About “Baby It’s You” Burt Bacharach wrote the music for “Baby It’s You”, and Luther Dixon (credited as Barney Williams) and Mack David wrote the lyrics. Both the Shirelles and the Beatles recorded the song and had hits with it. The highest-charting version of “Baby It’s You” was by the […]
Please Please Me
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About “Anna (Go To Him)” Arthur Alexander wrote this, making it one of the world’s great trivia questions: Alexander is the only person to write songs that were recorded by Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. This was distributed to US disc jockeys in 1963 on a single […]
JOHN 1980: “It was kind of a John song, more than a Paul song… but it was written together.” PAUL 1988: “John and I were a songwriting team, and what songwriting teams did in those days was wrote for everyone. ‘Misery’ was for Helen Shapiro, and she turned it down. […]
About “Chains” “Chains” is the song that Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote together in 1961 as part of a husband-and-wife songwriting duo. An American girl group called the Cookies recorded this song in 1962 and it went on to become a hit. In 1980, Carole King recorded a solo […]
JOHN 1980: “That’s Paul doing his usual job of producing what George Martin used to call a ‘potboiler.’ I helped with a couple of the lyrics.” PAUL 1988: “I wrote it with John. We sagged off school and wrote it on guitars. I remember I had the lyrics, ‘Just seventeen/Never […]
JOHN 1963: “I always hate singing the song, ‘Twist And Shout’ when there’s a colored artist on the bill with us. It doesn’t seem right, you know. I feel sort of embarrassed… It makes me curl up. I always feel they could do the song much better than me.” JOHN […]
JOHN 1980: “That’s Paul’s song. He was trying to write a ‘Soldier Boy’ like the Shirelles. He wrote that in Germany, or when we were going to and from Hamburg. I might have contributed something. I can’t remember anything in particular. It was mainly his song.” PAUL circa-1994: “A theme […]
JOHN 1980: “‘There’s a Place’ was my attempt at a sort of Motown, black thing. It says the usual Lennon things: ‘In my mind there’s no sorrow…’ It’s all in your mind.” About “There’s A Place” “There’s A Place” is the second track on the album Please Please Me, released in […]
About “A Taste of Honey” “A Taste of Honey” is a pop standard written by Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow. It was first performed by Scott, and its title may have been inspired by the 1958 English play A Taste of Honey which reached Broadway in 1960. The most famous […]
About “Ask Me Why” “Ask Me Why” was originally released in the United Kingdom as the B-side of their hit single “Please Please Me“. It was also included on their first UK album, Please Please Me. The song was mainly a John Lennon composition, written in early 1962, but it was […]
The Beatles’ quotes about “Do You Want to Know a Secret” JOHN 1980: “Well, I can’t say I wrote it ‘for’ George. My mother was always… she was a good comedienne and a singer. Not professional, but she used to get up in pubs and things like that. She had […]
JOHN 1963: “Our recording manager (George Martin) thought our arrangement was fussy, so we tried to make it simpler. We were getting tired though, and just couldn’t seem to get it right. In the following weeks we went over it again and again. We changed the tempo a little, we […]