The song remains different

Whenever I'm asked "desert island" questions about books and movies, my brain freezes. But with music, my answer is clear: I'd take all the Beatles albums.

My earliest memories run to a Beatles soundtrack. My mother, a huge fan, used to play them all the time, and my brother and I would stand in front of her big HMV record player, bouncing on our toes our childish version of dancing. The Beatles are a band whose music instantly brings a smile to my face, and I think there are just two songs I don't like.

As a teenaged, misguided guitar student (misguided in my belief that I had ability), I found that the band used some truly fiendish chords, all of them seemingly flattened, and minor and seventh and diminished, coming at my scrabbling fingers one after the other, often changing with every word of the lyrics.

It is The Beatles' harmonic and melodic complexity, as well as the constant twists and turns of their songs that has endeared them to so many listeners. They're one of the few bands that can surprise even during well-known songs. Led Zeppelin is the only other band I can think of that can consistently do that. This is unlike the self-conscious twists favoured by progressive rock bands: sudden changes of key or time signature, or abrupt bridges almost humorously more ornate or pared down than the rest of the song. The Beatles deal in more subsumed surprises: more Coen Brothers than M. Night Shyamalan.

Thinking about why this was so endearing, I tried to see whether surprise works in other areas. It certainly does visually: a photograph of an odd number of objects has more appeal than even numbers, where we can group them into expected patterns. The centre of a picture is its most powerful place, so putting the subject there often makes for a far weaker composition than the "surprise" of putting it towards one of the corners, known as the Rule of Thirds.

It works with taste as well. Squeezing lemon juice onto a piece of fish is a surprise of sorts. As are sea-salt caramels. Thai salads, with their mix of spicy, sweet, sour and salty are bite after bite of "expected surprise".

We love expected surprises because we're hard-wired to not like too much of the other kind. In the old days the really old days when most of our behaviours developed surprises often meant tedious running for your life from springing creatures, or rolling around clutching your belly because of strange berries. And because surprise usually meant danger, surprise in a controlled setting built tension and let us release it through laughter. We seem to love setting this emotional catapult up over and over: hunt retellings around fires, roller coasters, horror movies … getting finer and finer until it's about the complex taste of a drink or the appeal of a piece of music.

But back to The Beatles, they've been on my mind of late because they're, as the news tells us, "as big as ever". There was the recent release of their catalogue on iTunes, the Rock Band game, and also CD remasters of their albums. The latter apparently sound gorgeous revealing depth and detail that the current 1987 transfers just cannot do. This means that there's a whole new set of surprises waiting to be discovered, especially in that unadulterated mono box set of the first 10 albums that I'd dearly love to possess. Put that in my hands, and I'll happily go off to that desert island, and delight in being astonished by stuff I saw coming.

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.