I can always listen to and probably won't be improved upon. But with this single and onward, you get songs that in 2012 sound like they've come out of nowhere.