We've noted that each of the three songwriting Beatles wrote songs to the women in their lives – songs that were explicitly biographical, direct communications between lovers. And we’ve noted that this is not unconventional, in the realm of pop/rock music (or any other genre, for that matter).
What’s unusual in this arena is when that communication between lovers winds up all over the radio.
Each of the many real-love-story songs of the Beatles made their way from the songwriter’s notebook to the studio to the record shop to the ears of his lover; but in a few cases, there was an extra stop – Top 40 radio.
Here they are.
And I Love Her
If you’re Jane Asher and you’re Paul McCartney’s girlfriend, there really couldn’t be a better lead-off song to expose your private business on the airwaves. “And I Love Her”, the fifth track from the album A Hard Day’s Night and its third single to be released (on July 20, 1964), is a haunting, lovely song, a marvelous work both in composition and execution. It expresses a deep and earnest intimacy, rendered in romantic and almost melancholy terms. It is the sentiment of a man who’s head-over-heels for his woman, and unafraid to say it in the most vulnerable terms.
At some point, Jane had the experience of turning on a radio and hearing,
Bright are the stars that shine
Dark is the sky
I know this love of mine
Will never die
And I Love Her...
It didn’t hurt that the track was one of the richest, most nuanced tracks they had yet produced, with lush, articulate acoustic guitar work, subtle percussion and soaring vocal.
“And I Love Her” was so good, in fact, that it immediately established Paul as the top-shelf balladeer he had always longed to be - and he did it a full year before the release of his signature ballad “Yesterday”. And it established him, for Jane, as a boyfriend willing to shout his love for her from the rooftops.
We Can Work It Out
Having firmly proclaimed his love for Jane from radios across the known world, Paul then proceeded to start unraveling that accomplishment with the next Paul-and-Jane entry.
“We Can Work It Out”, released in December 1965, is beloved by millions for its reconciliatory hook-chorus title and its unrelentingly optimistic middle-eight, which proclaims,
Life is very short, and there’s no time
For fussing and fighting, my friend
I have always thought that it’s a crime
So I will ask you once again...
All well and good. But the verses themselves, upon review, are far less conciliatory and optimistic:
While you see it your way
Run the risk of knowing that our love will soon be gone
and
While you see it your way
There’s a chance that we might fall apart before too long
Fully appraised, the song is an appeal to Jane to relent and give Paul his way, in whatever argument they were having at the time – not exactly the stuff of stalwart romantic partnership. One can wonder what Jane thought when she heard it, along with thousands of others, while driving her car.
Note that it was John, not Paul, who wrote that stirring, upbeat middle-eight.
The Ballad of John and Yoko
John outdoes Paul in sentiment, if not musical and lyrical sophistication, with “The Ballad of John and Yoko” - a one-off single recorded by just the two of them in 1969, destined to be (in one of the most ironic contradictions of the Beatles’ career) both the last Beatles UK #1 single and banned by the BBC.
If you’re Yoko in 1969, you’ve already heard yourself immortalized by John on The White Album (“Happiness is a Warm Gun”). Now you have an even greater treat in store, when you tune in to the Top 40 station and hear this rocking lament of your unjustly-disparaged relationship, misunderstood by the harsh, unsympathetic establishment. It stokes that you-and-me-against-the-world sentiment that defines your couplehood:
Made a lightning trip to Vienna
Eating chocolate cake in a bag
The newspapers said, ‘She’s gone to his head,
‘They look just like two gurus in drag’...
The song is pure persecution complex laid over a rocking backbeat, tons of fun to the ear, silly and fun on many levels. But it’s also an authentic page from the Lennon-Ono diary, capturing perfectly the moment in time immediately following their Gibraltar nuptials. Yoko had to have enjoyed hearing it on the radio, and must have been thrilled when it went to #1 – vindicating the two of them after years of public disdain.
Something
And now George joins the list, at the very last possible moment. “Something”, from the swan song album Abbey Road, was actually his first A-side single with the Beatles – and his last chance to proclaim his love for wife Pattie on the air.
He’d written several songs for her that had made their way onto Beatles albums, but none had the power or artistry of this magnificent track, which is nothing short of a masterpiece.
Something in the way she knows
And all I have to do is think of her
Something in the things she shows me
I don’t want to leave her now
You know I believe and how...
Pattie is used to adulation – she will, eventually, receive more of it than she knows what to do with - but this has to be an experience like no other: “Something” goes to #1 in the US and eventually becomes the second-most covered Beatles song ever, after “Yesterday”. Everyone in pop/rock, it seems, all the way up to Frank Sinatra, is singing her song.
Then there were the B-sides.
Why do we care about B-sides? Because they are, by definition, inextricably bound to A-sides, and thus sometimes end up with airplay that album tracks never see.
Thus we have a handful of Beatles love songs which capture real relationship stuff that snagged at least a little bit of airplay.
Don’t Let Me Down
Excluded from the album Let It Be by producer Phil Spector, “Don’t Let Me Down” cried out to be heard by the world. Its placement on the B-side of Paul’s “Get Back” was inevitable, given the latter tune’s commercial superiority, but it was nonetheless deserving of the world’s ear.
If “The Ballad of John and Yoko” had been an anthem of relationship solidarity, this second 45rpm offering from him to her was a paean to that solidarity’s underlying intimacy. As Paul did years earlier in “And I Love Her”, John establishes unambiguously the sheer depth of his love for his woman:
I’m in love for the first time
Don’t you know it’s gonna last
It’s a love that lasts forever
It’s a love that had no past
And he proceeds to get almost embarrassingly graphic in his praise:
And from the first time that she really done me
Oh she done me,
She done me good
I guess nobody ever really done me
Oh she done me
She done me good
Had to have been a good time for Yoko, when DJs started flipping the disc and sending that one out.
For You Blue
And George is back with this entirely endearing tune for Pattie from Let It Be. “For You Blue”, a country-ish, blues-based track that landed on the flip side of “The Long and Winding Road” (the Beatles’ last #1 single as a band), may not be as masterful as “Something” - but as a love song to wife Pattie, it’s even more intimate:
I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you
You looked at me, that’s all you had to do
I feel it now, I hope you feel it, too
and this:
I want you in the morning, girl, I love you
I want you at the moment I feel blue
I’m living every moment, girl, for you
Pattie’s hearing some of what Yoko’s hearing – utter devotion, stated not just earnestly but with unapologetic vulnerability.
Paul should have been taking notes.
Things We Said Today
The B-side of “A Hard Day’s Night” elevated Paul’s troubles with Jane in the public arena as “We Can Work It Out” had, but with greater subtlety. The song, tellingly platformed in a minor key, gives plenty of lip service to the sentiment that he and Jane are “deep in love”, but can be summed up as a thinly-veiled complaint about the distance between them, as he Beatles around the world and she tours with her acting company, increasingly out of his reach:
Someday, when I’m lonely
Wishing you weren’t so far away
Then I will remember
Things We Said Today
All of that said, the track – which is smart, well-executed, and (as always) utterly listenable – is yet another in a long parade of tracks the Beatles produced between 1965 and 1969 that showcase aspects of relationships that don’t normally get attention in pop/rock, let alone on the air.
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