By turns impassioned and irreverent, The Beatles by Ear is a collection of essays on each Beatles album, song, chord, key change, and songwriting technique. Song fragments like those of the Abbey Road medley and Sgt. Pepper are examined first as individual songs and then as larger suites. The essays focus on fresh musical insights and avoid  the backstories and anecdotes about each song (the “standard talking points”) that are common knowledge among even the most casual Beatles fans.

The Beatles by Ear is written for musically inclined readers who—like the Beatles—have never learned to read or write music, but can play a few chords and are drawn to understand the creative processes behind the popular song.

A central premise of the book is that the Beatles' lack of formal training helped rather than hindered the expression of their natural talent. Whenever possible, theoretical terms and concepts are limited to those used by the Beatles themselves in the interview quotations sprinkled liberally throughout the book.

The reader is expected to know two things:

• the names of the 12 notes (shown in the book with letter names)
• how to play simple chords in the key of C on keyboard or guitar

For those who don’t know the names of notes and chords, a series of detailed tutorials is included in one of the appendices.

Hundreds of page number references enable the book to be read from cover to cover, or used as a reference book for isolated studies of individual songs or composing techniques.

In addition to the main chronological survey of albums and singles, there are separate sections for:

• each chord the Beatles used
• each key change
• vocal harmonies
• melodic basslines
• riffs
• the five rhythm tricks the Beatles used to manipulate the forms of their songs
• Beatles resources (a survey of the best books, films, podcasts, websites, and YouTube channels used by the author in the process of researching the book)

The Beatles canon is contextualized against a backdrop of:

• predecessors: classical music, jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll and R&B
• contemporaries: Brian Wilson, Bob Dylan, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Burt Bacharach, Carole King, and the Motown and Stax house bands.