Today we begin listening to The Beatles' second album, With The Beatles, which was released in November of 1963 (the same year as their first album). This one was "the second album to sell a million copies in the UK, after the soundtrack to the 1958 film South Pacific", and replaced Please Please Me at the top of the charts, keeping The Beatles in the number one spot for 51 weeks straight.
"It Won't Be Long", the first song on the album, has some neat history behind it. I'll copypasta the paragraph from Wikipedia because it's too awesome (and already concise) to paraphrase properly.
John Lennon, in his last interview, told Playboy magazine that the song was the beginning of a wider audience for Beatles' music than the youthful throngs that had fervently followed them from their Liverpool clubbing days. "It was only after a critic for the {London} Times said we put 'Aeolian cadences' in 'It Won't Be Long' that the middle classes started listening to us. ... To this day, I have no idea what "Aeolian cadences" are. They sound like exotic birds." Actually the critic, William Mann, said this about the song "Not A Second Time."
How hilarious is that? :) (By the way, I wondered myself what "Aeolian cadences" were so I looked it up for you.) It's always interesting when you see/hear/read about an interview one of the guys has given because it's a study in how differently people can remember the same events. Something can happen, and when, why, and even how it occurred can vary wildly between John, Paul, George, and Ringo. It seems the most common discrepancies involve John remembering contributing to a song and Paul saying he did it alone, and vice versa.
My impression of the song is very positive. I'd already heard it, but only the version by Evan Rachel Wood in Across the Universe (a fabulous movie... I might do a standalone post sometime to discuss it), so it was really neat to finally listen to the original. The song's page states that "the chorus is a play on the words 'be long' and 'belong'" and I found the call-and-response "yeah, yeah" very catchy. Overall I really enjoyed this one. :)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Heard It Tally: 3
Songs Completed: 15
No comments:
Post a Comment