SCU - I’m A Loser and Eight Days a Week

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The Music of the Beatles

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University of Rochester

The Music of the Beatles

416 notes

The Music of the Beatles will track the musical development of the band, starting from the earliest days in Liverpool and Hamburg, moving through the excitement of Beatlemania, the rush of psychedelia, and the maturity of Abbey Road. While the focus will be on the music, we will also consider how recording techniques, the music business, the music of other artists, and the culture of the 1960s affected John, Paul, George, and Ringo as they created the Beatles repertory. There is probably no band or artist that has had more written about their music than the Beatles. There are many good books on the band's biography, several insider accounts offering glimpses behind the scenes, books that interpret the meaning of the songs, and even books that catalog dates and people regarding the band. This course will try to synthesize much of that information into an account of the Beatles' development as musicians and songwriters.

À partir de la leçon

Success in America and the World

The Beatles begin to move toward the artist model. Music from A Hard Day's Night, Beatles For Sale, and singles from this period. From this point on we will closely follow particular authorship of songs, keeping track of John, Paul, and George as individual songwriters.

Beatles For Sale, Fall 196415:01

SCU - I’m A Loser and Eight Days a Week6:30

Rencontrer les enseignants

John Covach
Professor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music

Let's take a closer look at two songs from the second half of 1964

I'm a Loser, a John song and Eight Days a Week, a Paul song.

I chose I'm a Loser because it's yet

another of these Beatles contrasting verse-chorus kinds of songs,

and now how many do we have in this song string that we can sort of put together.

We can go back

to She Loves You, Can't Buy Me Love and now I'm a Loser.

And so, again, remember that the characteristic of the Beatles' contrasting

verse chorus is it's like a regular contrasting verse chorus song.

It's got verse sections and chorus sections, but the music contrasts.

But you've got two different versions of a

chorus, the one you get at the very beginning.

And the one that you get in the interior of the tune in that's exactly what

happens with this one. I also selected in order to again

emphasize the intention of John Lennon I think to get more.

Self reflective in his song writing.

We talked about the influence of Dylan before the Beatles met Dylan

they were already fans of Dylan's music and were fans of his lyrics.

And, and you know, John Lennon had always been

kind of a word guy.

We talked a bit about his being fascinated

with the Bing Crosby song Please Please Me.

He was always fascinated with the Chuck Berry kind of playing

around with the lyrics, the way that Chuck Berry would do.

And so this idea of, of becoming more of a poet, in

his, in his song writing as I said in the last lecture.

Can often lend to the first instance of it is

often sort of turning it sort of inside and saying,

you know I'm sad, or I'm a loser, or things

didn't work out for me you know, woe is me.

It's a way of unburdening yourself.

Even people in the middle of tremendous, world-wide success can be unhappy.

I mean it's a familiar pattern that we see in celebrities all the time.

So just because John Lennon was on top of the world didn't

mean that he didn't have a whole a whole reservoir of, of unhappiness

that he could tap into.

Especially when you learn a little bit about some

of the circumstances of his life, his mother, his

father, although he was very, very well treated by

his Aunt Mimi when he was growing up in Liverpool.

So I'm a Loser really gives us a chance

to sort of see John in a more confessional mode.

I'm a Loser is I think the immediate precursor to help.

Help is the more famous song, but without,

Help is Help is the song that's the point of arrival.

I'm a Loser is the sort of song on the way to Help,

and so we can sort of see that song string beginning to fill out.

In many ways we talk about Help, we'll

talk about the ambiguous introduction of that one.

And in many ways Help also hooks up with If I Fell,

which also has the kind of ambiguous introduction that we talked about.

Help, the song Help,

also being a contrasting verse chorus too.

So we're beginning to see these

connections as individual songwriters begin to

return to some of the same problems they've, they've dealt with musically.

In songs already, and solving them

in slightly different ways with different combinations

of different elements that are starting to make their way into their artistry.

And it's the connection, seeing the growth, seeing the development, I

think, that's the important sort of through line in a lot

of this history.

If we look at eight days a week again this is a very sort of sunny Paul song.

And a little bit like you know a hard day's night.

that, I hope that the phrase a hard day's night doesn't really make much sense.

And eight days a week does not really make much sense either, but it's

fun, it's funny and so that becomes the the this sort of beginning of

the song.

This one, eight days a week, an AABA form with partial reprieve.

So if you follow it through after that faded introduction,

you'll get a verse, verse, bridge, verse, the first AABA form.

And then you'll get a bridge, and a verse.

The next BA, and then a little coda that takes you

back out the same way the intro took you back in.

If you watch each verse, you'll notice

that there are like four sub-sections, four lines in the verse.

And the first one uses a particular bit of music.

The second one repeats that bit of music, the third one is a contrasting bit

of music and the first one comes back to the same bit of music again.

We can think of that as also being kind of AABA internal verse structure.

Which mirrors the larger AABA stru, song structure that we're seeing.

And so this nesting of the AABA is something that we begin to

see in Beatles music, both John songs and Paul songs about this period.

We could find another bunch of other examples, but why don't you listen through

and see if you can find other examples that you think work this way?

I point to this one in many ways, because of the symphonic impulse

that I can begin to see happening in The Beatles' music.

That is, we can begin to see, if you think

about the way Eight Days a Week works with the kind

of gradual crescendo of the music at the very beginning

and this sort of arrival and then the singing comes in.

It's a little bit more like an orchestral overture or

something the way it builds up the way that it does.

Of course you can say well, most songs fade out.

Here's a song that fades in.

That's of, that's of course an interesting angle too.

But the idea

that it builds up in an, almost kind of almost classical music kind of way.

And then goes out in a, in a similar kind of way using that material.

Re-using material of course.

From inside the song although, reusing material inside the song in a

kind of literal way like this one does, is not particularly motivic.

It does remind us a bit of John Lennon reusing that flat

seven chord as we talked about in in A Hard Day's Night.

So,

these two songs give us a pretty good idea of

what The Beatles were up to at the end of 1964.

Now, before we end this week's lessons this week's

lectures and, and start thinking about 1965 for next week.

I want to take just one more video lecture to talk about the

careers of Brian Epstein and George Martin during this period of time.

And find about what was happening with them and their careers

as the Beatles were exploding on the international scene in 1964.

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