A Hard Day's Night song: Encyclopedia II - A Hard Day's Night song - The making

A Hard Day's Night song - The making

Regardless of who decided on the title, Lennon immediately made up his mind that he would compose the movie's title track. Both Lennon and McCartney were credited as co-authors, though the two of them did not actually work on their songs together — instead, one would write the majority of the song, and the other would critique it. (In some cases, even when there was no input from the other Beatle, such as on "Yesterday", both of them would still be credited as authors.) It was a symbiosis that could be described as friendly competition.

Lennon dashed off the song in one night, and brought it in for comments the following morning (the original manuscript lyrics may be seen in the British Library, scribbled in ballpoint on the back of an old birthday card). As he described in his Playboy interview, page 148, "...the next morning I brought in the song... 'cuz there was a little competition between Paul and I as to who got the A-side — who got the hits. If you notice, in the early days the majority of singles, in the movies and everything, were mine... in the early period I'm dominating the group.... The reason Paul sang on A Hard Day's Night (in the bridge) is because I couldn't reach the notes."

In the Associated Press report, Shenson described his recollection of what happened. At 8:30 in the morning, "There were John and Paul with guitars at the ready and all the lyrics scribbled on matchbook covers. They played it and the next night recorded it." Shenson declared, "It had the right beat and the arrangement was brilliant. These guys were geniuses."

During that period of time, the Beatles were being interviewed by reporter Maureen Cleave of London's Evening Standard. Lennon showed Cleave the lyrics, and she suggested to him that the lines "I find my tiredness is through/And I feel alright" sounded weak. Lennon eventually replaced the lines in question with "I find the things that you do/They make me feel alright".

On April 16 1964, the Beatles gathered at Studio 2 of the Abbey Road Studios and recorded "A Hard Day's Night". It took them less than three hours to polish the song for its final release, eventually selecting the ninth take as the one to be released.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The making", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki