Monday, June 6, 2011

And I Love Her

"And I Love Her" is the next song on A Hard Day's Night. It was performed only once outside of Abbey Road Studios, on July 14, 1964 for an episode of the BBC radio show Top Gear (no relation to the TV show about cars). It reached #12 on the Billboard charts. According to Wikipedia, "this song was one of the first ballads with a title that starts in mid-sentence." 

BeatlesEBooks.com has some great quotes from Paul about his experience writing this song. He talks about the conception of the guys within The Beatles as stereotyped personalities; he says, "It's funny, the myth developed that I was the melodic, soft one and John was the hard, acerbic one.  There was some surface truth to that." McCartney was beyond doubt the balladeer of the group, penning most of the band's ballads and softer songs throughout the years. That's not to say he didn't break out of that stereotype--he did write "Helter Skelter" later on, as well as many others. 

Paul also mentioned in interviews how proud he was of his accomplishment with "And I Love Her". 
"It was the first ballad I impressed myself with," Paul explained in his book 'Many Years From Now.'  "It's got nice chords in it, 'Bright are the stars that shine, dark is the sky...'  I like the imagery of the stars and the sky.  It was a love song really.  The 'And' in the title was an important thing, 'And I Love Her', it came right out of left field, you were right up to speed the minute you heard it.... Having the title start in mid-sentence, I thought that was clever...it was a nice tune, that one.  I still like it."
I really liked this song. It's slow, with a kind of Latin feel to it (Ringo's bongo-playing and George's excellent guitar work definitely contribute to that). Overall, it's a perfect slow-dance song. :)

Despite the amount of love I'm in with this album, I'm almost eager to be done with the first side, because as soon as I am I'll get to watch the movie, and I'll post a review of it here. :) Something I'm looking forward to, for sure. 

Also, I know lately I've been doing a lot more history than opinion here, so I'm going to start trying to let my own voice show through more. When I first thought of doing this blog, I knew I wouldn't be able to write solely my opinions--that would be pretentious on my part and boring for you, and there would be no context for the people like myself who were hearing (and reading about) these songs for the first time. I think managing a balance is a little difficult, because I find myself writing the same things about every song ("I enjoyed it", "it's a fun song", etc.). I'll just have to bust out the creativity from now on... which shouldn't be too hard, since the songs are getting better as we go. :)

Alright, that's all for today! See you guys tomorrow. :)


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Heard It Tally: 4
Songs Completed: 42

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