Ruminations on the Beatles: A Hard Day's Night

With their first feature film A Hard Day's Night, fans got a comical glimpse of what its like to be a Beatle.  The accompanying soundtrack album gave listeners the first real glimpse of the band's enormous potential.
The Beatles were never really stagnant (that's one of their great strengths) but on their thir album they grew a lot in confidence: its the first album to include exclusively Lennon/McCartney compositions and it was all but unheard of for a band to have a whole album of originals at that time.
With memorable tunes like the title track, "Can't Buy Me Love" and "I Should Have Known Better", its clear that the songwriters grew a great deal during the making of this album.
A Hard Day's Night also includes a few of my favorite deep-cuts from the Beatles catalog. "If I Fell" is a tender love song that shows Paul's softer side, and "Things We Said Today" is possibly one of the most intelligent and powerful love songs I've ever heard.
I consider this album one of their best.