The 100 Best Beatles Solo Songs

“How?” is a perfect place to start, just because it’s a song by a John full of questions that have no answers. He’s setting off into his 30s, his post-Beatles life, his solo career, a new decade with his new wife. He’s done the drugs and paid for the therapy. But he’s never felt more confused. “How can I go forward when I don’t know which way I’m facing?” “How can I have a feeling when I don’t know if it’s a feeling?” “How can I give love when I just don’t know how to give?” Theseare questions that all four Beatles could relate to after the band split, in their very different ways.

A Number One hit so smoothed out it makes “Silly Love Songs” sound like “Helter Skelter.” “With a Little Luck” is a Seventies couples-therapy session with synthesizers: Paul promises, “There is no end to what we can do together,” which rhymes with (love this line) “the willow turns his back on inclement weather.” When Macca goes for yacht rock, he goes all the way; “With a Little Luck” is the rare yacht-rock hit that was recorded on an actual yacht, moored near the Virgin Islands with a mobile studio on board. And maybe, just maybe, a few drugs.

George kicked off his solo debut, All Things Must Pass, with a ballad he wrote with his friend and future Wilbury mate Bob Dylan, “I’d Have You Anytime.” It’s a tribute to their musical brotherhood — but also a flex to remind the other Beatles who was Dylan’s favorite Fab. They co-wrote “I’d Have You Anytime” at Dylan’s home in Woodstock on Thanksgiving 1968. “We finally got the guitars out, and it loosened things up a bit,” Harrison said. “It was really a nice time with all his kids around, and we were just playing.” But just a few weeks later, he was back with the Beatles for the Get Back sessions, still fighting to get them to play his damn songs. 

Damn right we’ve got Ringo on this list. Get used to it. “No No Song” has everything you want in a quality Ringo solo jam: an upbeat groove, a vocal that can give you third-degree charm burns, a witty lyric, and a little help from his friends who would jump on a grenade for this man because he’s Ringo. (In this case, the friend is Harry Nilsson.) “No No Song” is a trip through Hollywood decadence, turning down marijuana, cocaine, and moonshine, long before he (fortunately) got sober. He’s in his 80s, he lives on broccoli and blueberries, and he’s still a better dancer than you. He’s Ringo. We’ll hear from him again.

All you need is grunge. Paul teams up with the surviving Nirvana dudes, Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, and Pat Smear. They banged out “Cut Me Some Slack” in three hours, for Grohl’s documentary Sound City, and debuted it at the NYC Concert for Sandy Relief on Dec. 12, 2012. Maccavana won a Grammy for this song, which meant the surreal sight of Paul smiling at the podium alongside one of the Germs. (And Smear is one of the few rockers with a perma-grin to rival Paul’s.) Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, whatever, nevermind.

“Starting Over” hit Number One in the aftermath of John’s death, but there’s nothing grim about it—his voice and guitar are full of doo-wop joy. It’s the song of an adult romantic resolving to make something out of the time he’s got left with Yoko. The opening chimes connect to “Mother” from Plastic Ono Band, a decade earlier, except now he’s facing his future instead of his past. The ebullience in the music is a musical and spiritual high note.

George’s spiritual crises send him back to his guitar—the wisest guru he ever had. “The Day The World Turns ‘Round,” the capper from Living in the Material World, is George turning 30, seemingly on top of the world, yet wondering how it all went so wrong, as all that talk of peace and love turned into lawyers, accountants, dealers, junkies, divorces. The woozy proto-indie guitars have a Pavement vibe—it could come straight from Brighten The Corners or Wowee Zowee.

John Lennon, in his Lost Weekend madness, set loose in L.A., was like a Molotov cocktail. Now add alcohol. And for the lighted match: ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Harry Nilsson! That guy sure had a way of making things blow up. John producing Harry’s Pussy Cats album wasn’t the greatest move for either one’s mental health, or for the long-suffering bartenders of Hollywood. But they sound right in tune in “Old Dirt Road,” their piano-ballad collabo on Walls and Bridges, two old rogues by the side of the road, begging for water when they’d rather guzzle Brandy Alexanders.

How strong were the drugs in the Seventies? Put it this way: musicians kept joining Wings, then complaining they didn’t have creative input. My dudes. You’re in Paul McCartney’s band. Nobody’s out there in the crowd yelling “‘Medicine Jar!’” “Listen To What The Man Said” is prime Wings: Paul consults his love guru (an updated Fool on the Hill for the Me Decade) over plush boogie, with a Tom Scott sax break. What wisdom does Paul get from his guru? “Love is fine.” Most quintessential Macca detail: the way he follows the line “soldier boy kisses girl” with an audible smooch. The wonder of it all, baby.

George sings about the joys of Krishna Consciousness, with a band full of drug fiends and a hopefully unarmed Phil Spector. But the joyful clamor of “Awaiting for You All” achieves that Spector girl-group spirit, lifted high by Derek and the Dominoes and loads of percussion. 

Ringo made his solo debut with the oddity Sentimental Journey, crooning showbiz oldies like “Stardust”—the kind of old-time standards he grew up hearing his parents sing down the pub. As he explained, “I did it for me Mum.” You gotta love how Paul was making his ambitious solo move, John was getting into primal scream, George did a triple album about Krishna…but Ringo, he just wanted to sing “Stardust” for Elsie Starkey Greaves. His arranger? A gent named Paul McCartney. Ringo also got arrangements from Quincy Jones, Oliver Nelson, Elmer Bernstein, and good old George Martin. As Greil Marcus wrote in Rolling Stone, ‘Not exactly ‘Octopus’ Garden,’ but what the hell.”

A tormented love ballad for Yoko from Mind Games, right when their marriage was hitting the skids. John sings about how she changed his life, over those “Sexy Sadie” chords, testifying, “Everyday I thank the Lord and Lady for the way that you came to me.” But it’s a song he couldn’t write until she finally left him. And for that touch of Rumours, who’s that playing guitar? Yoko’s new boyfriend, David Spinozza. The Seventies, man.

The first night Paul had Linda over to his house, in 1968, he opened the window to greet the fans camped outside, and played them a brand new song on guitar: “Blackbird.” Just a few years later, he sang “Bluebird” for her, a vision of Paul and Linda as two lovebirds flying across the sea to their own desert island. It’s an oddly melancholy bossa nova melody, showcasing Nigerian percussionist Remi Kabaka.

A beautifully quizzical waltz that George wrote for Ronnie Spector, as her comeback single on Apple Records. She wasn’t the biggest fan, telling him, “I don’t understand a word of it.” He replied, “That’s okay. I don’t either.” When the single flopped, George couldn’t bear to see it go to waste, so he just sang “Try Some, Buy Some” over the original Phil Spector track. He flubbed half the high notes, yet that adds to the daft charm. But nobody ever loved this song like David Bowie, who sang it on Reality, hearing it as an allegory of his own addiction. “When I first heard that song it had a very different narrative to it,” he told The Word in 2003. “When I first heard the song in ’74 I was yet to go through my heavy drug period. And now it’s about the consolation of having kicked all that and turning your life around.”

“Arrow Through Me” is impeccably suave mall-funk from Back to the Egg, the 1979 mishmash that ended up being the final Wings album before Macca realized that pretending to lead a democratic rock band was more trouble than it was worth. New Wavers loved Back to the Egg (how it pains me not to have room for “Getting Closer” or “Old Siam, Sir”). “While I was in Tokyo I used to go to a vinyl bar, but the bartender didn’t have Wings records,” Harry Styles told Rolling Stone in 2019. “So I brought him Back to the Egg. ‘Arrow Through Me,’ that was the song I had to hear every day when I was in Japan.” Erkykah Badu samples it cleverly in “Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long.”

George wrote this festive Celtic sea shanty, completing the Ringo Aquatic Trilogy begun by “Yellow Submarine” and “Octopus’ Garden.” Ringo and George kick up their heels on deck with their friends in The Band—Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Robbie Robertson, sailing away on fiddle and accordion.

What’s this: John swiping a hook from (of all people) Ringo? You love it to see it. “Crippled Inside” sounds a heck of a lot like “Don’t Pass Me By,” Ringo’s White Album hoedown, with George twanging away on the dobro. But it’s also the kind of old-timey tune that John’s mother Julia taught him to play on banjo when he was a little boy, which might be a clue to the inner devastation he’s confessing in the song. As he admits, “One thing you can’t hide is when you’re crippled inside.”

An enigmatic rainy-day ballad from Venus and Mars, with bittersweet 12-string guitar. Paul pleads, “My heart cries out for love and all that goes with loving.” “Love In Song” feels like he started out trying to write one of his signature upbeat ditties, but changed his mind halfway through so he could brood over loss and exile, mourning “happiness in the homeland.” He plays a stand-up bass—the same one Bill Black played on the early Elvis hits.

Ringo is the most New Orleans in spirit of English rock stars, so it’s a shame he didn’t do more Crescent City songs. (Can you imagine Ringo doing a whole album of Ernie K-Doe tunes? Perfect for him. Seriously, Ringo—get Walsh into the studio and bang out “Te-Ta-Te-Ta-Ta” or “Hurry Up and Know It.”) But with “Lipstick Traces,” he revs up an Allen Toussaint R&B classic he was born to sing (originally written for Benny Spellman in 1962), with Dr. John on piano. Nobody heard it, since this was the flop single from one of his worst albums, the instantly forgotten 1978 disaster Bad Boy. But it’s Ringo in his grandest role as a Liverpool Sisyphus calmly enduring his fate.

Paul staked out his eccentric turf with Ram, such a weird masterpiece it took the world years to catch up to it. “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” hit Number One, a crackpot prog-pop suite four years and countless bong hits ahead of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Paul and Linda sing the “Hands across the water” chorus, inspired by their Anglo-American marriage. His real-life uncle was a character—as Paul recalled, “Uncle Albert would stand on the table, roaring drunk, and recite the Bible.” Like the rest of Ram, it was ahead of its time. “A while ago, one of my nephews, Jay, said, ‘Ram‘s my all-time favorite album,’” Paul told Rolling Stone in 2016. “I thought it was dead and gone, stinking over there in the dung pit. So I listened to it. ‘Wow, I get what I was doing.’”

A proudly autobiographical tale from Double Fantasy, musing on life as a house-husband. John sings about dropping out of the music biz in the 1970s, giving up on stardom, choosing to stay home, raise his kid, bake bread, watch the wheels go round and round. There’s a cocky defiance when he sings, “No longer riding on the merry-go-round / I just had to let it go.” As he boasted in 1980, “I have the great honor of never having been to Studio 54.”

Paul summed up the themes of his homemade DIY solo debut: “Home. Family. Love.” It’s all here in “Every Night,” his affectionate ode to staying home with Linda and his kids instead of hitting the town. As he explains in The Lyrics, “It’s a love song, but rather than it being the sort of fantasy ‘happily ever after’ love, this is a more realistic and redemptive love.”

“Cosmic Empire” is a brilliant outtake George left behind from the All Things Must Pass sessions. It’s one of the mysteries of his career—he knocked off acoustic demos for 30 songs in the first 2 days, then left half of them in the vault. Some he revisited later, like “Beautiful Girl” or the Dylan tune “I Don’t Want To Do It.” (He put that one on the Porky’s Revenge soundtrack—George always had a mischievous sense of humor.) But for some reason, he never went back to this jaunty spiritual gem. “Cosmic Empire” is George having a sly laugh at religious day-trippers shopping for instant enlightenment. As he chirps, “I’m waiting in the queue to go to the cosmic empire / I want a front-row pew at the cosmic empire!”

Fifteen years after John wrote “Girl” on Rubber Soul, reaching out for the cerebral female muse who turned out to be Yoko, “Woman” serenades her with Rubber Soul levels of guitar jangle and breathy vocal beauty. That “well well” is such a flex.

Ringo bids a fond farewell tribute to his old L.A. outlaw buddy Harry Nilsson, the kind of playful Old Hollywood razzle-dazzle soft-shoe that Schmilsson made a specialty. “Harry’s Song” is sculpted with love by Starr and producer Mark Hudson, so clever it feels like they’re like sharing a private laugh with Harry. 

John had some gall calling his anti-Paul rant “How Do You Sleep?,” considering how often John’s answer to that question was “enough drugs to kill an elephant.” A less gentlemanly target than Macca might have tossed that brick at John’s glass house, but that wasn’t Paul’s style. “Dear Friend” was an unsentimentally blunt pipes-of-peace offering, with the plea, “I’m in love with a friend of mine.” (Did he mean Linda or John? He undoubtedly meant both.) “Dear Friend” successfully squashed the beef—not even John could think of a clever comeback—so their public spats ended. That sums up Paul: a soldier of love who’d rather lay down his arms than win the fight. As John wrote in a news “report” for Rolling Stone in 1973, “The extreme humility that existed between John and Paul seems to have evaporated. They’ve spoken to each other on the phone, and in English, that’s a change.”

A moment of tranquility in all the sturm and drang of Plastic Ono Band, with his tremolo guitar echoing “Don’t Let Me Down,” as he gives a pep talk to himself and Yoko. “Even now I’m saying, ‘Hold on, John, it’s gonna be all right,’” he told Rolling Stone’s Jann S. Wenner in the “Lennon Remembers” interview. “Otherwise, I won’t hold on.” John was an early fan of the brand-new TV show Sesame Street, so he growls “Coookieeee!” in a nod to his fellow chaos Muppet, Cookie Monster. No wonder he could relate: a shaggy creature raging about monstrously unmanageable childish appetites? And on drums: Ringo, the Beatles’ Grover.

Why did McCartney make an album of Fifties rock & roll oldies in 1999? He’d just lost Linda, after 30 years when they were inseparable. He worked through his grief by going back to Abbey Road to make Run Devil Run, losing himself in songs by his original heroes: Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Wanda Jackson, Elvis. “No Other Baby” is a long-forgotten 1958 side by the obscure U.K. skiffle group the Vipers. But Paul turns it into an elegiac haiku for Linda, with guitar from Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. It’s incredibly moving as he sings “No Other Baby” as a soulful tribute to the life and dreams they shared. 

