Five sources, ranked by what each one is good for, plus a seven-song starter path.
Read Pollack for prose, tap HookTheory for quick chord function, pull Isophonics for spreadsheet data, layer BeatlesFC for academic function labels, and reach for Krerowicz when you want the whole shelf.
These are five places that explain how Beatles songs are built.
The best one to read is Alan Pollack. He wrote a plain story about almost every song: how it is shaped, where the tune goes, and why it sounds the way it does.
HookTheory shows you the chords fast, with little number names, one song part at a time.
Isophonics is for people who like charts.
You can download files that list every chord and where it changes.
BeatlesFC adds a label to each chord that tells you its job in the song.
Aaron Krerowicz wrote big books that look at every single chord of every song.
Check that you can still buy them before you pay.
At the bottom there are seven songs to start with.
Do one at a time.
Each one teaches a new trick, like how a middle part works or how a chord can sound sad.
The closest thing to a free, song-by-song Beatles theory archive, with separate entries for nearly the whole catalog: “A Day in the Life,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Across the Universe,” “All My Loving,” “Because,” “Blackbird,” and on.
Best for: form, key movement, melody, harmony, arrangement, and why each song behaves the way it does.
The mirrored index is easier to browse than the older archive because the titles stay on one long page with direct entries.
Open the mirror →A Beatles page like “And I Love Her” splits the song into verse, bridge, and outro, then gives chord and melody analysis in relative notation.
The Beatles index runs from “A Day in the Life” through “Your Mother Should Know,” and TheoryTabs show progressions, melodies, and Roman-numeral function.
Best for: quick Roman-numeral patterns rather than essay-style analysis.
Open the index →Song-by-song files for structural segmentation, key changes, chords, and beats, in CSV and RDF for many tracks.
Useful for building spreadsheets, comparing harmonic habits, counting chord types, and mapping where the modulations happen.
Best for: the nerd vault, less prose, more usable machinery.
Open the annotations →Adds harmonic function labels to the Isophonics Beatles dataset.
The 2026 paper classifies chords by function, tonic, predominant, dominant, at the phrase level.
That bridges raw chord identifies with higher-level structure, which is what “song by song” needs to become “what is the song doing.”
Best for: use after Isophonics when you want function, not just chord spelling.
Read the paper →Krerowicz describes one volume as structural analysis of all 211 official Beatles recordings and another as a harmony analysis that examines every chord of every song.
His focus is music analysis rather than biography, which is the right lane here.
Best for: the most exhaustive paid route.
Treat availability carefully and verify the exact edition before buying.
Read the interview →The earlier five-song craft path (If I Fell, And I Love Her, In My Life, Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane) has moved to its own page at /beatles-pre-1969-starter. The 1969-forward deep-dive queue is at /beatles-1969-forward.