The Beatles - Please Please Me (1963)

Reason for Listening:
It seems I have not listened to very many The Beatles albums. Decided to start with the first.

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Released .
14 songs. 31:59. Please Please Me (1963)
Wikipedia

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Notes:
--20250814--
First listen. Remastered 2009.
How strange. This song title is "Anna (Go To Him)" yet the song lyrics are "go with him." In any case, apparently the song was written and first performed by Arthur Alexander.
"Twist And Shout" has the most Spotify plays but interestingly the song was originally recorded by The Top Notes in 1961, and became a hit when The Isley Brothers recorded the song in 1962.

4: "Love Me Do"; "Twist And Shout";
3: "I Saw Her Standing There";
2: "P.S. I Love You"; "Do You Want To Know A Secret";
1: "Anna (Go To Him)"; "Chains";
0: "Misery"; "Boys"; "Ask Me Why"; "Please Please Me"; "Baby It's You"; "A Taste of Honey"; "There's A Place";

Summary:
Overall, the album is fun. It was a wakeup to realize that not every song they recorded was a big hit.

I had trouble picking between "Love Me Do" and "Twist And Shout", but eventually I decided to go with "Love Me Do".
Overall Rating: 4.2/5
Favorite Song: "Love Me Do"

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Billboard 200
Debut Date: 20101204 | Peak Date: 20101204 | Peak Position: 155 | Weeks on Chart: 1

The Wikipedia article mentions the following:

On the other hand, the album was not released in the US, where the band sold poorly for most of 1963; after the stateside emergence of Beatlemania, Vee-Jay Records released a mild abridgment of the album as Introducing... The Beatles in early 1964, while EMI's American label Capitol Records divided the material from Please Please Me across multiple albums. Other countries also received different versions of the album, which continued until 1987, when the entirety of the Beatles catalogue was brought to CD and internationally standardised to the UK albums.

This explains why the US Billboard entry for this album doesn't match their success as a band.