The Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye” was a bigger hit than it deserved. It reached Number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in both the UK and the US, but then, by that point, basically anything the Fab Four touched did. The lyrics—a series of opposite phrases resulting from a game Paul McCartney played with the band’s assistant as Paul hit alternating notes on a harmonium—were a big step backwards for the group, who, after being exposed to Dylan, had finally started taking lyric-writing seriously a couple years earlier.
But the song does have one legitimate stroke of genius. It’s the “ooooh” that Paul sings in falsetto at 2:04.