After ‘What You’re Doing,’ my favorite song on Beatles For Sale is John Lennon’s ‘I’m a Loser.’ Lennon dressed up his famously low self esteem in a song about a failed relationship but really about his own insecurities.
Lennon was paying a lot of attention to Bob Dylan at the time, and this is the first of his songs that makes that influence clear (it would become more clear with ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’ on the band’s next album).
The Beatles’ fourth album, Beatles For Sale, has the dubious honor of being my least favorite of the band’s releases. Nestled between A Hard Day’s Night and Help! with half of its tracklist dedicated to covers, it never really stood a chance.
But, as the saying goes, the worst Beatles album is still better than most of what’s out there. And Beatles For Sale certainly has its share of great songs.
Beatles For Sale feels like it should be the group’s third album — so much so that I have accidentally miscategorized it as such several times already in preparing this week’s blog posts. After the all-original material of A Hard Day’s Night, it returns to the pattern of the band’s first two releases, splitting the lineup between originals and covers.
I imagine it was a bit of a let-down when it came out. Following the phenomenal artistic success of A Hard Day’s Night it must have seemed like a step backward. For me, who discovered all of The Beatles’ albums nearly two decades after the group broke up, that wasn’t really an issue.
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