You want songs about being in love eight days a week? About holding hands? About the sun and the fact that here it comes? No, too bad. None of that here. You will get songs by The Beatles below, but the following all rank among the legendary band’s most downbeat tracks. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison were all more than capable of tugging on one’s heartstrings through the music they wrote and sang. Ringo Starr, on the other hand, mostly stuck to tracks about submarines and octopuses.
Anyway, most of the early Beatles tracks are love-related, and then various later tracks got psychedelic (and even a bit unsettling at times), though throughout the band’s short but impactful life, sad songs were pretty much always a thing. There’s some subjectivity involved in assembling a ranking like this, so you might not agree entirely, but an effort was made and as a result, maybe like, hey, you’ve got to hide your angry comments away.
10
“The Fool on the Hill” (1967)
You’re not gonna believe this, but “The Fool on the Hill” is about a guy on a hill, and the guy’s kind of foolish. Or maybe that’s just what everyone believes. The important thing is he’s ostracized, and maybe he doesn’t mind, or maybe he does. The hope that he’s kind of blissful about the whole being foolish and stuck on a hill thing keeps it from being one of the more depressing Beatles tracks.
Yet it is a little bleaker than the comparable “Nowhere Man,” which isn’t as sad-sounding on a melodic/musical front, even if the lyrics are also about some kind of singular person who doesn’t really fit in. You might find this one bittersweet, or mostly bitter, but that ambiguity is okay. “The Fool on the Hill” is also a great song generally speaking; maybe one of the more underrated Beatles songs, if you can actually call any song by perhaps the most famous band of all time “underrated.”
9
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (1968)
There’s no polite way to say it: the self-titled Beatles album from 1968, sometimes referred to as “The White Album,” is genuinely insane. It’s an album where no genres or any kind of experimentation felt off limits, and if future genres like synth-pop and hip-hop had properly been around in 1968, there’s every chance that at least one song on this double album would have dabbled in such genres/styles.
The best song on the self-titled Beatles album would have to be “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” which is one of George Harrison’s finest hours as a songwriter and singer.
Case in point, there’s the agonizingly long sound collage that is “Revolution 9,” and a song that might well have helped define what heavy metal later became, in “Helter Skelter.” But the best song here would have to be “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” which is one of George Harrison’s finest hours as a songwriter and singer, and it does indeed live up to the title emotionally. The title mentions weeping, and it’s undoubtedly a moving song.
8
“She’s Leaving Home” (1967)
“She’s Leaving Home” is one of the more aggressively sad songs that The Beatles ever released, to the point where some might find it too over-the-top to be genuinely moving. It’s about exactly what you’d expect it to be, based on the title: there’s a teenage girl who abruptly runs away from home one day, and then her parents are left feeling confused about why, and no real closure is given about the whole thing.
It’s like a melodramatic film or TV series condensed into a few minutes, and made into a song. It’s not subtle at all, but the sadness they wanted to achieve here? Yeah, you still feel it. It’s not one of the absolute very best songs on the classic rock/pop album that is Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but it’s still a significant piece of the overall puzzle that said album is.
7
“For No One” (1966)
Revolver is one of the cooler albums by The Beatles to shout out as your favorite, for better or worse. Nah, sass aside, it’s pretty great. And maybe, given that most of the hardcore fans love it, but more casual Beatles fans will probably point to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Abbey Road as high points of the band’s discography, you could almost call Revolver underrated, at least on a broad level.
That’s a lot of rambling. Uh, Revolver has a song on it called “For No One” that’s also not really, like, a hit by The Beatles or anything, but it’s pretty great. And it’s also pretty soul-crushing, as a break-up song. It punches you in the gut and then keeps kicking you while you’re down, especially with its absolutely desolate lyrics, and a bit with the music side of things, too. It’s two minutes of utter despair, basically.
6
“Let It Be” (1970)
Even the title “Let It Be” is sad, when you take into account where The Beatles were at by the end of the 1960s. Let It Be was originally envisioned as the Get Back project, which was Paul McCartney’s attempt to “get back” to the more laidback rock sound the band had in their earlier days. “Get Back” still exists as a pretty great song, from the overall project, but the album was renamed Let It Be.
