With the Beatles

With the Beatles is the second studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. It was released in the United Kingdom on 22 November 1963 on Parlophone, eight months after the release of the band's debut album, Please Please Me. Produced by George Martin, the album features eight original compositions and six covers. [Wikipedia]

Recorded between July and October 1963 in seven separate sessions (in contrast to the debut's single-day blitz), With the Beatles found the band negotiating Beatlemania while it was happening to them. They were on tour for most of the recording window, breaking off to record then returning to one-night stands. By release the country was in such grip that a Birmingham warehouse-load of LPs had to be moved under police escort.

With the Beatles is a Beatles EP issued in the United Kingdom on 22 November 1963 by Parlophone under catalogue number PMC 1206. It sits in the band's Beatlemania (1962–1964) period. It was issued the same day as the parent LP With the Beatles.

Sessions were produced by George Martin with Norman Smith engineering, working at EMI Studios, Abbey Road. The signal chain ran through the Twin-track BTR-2 (1962); Studer J37 four-track from late-1963 • REDD.37 / REDD.51 valve consoles, with vocals captured on Neumann U47, U48. This combination of room, tape format and outboard chain is the same one heard across the band's other releases from the era — meaning the release shares its sonic identity with its parent LP rather than departing from it.

The release features It Won't Be Long, All I've Got to Do, All My Loving, Don't Bother Me, Little Child, Till There Was You, Please Mister Postman.

Documented alternate masters and remaster passes can be found via the linked entries above; the editorial position throughout Beatles Answers is that the original UK mono master is the canonical point of reference for any EP from this era, with the 2009 and 50th-anniversary stereo remasters treated as documented variations rather than replacements. Catalogue numbers, label copy and matrix data are taken from EMI/Parlophone primary documentation and cross-checked against Mark Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (1988).

Norman Smith was again the engineer; the four-track Studer J37, which would define every subsequent Beatles album, had not yet been installed and the band were still working to twin-track. The recording was nevertheless more layered than the debut, with more overdubs and tighter arrangements. Smokey Robinson's harmony stack on You Really Got a Hold on Me; the chiming bell-tone Rickenbacker 12-string George Harrison had picked up in New York; the calypso piano of Till There Was You — these were the band stretching beyond what they could play live in one take.

All My Loving, written words-first by Paul on the tour bus, opened the band's debut Ed Sullivan appearance in February 1964 and so became the literal soundtrack to their American breakthrough. Don't Bother Me, written by George in a sickbed in Bournemouth, marked his arrival as a writer (the first of 22 Harrison compositions on Beatles records). Money (That's What I Want) closed the LP with another lung-shredding Lennon performance to sit beside Twist and Shout.

Released 22 November 1963 — the same day as the assassination of President Kennedy — With the Beatles became the second LP in UK history to sell a million copies. It held UK number one for 21 weeks, displacing Please Please Me, which had held the spot for 30. The half-shadowed black-and-white sleeve by Robert Freeman — shot in a Bournemouth hotel corridor — became the visual shorthand for the band almost immediately, copied for The Rolling Stones' second LP and parodied for decades.

If Please Please Me was a band captured live, With the Beatles was a band beginning to discover what a recording studio could do. The album is built as a rock'n'roll set, but the Smokey-soul ballads point ahead to the introspection of A Hard Day's Night and the studio sophistication that would soon follow.

• BPI certification: Gold (British Phonographic Industry)
• RIAA certification: Gold (Recording Industry Association of America)

Chart positions and certifications sourced from the relevant Wikipedia article infoboxes and citation footnotes.

• Rolling Stone 500: Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2003, and was included in Robert Dimery's 1001 Albums You
• Rolling Stone 500: Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2003, and was included in Robert Dimery's 1001 Alb

Recognition mentions extracted from the Wikipedia article. Verify against the linked source before quoting.

• Please Please Me