r/TheBeatles

I’ve been working on this for a while and I’m finally ready to share it.
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I rebuilt The Beatles catalog into 14 expanded playlists: the 13 core albums plus Odds & Ends for material that doesn’t fit neatly anywhere else.
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The project is called THE LONG ONE.
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Originally I called it The Complete Sessions but that stopped feeling accurate. These aren’t strict session by session reconstructions and there’s still unreleased Beatles material in the vaults.
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I also considered Unfolded but eventually THE LONG ONE hit me like Hank Schrader on the shitter.
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Literally. I thought of it on the toilet.
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The name also has an actual Beatles connection since “The Long One” was a working title for an early assembly of the Abbey Road medley.
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The basic idea is to keep the original album sequence but expand each song into its own developmental history.
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A song may go:
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demo → rehearsal → early take → breakdown → backing track → alternate version → master → remix → BBC/live version
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Then it moves to the next song on the album.
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Keeping the original sequence intact matters a lot to me. One of my biggest pet peeves with expanded playlists is when album tracks get moved around just to make everything perfectly chronological. Once the songs are out of order it stops feeling like the album to me.
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So the rule became:
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Album order first. Song family second. Developmental order within the song. Recording date after that.
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Honestly my OCPD was never going to let me not do this once the idea got in my head.
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What started as “I should make some Beatles playlists” turned into spreadsheets tracking takes, mixes, recording dates, duplicates, source releases, alternate versions, sequencing and where everything belonged.
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I built these whenever I had time. After work, on lunch breaks, on weekends, late at night or whenever I could squeeze in more research and sorting.
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I also listen to music pretty much all day while I’m working so these playlists got a lot of actual listening time while I was building them.
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For closer comparisons my main setup is a wired DAC with closed back headphones using 40mm carbon fiber drivers, a brass surround, a 10Hz to 40kHz frequency response and hi res support.
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A lot of my testing was done through TIDAL. It can deliver HiRes FLAC up to 24 bit / 192 kHz when available compared with standard CD quality lossless at 16 bit / 44.1 kHz. With the wired DAC I can avoid Bluetooth compression and get a cleaner reference when comparing tiny differences between versions.
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That mattered for things like vocal placement, bass, drums, edits, tape noise, stereo imaging, alternate mixes and mastering differences.
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I’m also not making the playlists long just for the sake of being long. If two tracks are essentially the same performance and mix with nothing meaningfully different besides mastering I usually keep one. If there’s a real difference worth hearing I want it represented.
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For the songs The Beatles covered I also included the original artist’s version (when available) before their version because I like hearing what they were working from and then hearing what they did with it.
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The artwork became its own part of the project too. I’m not a graphic designer but The Beatles are my favorite band so I wanted each cover to actually fit the album or era rather than just using random photos or tossing together low effort AI slop thumbnails.
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I wanted the real Beatles on the covers and I wanted the images to actually mean something. They’re built around real historical Beatles photographs and source imagery from the appropriate periods. No fake Beatles, no AI generated artwork and no AI generated audio.
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THE LONG ONE
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Please Please Me
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0Lm1jNnYzJjgyvI3eZluSU

And yes the Abbey Road playlist includes the actual Long One.
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The project is also available on Apple Music, TIDAL, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. I don’t have every individual playlist link organized for those yet but you can find them through my profiles:
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Apple Music⁠ | TIDAL⁠ | YouTube Music⁠ | Amazon Music⁠
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I’ll keep updating these whenever more official Beatles material comes out.
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If you notice something missing, duplicated, misplaced or incorrect let me know. I genuinely want the project to keep getting better and welcome any and all feedback.
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I’m sure only five people on Earth care about this at the level I do including me.
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So I hope the other four of you enjoy it.

Thank you.

What if the Beatles were still together in 1980 and made another album?

John, Paul, George and Ringo were all still releasing plenty of great music on their own, so I wanted to see what would happen if I brought some of those songs back together and treated them like tracks on a Beatles album.

I ended up with 14 songs, and I tried to sequence them the way I would an actual Beatles record, with all four of them represented throughout.

And there's really only one place this album could begin. Because if the Beatles were making a new album in 1980, hearing John Lennon open it with “(Just Like) Starting Over” would have been pretty perfect.

Here is the tracklist for this album: