Notes on

About this edition

Alan W. Pollack posted the first of his Notes on … to the Usenet group rec.music.beatles over Memorial Day weekend, 1989, with “We Can Work It Out”. He finished the official canon in February 2000 with “Her Majesty”, and kept revising for another year. The notes were turned into web pages by Ed Chen, Mike Markowski, Bruce Dumes and Maurizio Codogno, then indexed and published by Ger Tillekens in the Dutch journal Soundscapes.

This edition takes that text unchanged and re-sets it for reading on any screen. Nothing in the notes has been rewritten. What’s new is the way you get around:

  • Full-text search across every note (press /).
  • Chord charts redrawn as bars, which you can play in the browser, with Pollack’s bass lines, melodies and inner voices sounding along with the chords.
  • A form strip for each song, linked to Pollack’s section-by-section walkthrough.
  • Backlinks: each note lists the other notes that mention it.
  • Reading order both by Pollack’s numbering and by release, with keyboard shortcuts.
  • A sortable, filterable table of every song, by key, meter, release and recording date.
  • A glossary, with definitions shown in place as you read.
  • Reading settings for theme, typeface, size, spacing and width, plus a record of what you’ve read. Both are kept only in your browser.
  • Pollack’s earlier versions of 40 notes, linked from each note’s revision history.

Background reading

How it’s made

The words and the data are kept apart from the design. Each note is a plain Markdown file with its song details (key, meter, form, recording and release dates) in a header block. The indexes are JSON files. Templates, one stylesheet and a few scripts turn them into this site, and changing the design never touches the text.

Sources: the notes and indexes as published in Soundscapes, now kept at awpnoteson.info. Chord playback is a rough guide made from Pollack’s chord symbols. It starts at the record’s tempo where that is known, measured from the Isophonics beat annotations (Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London) for the twelve studio albums. Pollack doesn’t give tempos himself. It is not a recording, and charts are only drawn where the typed chart can be read reliably.

Song facts from the Beatles DB

Pollack gives each song’s key, meter, form and dates. Four other facts, and the Wikipedia links, come from the Beatles DB, a collection of Beatles song data compiled by David Pannell: who mainly wrote each song, who sings lead, how long the record is, and its place in Billboard’s ranking of the Beatles’ 50 biggest hits in the US. They appear on each note, in the song table, and as the “Who wrote it” and “Who sings” views of the grid on the front page.

The writer named is the one who mainly wrote the song, as most histories tell it, not the official credit: nearly every original is credited to Lennon–McCartney whoever wrote it. “McCartney, with Lennon” means McCartney’s song with some help from Lennon. These attributions are Pannell’s judgment, not Pollack’s, and some are disputed. Lengths are for the original release.

    Type a song title, or try “V-of-V”, “Mixolydian” or “cross relation”.