Categories: BeatlesList

The Beatles 40 best songs: at 16 She Loves You

She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

“John and I wrote She Loves You together. There was a Bobby Rydell song (Forget Him) out at the time and, as often happens, you think of one song when you write another.

We were in a van up in Newcastle. I’d planned an ‘answering song’ where a couple of us would sing ‘She loves you…’ and the other one answers, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ We decided that that was a crummy idea as it was, but at least we then had the idea for a song called She Loves You. So we sat in the hotel bedroom for a few hours and wrote it.”
– Paul McCartney (Anthology)

“She Loves You” is a song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and recorded by English rock group the Beatles for release as a single in 1963. The single set and surpassed several records in the United Kingdom charts, and set a record in the United States as one of the five Beatles songs that held the top five positions in the American charts simultaneously on 4 April 1964. It is their best-selling single in the United Kingdom, and was the best selling single there in 1963.In November 2004, Rolling Stone ranked “She Loves You” number 64 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In August 2009, at the end of its “Beatles Weekend”, BBC Radio 2 announced that “She Loves You” was the Beatles’ all-time best-selling single in the UK based on information compiled by The Official Charts Company.

She Loves You (clip from the film, A Hard Day’s Night):

  • John Lennon – vocal, rhythm guitar
  • Paul McCartney – vocal, bass
  • George Harrison – harmony vocal, lead guitar
  • Ringo Starr – drums
  • George Martin – producer
  • Norman Smith – engineer

SHE LOVES YOU
(Lennon/McCartney)

“We arrange them in the studio normally, you know. We get a basic idea, because you write a song and you get a sound in your head that you think it’s gonna sound like. And it usually turns out different, you know. We’ve given up trying to plan it too much before we go in. None of us can read music. Our A&R man (George Martin) can read music, so sometimes he’ll say ‘That note’s just… it doesn’t work, you know. You can’t have it.’ And we have to go into detail with the piano and everything and work it out and say ‘It DOES work. You know, we’re singing it. It works.’ And sometimes he’s right, sometimes he’s wrong, you know. (giggling) But it usually all works out in the end.”
– John Lennon


The opening lines follow Speech inflections and stay within the compass of their chords – obviously Lennon’s work. What changes them, making a straightforward sequence surprising, is McCartney’s harmony. Already maturing, the partnership’s writing formula can be heard here as the dual expression of Lennon’s downbeat cynicism and McCartney’s get-up-and-go optimism…
~Ian MacDonald (Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties)

She Loves You (live 1963):

Issued in Britain in August 1963, She Loves You was an enormous hit and remains their biggest-selling UK single. Prodigally original yet instantly communicative, it owed much of its success to the naturalness of the match between its music and the everyday language of its lyric. The contour of the melodic line fits the feeling and rhythm of the words perfectly – and, where it doesn’t, the singers make a virtue out of it by altering their inflection…
~Ian MacDonald (Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties)

Lyrics

She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

You think you lost your love,
Well, I saw her yesterday.
It’s you she’s thinking of
And she told me what to say.

She says she loves you
And you know that can’t be bad.
Yes, she loves you
And you know you should be glad.

She said you hurt her so
She almost lost her mind.
But now she said she knows
You’re not the hurting kind.

She says she loves you
And you know that can’t be bad.
Yes, she loves you
And you know you should be glad. Ooh!

She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
And with a love like that
You know you should be glad.

You know it’s up to you,
I think it’s only fair,
Pride can hurt you, too,
Apologize to her

Because she loves you
And you know that can’t be bad.
Yes, she loves you
And you know you should be glad. Ooh!

She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah

with a love like that
You know you should
Be Glad!

with a love like that
You know you should
Be Glad!

With a love like that
You know you should
be glad!

Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah Ye-ah.

Other

  • “She Loves You” is the song that thrust the Beatles full-scale into the British national spotlight. Part of this was the effectiveness of the song’s hook; author Eric Starr wrote in retrospect, “Each chorus or refrain pounds the hook into your head until it’s imprinted in your brain.”
  • As Nicholas Schaffner later wrote, it was “‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ [was] chanted repeatedly and emphatically enough to drive any listener out of his mind, one way or the other.”
  • In 1975, authors Roy Carr and Tony Tyler wrote in The Beatles: An Illustrated Record that “If a future archivist were to select one single tune to characterise the Beatles’ appeal and the stylistic devices for which they became world famous, he would be forced to choose ‘She Loves You'”
  • In 1979, author Greil Marcus included “She Loves You” in his Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island list of essential rock records. Even more fundamentally, Marcus posed the question of what one would tell a Martian who landed and asked the meaning of rock and roll? The first answer would be “She Loves You”
  • “Yeah, yeah, yeah” was to have a great effect on the Beatles’ image — in some parts of Europe, they became known as the Yeah-Yeahs.
  • In November 2004, Rolling Stone ranked “She Loves You” as the 64th Greatest Song of All Time
  • On 27 July 2012, a portion of “She Loves You” as well as footage of the band performing the song was included in a montage of British music during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games

Check out: The Beatles 40 best songs

– Hallgeir & Egil

Hallgeir

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