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To most Beatles fans, choosing between the songs of the Fab 4 is a bit like choosing between children. But, on the JamsBio exclusive, Playing The Beatles Backward, one intrepid fan dares to rank the original songs of The Beatles and give his reasons why in a worst-to-first countdown. Check back each day for the next five songs on the list, prepare to hit the message boards to defend your favorites, and follow the countdown all the way to Number 1.

The complete list to date.

The Last Five:

19. “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”

18. “Tomorrow Never Knows”

17. “Lady Madonna”

16. “Please Please Me”

15. “Nowhere Man”

14. “If I Fell”

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Nestled amidst all the adrenaline-rush rockers on A Hard Day’s Night is this tender ballad that finds The Beatles, and John Lennon in particular, showing off a newfound maturity. There are no easy answers in the situation in which the protagonist finds himself, and hearts will be broken no matter what decision he makes. “If I Fell” is a lot more cutting than the puppy-love odes of their previous records.

The music takes a complex turn here as well without ever losing its inherent sweetness. There is the opening section which comes and goes, never to be heard from again. And there is no chorus to speak of. We talked about how “Please Please Me” was influenced by Roy Orbison, but this ballad has an Orbison-like feel to it as well, always rising, and then rising again just when you think it has reached a peak. Paul is really taxed to hit that high harmony part throughout.

John finds himself at the hub of a love triangle here, and he shows sensitivity toward the girl he’s with while singing his heart out to the girl he loves. He also seems to suggest that it’s better to not love at all rather than to love and lose. It’s interesting that many of the early love songs come back often to the word “pride.” While some of it may have to do with the easy rhyme the word provides, it’s still a fascinatingly antiquated notion of manhood, and it reveals a lot of insecurity that you might not expect from guys who were stunningly successful at such a young age. It’s the kind of thing that always made them relatable to their audience.

The harmonies of John and Paul hit all the right emotional highlights, bringing the lyrics to life without hammering them home. It’s a pitch-perfect performance of a gorgeous song, one of the first in which the boys admit that love is “more than just holding hands.”

13. “For No One”

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You might as well call this song “She Loves You Not.” Once again The Beatles tackle a love story from a third-person perspective, but this time the story is at the painful epilogue instead of the happy start. And once again Paul McCartney shows his mastery of the slow stuff and he gives a suitably clear-eyed performance in an attempt to convince the hapless suitor in this song.

Let it be repeated that Paul is a shamefully underrated lyricist. He nails the girl’s prevalent mood of indifference in the way that she talks about the man as if he’s not even in the room, some ghost she’s long since vanquished. Meanwhile he takes the man to task for his self-deception: “You want her/You need her/And yet you don’t believe her.”

The music is ridiculously beautiful. The descending piano notes in the verses seem to mirror the downfall of the relationship itself. And the lovely French horn interlude once again displays the group’s flair for adding just the right touch to each individual track.

The song begins with daybreak and ends with daybreak. It’s not clear whether it’s the same day or if time has passed, but it really doesn’t matter because nothing changes in this situation anyway. And nothing will until the man admits that his tears are cried “for no one,” an astute line that says more about the deterioration of a love affair than whole romance novels ever could.

12. “We Can Work It Out”

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I defy you to find a wasted or unnecessary moment in this song. It rushes by with the urgency and haste that Paul McCartney is urging his girlfriend to patch things up between them, and yet the band is in control of things the whole time. It is another example of a pristine pop song by the group, and they consistently produced these mini-masterpieces with shocking regularity.

The harmonium gives the song a slightly Victorian air, lending a stately dignity to the proceedings, embellishing the mood of restraint and compromise that Paul is espousing. The other distinguishing characteristic of the music in “We Can Work It Out” is the way the bridge sounds like it’s out of a completely different song. The harmonium goes from a supporting player to the star role, and the tempo changes from the main part of the song and then changes again within the bridge itself to a stomping waltz beat. If you guessed that the ever-mercurial John Lennon was in charge of this section, give yourself 100 Beatle points. How Ringo kept up with all of this is a marvel, but it’s one of the many reasons why he was so integral to the group.

