The songs demonstrate the Beatles' increasing maturity as lyricists, and in their incorporation of brighter guitar tones and new instrumentation such as sitar, harmonium and fuzz bass, the group striving for more expressive sounds and arrangements for their music.

[5] Aside from setting a new attendance record when they played to over 55,000 at Shea Stadium on 15 August, the tour allowed the band to meet with Bob Dylan in New York and their longtime hero Elvis Presley in Los Angeles.

[8] In their new songs, the Beatles drew inspiration from soul music acts signed to the Motown and Stax record labels,[9] particularly the singles they heard on US radio that summer,[10] and from the contemporary folk rock of Dylan and the Byrds.

[14] Two years after the start of Beatlemania, the band were open to exploring new themes in their music through a combination of their tiring of playing to audiences full of screaming fans, their commercial power, a shared curiosity gained through literature and experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, and their interest in the potential of the recording studio.

[38] They received their MBEs at Buckingham Palace on 26 October, from Queen Elizabeth II,[39] and on 1–2 November, the band filmed their segments for The Music of Lennon & McCartney, a Granada Television tribute to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership.

[59] Having been introduced to the string instrument on the set of the 1965 film Help!, Harrison's interest was fuelled by fellow Indian music fans Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds, partway through the Beatles' US tour.

[69][81] According to musicologist Walter Everett, some of the vocal arrangements feature the same "pantonal planing of three-part root-position triads" adopted by the Byrds, who had initially based their harmonies on the style used by the Beatles and other British Invasion bands.

[99] Author Bernard Gendron dismisses the commonly held view that Rubber Soul is a folk rock album; he cites its incorporation of baroque and Eastern sounds as examples of the Beatles' "nascent experimentalism and eclectic power of appropriation", aspects that he says suggest an artistic approach that transcends the genre.

[117][nb 7] Arranged in 12/8 time,[119] and in the English folk style, the song has a Mixolydian melody that results in a drone effect in the acoustic guitars, complementing the sitar part, though switches to parallel scale of E Dorian during its middle eight.

[137] In Prendergast's description, the track "burst[s] forth with all the gusto of newly discovered psychedelia", as Lennon's lead vocal "luxuriates in an opiated haze of production and Harrison's Fender Stratocaster solo fuzzes with all the right hallucinatory sparkle".

[146] Author Ian MacDonald recognises the "distant influence" of Wilson Pickett's "In the Midnight Hour" and James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" on the song's rhythm, and highlights Starr's drumming (for its "feast of eccentric 'backwards fills'") and McCartney's dextrous bass playing.

[165] Riley likens the musical arrangement to a "scene from the old world" and he concludes of the song: "The old-fashioned atmosphere conveys desire and deception, and Lennon sings it as much to console himself as to make sense of its bewildering proportions ('And she promises the earth to me and I believe her/After all this time I don't know why').

[171][nb 9] Lennon credited a remark made by BBC journalist Kenneth Allsop, who had asked why his songs appeared to lack the wordplay and childhood focus evident in his 1964 book In His Own Write, as the catalyst for "In My Life".

[174] In Gould's description, "In My Life" "owed a conscious debt" to the Miracles' contemporary hit "The Tracks of My Tears" and thereby served as "the most recent installment in the lively cultural exchange between Motown's Hitsville Studios and EMI's Abbey Road".

[182] MacDonald writes that, although Lennon and McCartney would most likely have viewed the subject matter as dated even in June, the group's performance gives the song the required "drive and character" for Rubber Soul, particularly Starr's approach to the rhythm changes between its contrasting sections.

[208] The stereo mixes used by Capitol contained two false starts at the beginning of "I'm Looking Through You",[203] while "The Word" also differed from the UK version due to the double-tracking of Lennon's lead vocal, the addition of an extra falsetto harmony and the panning treatment given to one of the percussion parts.

[30][nb 13] In Phillip Norman's view, the title served as "a sly dig at their archrivals (and private best mates) the Rolling Stones", with the added implication that the Beatles' "variety" of soul music "at least was stamped out by a good strong northern [English] Wellington boot".

From early 1966, record companies in the UK ceased their policy of promoting adult-oriented entertainers over rock acts, and embraced budget albums for their lower-selling artists to cater to the increased demand for LPs.

[279] Newsweek lauded the Beatles as "the Bards of Pop",[280] saying that the album's combination of "gospel, country, baroque counterpoint and even French popular ballads" lent the band a unique style in which their songs were "as brilliantly original as any written today".

[281] Like Newsweek, The New York Times had belittled the group when they first performed in America in February 1964, but following the release of Rubber Soul, entertainment critic Jack Gould wrote an effusive tribute in the newspaper's Sunday magazine.

"[283] The writers of Record Mirror's initial review found the LP lacking some of the variety of the group's previous releases but also said: "one marvels and wonders at the constant stream of melodic ingenuity stemming from the boys, both as performers and composers.

Green acknowledged that his was an unpopular opinion, before stating: "Judging LPs strictly on their merits, recent albums from Manfred Mann, the Beach Boys and Jerry Lee Lewis rank high above Rubber Soul.

"[285] In another review that Richard Williams later cited as an example of the British pop press not being "quite ready" for the album, Melody Maker found the Beatles' new sound "a little subdued" and said that tracks such as "You Won't See Me" and "Nowhere Man" "almost get monotonous – an un-Beatle-like feature if ever there was one".

[251] Among the few newspaper columnists seriously reviewing rock music was Ralph J. Gleason, jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle,[288] who credited Rubber Soul with "experimenting far past the style of outright imitations of Negro rhythm and blues artists" which had often characterised the Beatles' earlier work.

"[307] Scott Plagenhoef of Pitchfork describes the album as "the most important artistic leap in the Beatles' career – the signpost that signaled a shift away from Beatlemania and the heavy demands of teen pop, toward more introspective, adult subject matter".

[299] According to Richie Unterberger of AllMusic, the album's lyrics represented "a quantum leap in terms of thoughtfulness, maturity, and complex ambiguities", while the music was similarly progressive in its use of sounds beyond "the conventional instrumental parameters of the rock group".

[311] Conversely, Jon Friedman of Esquire finds the work vastly overrated, with only the Lennon-dominated songs "Norwegian Wood", "Nowhere Man", "In My Life" and "Girl" worthy of praise, and he dismisses it as "dull" and "the Beatles' most inconsequential album".

[326] This in turn was reflected in The Village Voice's appointment of Richard Goldstein, a recent graduate and New Journalism writer, to the new position of rock critic, in June 1966,[327] and the Beatles' central role in achieving cultural legitimisation for pop music over 1966–67.

in February 1966 with the aim of reflecting the sophistication brought to the genre by Rubber Soul and Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home – the two albums that, in music journalist Barney Hoskyns' description, "arguably gave birth to 'rock' as a more solid concept than 'pop'".

He quotes writer Nik Cohn's complaints that the "danger signs" for pop music's loss of innocence were apparent on Rubber Soul, and poet Philip Larkin's comment that "[The Beatles'] fans stayed with them, and the nuttier intelligentsia, but they lost the typists in the Cavern."