And Let It Be suggests that The Beatles, as a group, had to be left alone. What once was had to be allowed to remain there, in the past. Uncertainties about doing that? No, let them be, let them rest. That’s kind of subtext, and then the song “Let It Be” itself is also moving because of how it sounds, and what it deals with lyrically. It’s technically bittersweet, but with quite a bit of bitter, or at least an attempt to find catharsis and release some fairly heavy and sometimes confounding emotions.
5
“In My Life” (1965)
There are a decent number of songs by The Beatles that tap into nostalgia or childhood memories in one way or another, but none with the same emotional potency as “In My Life.” Call it a hot take if you want, but this is John Lennon’s finest hour as a singer and songwriter, though Paul McCartney has disputed the idea that Lennon was solely responsible for the song.
Maybe that’s a sign of how good “In My Life” is. Lennon and McCartney, usually able to admit which of the two were more responsible for any given song, butted heads, to some extent, over this one. Anyway, on an emotional front, this is perfect as a downbeat pop/rock song that wants to be stirring, and that downbeat stuff isn’t oppressive, either. There’s warmth to “In My Life,” and really, it ends up being a perfect mix of both bitter and sweet.
4
“The Long and Winding Road” (1970)
While the title track from Let It Be might be its most famous and obvious tearjerker, there’s something about “The Long and Winding Road” that makes it even more moving. That wouldn’t be the case if “The Long and Winding Road” were from an album that didn’t end up being on the final Beatles album, but Let It Be being the last one released (albeit not the last one recorded) makes it feel like a potentially unintentional funereal song for The Beatles and their legacy overall.
Like much of Let It Be, it’s got Paul McCartney’s fingerprints all over it, even putting aside the fact that he wrote/sang it, but dammit, he makes it work. “The Long and Winding Road” is sappy yet, in hindsight, also incredibly moving at the same time. It’s a melodramatic – and perhaps not entirely intentional – way to kind of send off The Beatles, hitting the same nerve emotionally that the now very bittersweet “Two of Us,” also from Let It Be, ultimately hits.
3
“Yesterday” (1965)
Help! was a very strange movie the members of The Beatles starred in, and the album of the same name was kind of a soundtrack, and kind of its own thing. Anyway, befitting the title of the album, it’s kind of angsty, compared to much of what The Beatles had done before it. The title track, which kicks off the album, is more anxious than sad, but it is very much a cry for help(!).
Things wind down a little after the frenzied opening, and you get “Yesterday” near the end of the album as perhaps its slowest and most traditionally tear-jerking track. If you’ve heard the song, you know why it’s sad. And if you’ve somehow never heard the song, it’s only two minutes long, so you should listen to it, and then you’ll understand. It’s very simple and very effectively stirring, and it was also used incredibly well (and appropriately) in the soundtrack for Once Upon a Time in America.
2
“Eleanor Rigby” (1966)
Before “She’s Leaving Home,” there was “Eleanor Rigby,” which might be the only sad song The Beatles ever put out that’s more aggressive and in-your-face with its misery than that aforementioned Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club track. At least with “She’s Leaving Home,” you could imagine that she was leaving for somewhere good, but with “Eleanor Rigby,” everyone seems sad, alone, and, eventually, dead.
It would almost be darkly funny if it weren’t handled so well. There’s a funeral and no one comes. There’s a priest who does what he’s supposed to do, but no one is saved. And then time marches on, and the song itself is also kind of brutally abrupt, with how it concludes without much closure. It’s about mortality and a certain despair that comes with looking at life objectively, and it might well be the heaviest song Paul McCartney ever sang (he is a member of The Beatles, after all, who sometimes has a reputation for being behind some of the band’s sillier/bouncier songs).
1
“Ticket to Ride” (1965)
Going back to Help!, this album was perhaps mid-tier by the standards of The Beatles, but mid-tier for such a great band is top-tier by any other metric. And it’s “Ticket to Ride,” which likely stands as the best song from an overall very strong album, and it’s further notable for being one of the first properly mature songs by The Beatles. They’d done songs about the hardships of love before, but they hadn’t felt so efficiently somber.
That’s kind of what makes “Ticket to Ride” next-level. Also, excuse the lack of music-related knowledge on, like, a technical front, but that uneasy and intentionally wonky riff heard throughout the song does so much to capture the feeling of being displaced and out of sorts. Lyrically, the sadness inherent in the words sung? Speaks for itself, really. Or speaks for themselves. I don’t know. I’m sad. She’s got a ticket to ride, and she don’t care. But I do.