I’ve seen many critics talk about how the two sections of the song reveal a lot about the men behind them, i.e. Paul, ever optimistic in the bridges and refrain, and John, impatient and pessimistic in the bridge. But if you parse the lyrics of both parts, you get essentially the same message: the longer the rift between these two people exists, the harder it will be to repair it.

The yin/yang of the duo is more evident in the musical differences, but, as usual, the song never feels disjointed. On “We Can Work It Out,” John and Paul prove that different methods, rather than being a cause for argument, can be interwoven to form something brilliant. If only the girl in the song would listen. If only John and Paul could have heeded this advice a few years down the road.

11. “Dear Prudence”

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Prudence Farrow’s legacy among Beatle fans is secure as long as this magnificent track off the White Album exists. John wrote it in India to coax her out of her tent, and if you can somehow disengage the song from its majestic recording, then you might be able to hear the traces of a relatively simple ditty that sounds like it was written without much effort.

But once the boys got a hold of it in the studio, they turned it into an anthem for the ages. The key is the way they build the track, beginning with the beguiling simplicity of John’s voice and his acoustic guitar, albeit heavily compressed to give it a heavier feeling. One by one, other elements are added: a single bass note, then drums, then a bass line from Paul, backing vocals, then some electric guitar.

By the time we get to the last verse, it seems there isn’t a noise-making doohickey in the studio that hasn’t been utilized. Of course, that’s the illusion that’s been created by the gradual introduction of the instruments. It’s a clever way to build up the drama, and indeed by the time John gets to his rousing conclusion, the emotional release is overwhelming.

Most Beatle scholars agree that Paul does the drumming on this song (recorded as it was during Starr’s brief departure), but others have speculated that Ringo could have come back at a later date and overdubbed the frenzied rolls in the closing section. That’s something that only one of those two men could answer for sure; whoever did the work deserves kudos for the unhinged glee of the drums in that part of the song.

“Dear Prudence” may not have succeeded in getting the desired reaction out of its intended target. But it has certainly beguiled millions of listeners since then, so I’d say its batting average is pretty high.

10. “Eleanor Rigby”

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It sounds like the plot of some independent film that was a critical success at Sundance yet has no chance of catching on with audiences: a lonely spinster and an ineffectual clergyman lead lives of parallel isolation before finally being united at the grave. Why “Eleanor Rigby” succeeds is that it does what all great pop songs can do better than even the finest movies: illuminate a theme or topic with insight and detail and do it all in less than three minutes, guaranteeing a force of impact that a 90-minute movie can’t hope to match.

The marvelous innovation of The Beatles, of course, was that they had the foresight to consider such a downbeat topic worthy of a pop song in the first place. Only Dylan was going to these dark places at this point, and his was almost an entirely different genre (although he was admittedly shifting to the rock idiom at the point of “Eleanor Rigby,” which was included on 1966’s Revolver).

Paul McCartney studies these characters with the detached interest of an anthropologist in much of the song. He notices Eleanor’s “face,” the one that she shows to the world, is kept separate from her inner self. He notices Father McKenzie’s tireless efforts in the face of indifference. He even asks rhetorical questions to the listener about what to do about this problem.

But the refrain of “Ah, look at all the lonely people” shows a crack in the façade, and the problem is now on a much wider scale. The word “all” implies a great number of lonely people, and it also hints at the conundrum that so many people walking around lonely fail to realize that theirs is not a unique condition.

All of it is set to the lovely string octet score put together by George Martin from Macca’s ideas, yet another innovation that would soon become de rigueur among pop artists searching for “serious” credibility. (It would even become a genre in itself; witness Procol Harum, The Left Banke, and, further down the line, ELO.)

The gut-punch of a twist ending is amplified by McCartney’s damning final verdict: “No one was saved.” The poignant realism of that line gives “Eleanor Rigby” an artistic truth that any work of art, regardless of the medium, would love to achieve.

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