Chase Spins More of the Beatles

As promised,or threatened (depending on your perspective), I, Chase McInerney, humbly offers my top 10 Beatles songs:

1. "In My Life" - I want this song played at my funeral. A wise-beyond-its-years song that John Lennon wrote when he was, what, 24 or 25? Amazing. Lennon was such a consistently honest writer, even his most seemingly innocuous lyrics ("There are places I remember all my life / Though some have changed") pulsate with meaning. And the song's concluding swan-song to love gets me every time.

2. "Across the Universe" - Lennon's haunting existentialist lullaby is a happy accident of production, its very roughness augmenting the song's strange feeling of peace. It is some sort of musical genius who can turn the phrase "Nothing's gonna change my world" into something approaching an epiphany.

3. "Come Together" - I've got to defer to Turtle's dead-on description for this one greasy great.

4. "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey" - Bare-knuckled, blues-drenched, nonsensical rock 'n' roll courtesy Lennon (hmm, I didn't realize my preference for John's compositions until writing this). And it even has more cowbell!

5. "Your Mother Should Know" - I know this is a Paul McCartney-penned trifle, frothy orchestrated pop that doesn't mean anything and is a harbinger of the songwriter's worst impulses to come, but I don't care. This is a great pop song that is as timeless as the music it celebrates.

6. "All My Loving" - Irresistibly simple jangle pop. With its playful rockabilly hook and bittersweet lyrics, this McCartney love song practically calls out for a background chorus of screaming Beatlemania groupies.

7. "Lovely Rita" - From the opening "aaahhh ahhhs" of abandon that sound as if McCartney is spiraling down the rabbit hole, this sonic confection hooks you and doesn't let go until it wraps up all its engaging silliness about a hot-to-trot meter maid. And isn't the alliteration of "sitting on a sofa with a sister or two" just fun to say?

8. "Eleanor Rigby" - Under George Martin's meticulous production, the song's relentless strings and elegiac harmonies paint a landscape of loneliness and isolation. Apparently McCartney had his depressive side, too (bad acid, perhaps?). No wonder he died for a while.

9. "She's Leaving Home" - Maybe they could've toned down the harp a bit, but generally its lush orchestration works in this McCartney sudser about a teenaged girl running away from home. The tune spurred some grousing at the time from rock purists -- after all, the song sure ain't rock -- but I don't know who could deny the song's ethereal beauty.

10. "Here Comes the Sun" - When I was young, I thought this George Harrison composition was just too sappy, but it's grown on me considerably over the years. A deceptively simple track buoyed by Harrison's strumming guitarlines, the song actually sounds like daybreak.

And now you know. Now I can't wait to get around to listing my favorite songs by the Cowsills.

I'm kidding, incidentally. That's an oldies joke.