Please Please Me | With the Beatles | A Hard Day's Night | Beatles for Sale | Help! | Rubber Soul | Revolver
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | Magical Mystery Tour | The White Album | Yellow Submarine | Abbey Road | Let It Be
Past Masters | The Beatles Anthology | The Beatles: Get Back
- Bad Export for You: Like every album before Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Rubber Soul was subject to editing of its tracklist by American label Capitol Records. They dropped two uptempo songs ("Drive My Car", "What Goes On") and two electric guitar-heavy numbers ("Nowhere Man", "If I Needed Someone"), replacing them with two acoustic guitar-driven songs from the UK Help! album ("It's Only Love", "I've Just Seen a Face"). This positioned Rubber Soul more as a Folk Rock album. This was 1965, so Capitol was really trying to tap into the lucrative folk music scene that was exploding at the time. However, this was the first Beatles album for which Capitol left the British title and artwork intact.
- Bury Your Art: The original stereo mix has only scarcely been reissued since the '80s, owed to producer George Martin's dissatisfaction with it. Instead, most reissues use the new stereo remix he created for the band's first catalog-wide CD releases in 1987.
- Christmas Rushed: The album was rush-produced for Christmas 1965. However, it is commonly thought of as one of their best works.
- Creator Backlash: Lennon came to hate "Run for Your Life", mostly because of the lyrics. The band as a whole also considered "Wait" to be Album Filler (it was a leftover from the Help! sessions).
- Creator Breakdown: "Norwegian Wood" is about an one-night-stand that John Lennon had, written in a way as to prevent his wife finding out. Original lyric: "Isn't it good/Knowing she would."
- Creator's Favorite Episode:
- In 1995, George Harrison named this as his favourite Beatles album, adding: "we certainly knew we were making a good album. We did spend more time on it and tried new things. But the most important thing about it was that we were suddenly hearing sounds that we weren't able to hear before."
- John Lennon named "In My Life" as one of his favourite Beatles songs.
- Follow the Leader:
- They drew inspiration from soul music, particularly the singles they heard on US radio that summer, by acts signed to the Motown and Stax record labels, and from the contemporary folk rock of Bob Dylan and The Byrds. They also took influence from The Rolling Stones.
- A specific Bob Dylan influence is with "Norwegian Wood", which seems to have been modeled on "I Don't Believe You", also a song about a one night stand that ends poorly (the narrator sleeps with a woman, but the next morning "she acts like we never have met"). In turn, Dylan recorded "4th Time Around", an Affectionate Parody of "Norwegian Wood" where the woman kicks the singer out, he returns to get his shirt and makes her mad enough that she passes out, then he steals some stuff from her dresser and gives it to a different woman.
- Hitless Hit Album: In both the UK and US incarnations, with "We Can Work it Out"/"Day Tripper" issued alongside it as a single. Capitol Records released "Nowhere Man" as a single after they left it off the US version and it hit the Top 10.
- Hostility on the Set: Recording engineer Norman Smith later stated that the studio sessions revealed signs of growing conflict within the group – "the clash between John and Paul was becoming obvious", he wrote, and "as far as Paul was concerned, George could do no right". Smith, who'd done years of engineering for the Beatles, stopped working with them after that.
- Killer App: For rock and roll albums. Prior to Rubber Soul, LPs were the domain of classical music, jazz, original cast recordings and film soundtracks, while pop/rock albums were mainly filler anchored by a few hit singles. Brian Wilson was really impressed with this album, wanting the next Beach Boys album to be just like it, "an album filled with all good stuff." He succeeded.
- Similarly Named Works: The Velvet Underground has another song titled "What Goes On".
- Throw It In!:
- The stretched-out photo on the album cover happened by mistake; the photographer was projecting potential cover photos on a piece of cardboard for the Beatles when the cardboard tipped back slightly, giving the elongated image. The Beatles loved it, especially as it worked well with the album title, and asked him to print it that way.
- If you listen to the opening of "You Won't See Me" carefully, you can hear someone cough on the right stereo channel right before Paul's vocal begins.
- Write What You Know: John Lennon later said that "Norwegian Wood" was inspired by a clandestine extramarital affair he was having at the time, but never went into detail about it. His ex-wife Cynthia and his biographer Philip Norman both came to the conclusion that the affair was with Sonny Freeman, the wife of Robert Freeman, the photographer of the Rubber Soul cover photo, among many other Beatles pics. The Freemans divorced shortly after the song came out. Sonny was German, but told people she was Norwegian.
