Re: Why I Love Collecting Vinyl (Records)
A Hard Day's Night
yeh that's my favourite one prior to Rubber Soul, and one folks generally don't know about, assuming those first five albums were all simplistic teenybopper pop. A Hard Day's Night was a major step forward in songwriting and instrumentation. My favourite track is "If I Fell".
It's all Lennon and McCartney, no covers perhaps because it was a movie soundtrack and they wanted to maximise profits. Ringo doesn't sing at all, possibly a bonus, as it often feels like they're just trying to do him a favour. Unusually, this LP has the singles of the day on it AND the B-sides such as "You Can't Do That" and "Things We Said Today".
The EP Long Tall Sally is basically the non-lp single directly associated with the album in this case. I think those four songs on the EP all came from the same recording sessions and the artwork features the same font. Ringo sings the cover toon "Matchbox" on that EP, so maybe his usual vocal spot got shuffled onto the EP when they realised they had enough new Lennon-McCartney originals to fill a whole album. George sings "Happy Just to Dance with You", they would sometimes give him a weaker Lennon-McCartney toon to sing instead of a cover version, on the albums before he started writing his own material.
Also it's not just all Lennon-McCartney. It is almost entirely Lennon toons, I thing Paul wrote at most three and John wrote all the rest. John was at his creative peak at this time, way earlier than the albums generally considered cool to listen to, and I think this is the most Lennon-dominant album.
Help! also included two singles on the album, I think because aHDN and Help!were both soundtrack albums someone felt the expected hits heard in the movie ought to be on the official soundtrack (also in both cases the first single was the title track of the movie, so it'd be strange to leave it off). But in the case of the two Help! singles, they each had non-lp exclusive b-sides: "I'm Down" and "Yes It Is".
Otherwise, typically each British album had a corresponding non-lp single derived from the same recording sessions, it's a fun game to figure out which single corresponds to which album.