in Music | February 4th, 2026 Leave a Comment
More than a few of us can claim, with some confidence, to know every Beatles song. And indeed it may be true, in that we’ve heard every track of all their studio albums. But as decade after decade of Beatles scholarship has demonstrated, there’s knowing their songs, and then there’s knowing their songs. Musician and YouTuber David Bennett has made it his project to attain the second kind of knowledge, and on his dedicated series UnBeatled, to share it with the public. In each UnBeatled video he analyzes just one song — “Help!,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “Penny Lane,” and so on — at a level of detail fine enough to necessitate not just breaking it down to its component tracks, but also examining the demos and unreleased takes recorded in the studio.
This process can reveal a great deal about the Beatles’ songwriting process, as Bennett explains in the video at the top of the post. In the course of twenty minutes, he covers eleven songs, a selection not necessarily limited to the group’s universally praised compositions.
Take the first, “Yellow Submarine,” whose early recordings differ both lyrically, melodically, and in time signature from the version we know (and may or may not love), beginning with an idea of John’s and being further shaped by Paul through its iterations. Another of John’s musical seeds is “Everybody Had a Hard Year,” whose fingerpicking pattern (originally learned from Donovan in India) is also heard in “Julia” and “Dear Prudence,” and which evolved, with different chords, into the middle section of “I’ve Got a Feeling.”