George’s final album Brainwashed didn’t come out until after his death in 2001, at only 66, but it was a labor of love crafted with his son Dhani Harrison. In “Any Road,” he meditates on a theme inspired by Alice in Wonderland: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Boy George did a really touching version of this one in 2014.

An anything-but-silly love song for Nancy Shevell, a song that only the truest of rock & roll romantics could bring to life. He wrote it visiting Morocco with her, just as their romance was beginning. “It was a good awakening,” he told Rolling Stone. “It made me want to write positive songs.” Great as it is on Kisses on the Bottom, “My Valentine” has taken on a new life onstage, evolving over the years into an artistic statement of purpose, almost like his version of Leonard Cohen’s “Tower of Song.”

John’s hilariously deadpan tale of feeling dazed and confused in the Eighties, yelping, “Strange days indeed! Most peculiar, mama! Roll!” “Nobody Told Me” was a posthumous hit in 1984, from the great Milk and Honey collection—these tunes weren’t rejects from Double Fantasy, just too loose and funny and freewheeling to fit that album’s serious mood. But when it comes to Lennon one-liners about feeling lost in adulthood, it’s hard to top, “Always something happening and nothing going on.”

How is it possible Paul McCartney was writing brilliant songs like “Love Me Do” in the 1950s, yet he’s still writing brilliant songs like this in the 2020s? McCartney III is Macca down on the farm, in lockdown—or “rockdown,” a very Paul thing to call it—strumming his guitar to the sheep and chickens, singing a lazy song beneath the sun. He worried “Seize the Day” sounded too “Beatle-y” when he wrote it, but figured, “I’ve gotta admit it’s what I do. It’s the way I write songs. If I like something that’s going a bit Beatle-y, I’m just gonna let it be.” Good move. Phoebe Bridgers sings it so brilliantly on the McCartney III Imagined album.

Ringo kept up to speed with Seventies pop as a buddy of T. Rex’s glam-rock guru Marc Bolan. “I’ve got a Les Paul given to me by my good pal Marc Bolan and I can play several chords,” he told Disc in 1972. “I pick it up and if something comes I tape it. I have to tape it otherwise I’ll forget what I’ve done.” “Back Off Boogaloo,” produced and co-written by George, was Ringo’s gong-bangingly great T. Rex-style hit, reaching out to the children of the revolution.

A psychedelic groove inspired by a childhood game they used to play in the streets of Liverpool. It’s the highlight of New, with a playful zest re-energized by his bride Nancy Shevell. He played a memorable version of “Queenie Eye” at the Grammys with Ringo on drums—and the poignant sight of Yoko and Sean in the audience, getting up to dance. 

His great pained love song to Yoko, from his Lost Weekend  in L.A., when the marriage seemed to be over once and for all. The music heads into Stevie Wonder deep-soul territory. John wishes Yoko the best in her new life, even as she’s in someone else’s arms, adding, “Bless you whoever you are, holding her now / Be warm and kindhearted.” It’s his version of Bob Dylan’s “If You See Her, Say Hello,” saying farewell with a hard-won generosity of spirit.

If you were Paul McCartney in the Eighties, you could crank out perfect melodies like this, the kind other songwriters spend entire careers striving for—without anyone even noticing. “So Bad” was a here-today gone-today hit in 1983, from the era when he couldn’t get no respect at all, with gloppy production and you-gotta-be-kidding lyrics, a song even he dismissed as “overtly sentimental.” Which is true—but what’s wrong with that, I’d like to know?  One fan who DOES appreciate the greatness of “So Bad”: Smokey Robinson, who sang it exquisitely on the 2014 tribute album The McCartney Project.

One of the most mysteriously beautiful songs on All Things Must Pass, with George warning about the evils of the material world, as he follows his tangled chords wherever they lead. He cautions everyone to “beware of Maya,” or illusion. But in his demo version, he warns, “Beware of ABKCO,” a dart at new manager Allen Klein—a pithy quip about how deep in the material world he was slipping. On his next album, he was singing the “Sue Me, Sue You Blues.”

“Junk” dates back to the Rishikesh days, on retreat with the Maharishi—Paul does an excellent White Album demo version on the Beatles’ Anthology 3. But it’s perfect for his solo debut: a young man looks in a junk-shop window and gets a glimpse of his future, picturing himself as old and forgotten, like the flip side of “Eleanor Rigby.” It sums up the album’s lo-fi basement-tapes vibe. “It’s got the door opening, the banging of the tape recorder, a couple of people giggling in the background,” he described it in Rolling Stone in 1974. “I’d always like that, all those rough edges and loose ends. It gives it a kind of live excitement.”