The odd time signatures of "Happiness is a Warm Gun" & revisiting "The White Album" in general [Something Interesting #73]

I run hot-and-cool on The Beatles for the most part, really getting into them when I was in high school and then leaving them behind for many other bands while in college. Part of that is due to getting sick of hearing how great they were and finding that the music sounded "Ok" when I actually put on the CDs. I heard it vaguely but figured it was a "You had to be there" sort of reaction.

Fast forward over 20 years later and I find this video randomly from a pianist named David Bennett, whose YouTube channel focuses on song breakdowns from multiple musicians and has another song-by-song analysis podcast dedicated to The Beatles' works. The video I caught (posted here as the focus) does an excellent job making the case of how "Happiness is a Warm Gun" is structured in such a fascinating way that only confident songwriters could pull it off. As one commenter (@keepinggamers7425) put it: "The Beatles sound so simple sometimes and then you look into it and they were actually the second coming of Mozart."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcFK7U6qOs4

While the Mozart thing might be a tad hyperbolic, they're not wrong about the complexity that's actually there in those later Beatles recordings. After I saw the video, I chose to listen to the entire 90 minutes of The Beatles/"The White Album" (1968) while working and came away with the following:

1. The original CDs for The Beatles from 1987 (the only way to hear them in 2002) were absolute garbage. Hearing the whole thing remastered, even if it was the mix from 2009 allowed me to pick up on details I had no idea even existed.

2. All arguments about trimming it down to a single album feel really stupid, since there actually is a theme to the whole thing as a complete unit if you know the story of the making: it's about what they found when they were in India to learn about Transcendental Meditation.

Of course, this is just one person's humble opinion and I'm also going to post articles I was reading later on about both their trip to the Majarishi and the recording session afterwards:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfyTzDu2TmQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=262449_0wxI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H26LMwzUzJc

I also checked out the box set for the album to hear some of the demos and, yeah, a lot of work was put into the creation of this thing. I highly recommend listening to those as well, which I'm posting here too: