"Rubber Soul" Brought new Meaning to Producing an Album

For more than fifty years, the goal of a band was to release as many singles as possible as quickly as possible. Producing an album simply meant compiling a selection of completely unrelated singles. Little sense of weaving together musical and literary themes, political and cultural themes throughout one album was fostered by the popular bands until "Rubber Soul" came along. This idea brought a whole new level of quality to pop music, once again blurring the line for what was expected of music.

The songs in Rubber Soul go from the normal, shallow songs describing an event, as with "Drive My Car", to songs dealing with much more unfamiliar topics with deeper themes, such as existentialism. In "Nowhere Man", for instance, the Beatles move from common "love" and "loss" type of songs to a deep seeded message of how to find meaning in life, something everyone struggles with, along with love and loss, but something which few really expressed in pop music before.

As you listen to the album through, it is easy to pick out the places where it veers off from mainstream pop music (Paul McCartney's interest in avant garde must have played a big role here). Again, songs like "In My Life" offer personal insight into the power of memories, and the power of love to make one forget, a unique choice of topic which ties in well with the "Nowhere Man" and finding meaning in life. For, when a person looks at their past, and looks back on their memories, they have a sort of power to realize meaning into what good or misfortunate things may have happened, giving them a greater sense of meaning in their life.

Each song in "Rubber" soul can be connected in some where, even if just by musical style, chords and notes, to another in the album, helping the listener to build a certain congruency with the album as a whole, that is not possible with the singles albums previously produced.

Because weaving songs together to form one work of art drove deeper meaning into each song individually, forming albums like this became more and more popular, changing expectations for singles to expectation for a congruent album for a short time.