STUDIO ALBUM BY THE BEATLES

Year Released: 1969

Abbey Road is the eleventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles, released on 26 September 1969. It is the last album the group recorded, although Let It Be was the last album completed before the band's break-up in April 1970. It was mostly recorded in April, July, and August 1969, and reached number one in both the US and the United Kingdom. A double A-side single from the album, "Something" / "Come Together", was released in October, which also topped the charts in the US.

Abbey Road incorporates styles such as rock, pop, blues, singer-songwriter, and progressive rock, and makes prominent use of the Moog synthesizer and guitar played through a Leslie speaker unit. It is also notable for having a long medley of songs on side two that have subsequently been covered as one suite by other notable artists. The album was recorded in a more collegial atmosphere than the Get Back / Let It Be sessions earlier in the year, but there were still significant confrontations within the band, particularly over Paul McCartney's song "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", and John Lennon did not perform on several tracks. By the time the album was released, Lennon had left the group, though this was not publicly announced until McCartney also quit the following year.

Although Abbey Road was an immediate commercial success, it received mixed reviews upon release. Some critics found its music inauthentic and criticised the production's artificial effects. By contrast, critics today view the album as one of the Beatles' best and it is considered by many to be one of the greatest albums of all time. George Harrison's two songs on the album, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun", have been regarded as among the best he wrote for the group. The album's cover, featuring the group walking across a zebra crossing outside Abbey Road Studios, has become one of the most famous and imitated in the history of recorded music.

TRACK-LIST:

Side A:

1. Come Together
2. Something
3. Maxwell's Silver Hammer
4. Oh! Darling
5. Octopus's Garden
6. I Want You (She's So Heavy)

Side B:

1. Here Comes The Sun
2. Because
3. You Never Give Me Your Money
4. Sun King
5. Mean Mr. Mustard
6. Polythene Pam
7. She Came In Through The Bathroom Window
8. Golden Slumbers
9. Carry That Weight
10. The End
11. Her Majesty