"A Hard Day's Night" is a song by English rock band The
Beatles. Written by John Lennon, with help from Paul McCartney,
and credited to Lennon/McCartney; it was released on the movie
soundtrack of the same name in 1964. It was later released as a
single, with "Things We Said Today" as its B-side.
The song featured prominently on the soundtrack to The
Beatles' first feature film,
A Hard Day's Night, and was on their album of the same
name. The song topped the charts in both the United Kingdom and
United States when it was released as a single. Featuring a
prominent and unique opening chord, the song's success
demonstrated that The Beatles were not a one-hit wonder in the
United States.
The American and British singles of "A Hard Day's Night" as
well as both the American and British albums of the same title
all held the top position in their respective charts for a
couple of weeks in August 1964, the first time any artist had
done this.
The song's title originated from something said by Ringo
Starr, the Beatles' drummer. Starr described it this way in an
interview with disc jockey Dave Hull in 1964: "We went to do a
job, and we'd worked all day and we happened to work all night.
I came up still thinking it was day I suppose, and I said,
'It's been a hard day... and I looked around and saw it was
dark so I said, '...night!' So we came to 'A Hard Day's
Night.'"
Starr's statement was the inspiration for the title of the
movie, which in turn inspired the composition of the song.
According to Lennon in a 1980 interview with
Playboymagazine: "I was going home in the car and Dick
Lester [director of the movie] suggested the title, 'Hard Day's
Night' from something Ringo had said. I had used it in
In His Own Write[a book Lennon was writing then], but it
was an off-the-cuff remark by Ringo. You know, one of those
malapropisms. A Ringo-ism, where he said it not to be funny...
just said it. So Dick Lester said, 'We are going to use that
title.'"
In a 1994 interview for
The Beatles Anthology, however, McCartney disagreed with
Lennon's recollections, basically stating that it was the
Beatles, and not Lester, who had come up with the idea of using
Starr's verbal misstep: "The title was Ringo's. We'd almost
finished making the film, and this fun bit arrived that we'd
not known about before, which was naming the film. So we were
sitting around at Twickenham studios having a little
brain-storming session... and we said, 'Well, there was
something Ringo said the other day.' Ringo would do these
little malapropisms, he would say things slightly wrong, like
people do, but his were always wonderful, very lyrical... they
were sort of magic even though he was just getting it wrong.
And he said after a concert, 'Phew, it's been a hard day's
night.'"
In 1996, yet another version of events cropped up; in an
Associated Press report, the producer of the film
A Hard Day's Night, Walter Shenson, stated that Lennon
described to Shenson some of Starr's funnier gaffes, including
"a hard day's night," whereupon Shenson immediately decided
that that was going to be the title of the movie (replacing
other alternatives, including
Beatlemania). Shenson then told Lennon that he needed a
theme song for the film.
Regardless of who decided on the title, Lennon immediately
made up his mind that he would compose the movie's title track.
He 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 1980
Playboyinterview, "...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."
On 16 April 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.
"A Hard Day's Night" was first released to the United
States, coming out on 13 June 1964 on the album
A Hard Day's Night, the soundtrack to the film, and
released by United Artists. It was the first song to be
released before single release (see below).
"A Hard Day's Night" was the first Beatles single released
in the UK not to use a pronoun in its title, following "Love
MeDo," "Please Please
Me," "From
Meto
You." "
SheLoves
You," "
IWant to Hold Your Hand," and "Can't Buy
MeLove".
The United Kingdom first heard "A Hard Day's Night" when it
was released there on 10 July 1964, both on the album
A Hard Day's Night, and as a single, backed with "Things
We Said Today" on the B-side. Both the album and single were
released by Parlophone Records. The single began charting on 18
July 1964, a week later ousting the Rolling Stones' "It's All
Over Now" from the top spot on the British charts on 25 July
1964, coincidentally the day when both the American and British
albums too hit the peak of their respective charts. The single
stayed on top for three weeks, and lasted another nine weeks in
the charts afterwards.
America first saw the single of "A Hard Day's Night" on 13
July 1964, featuring "I Should Have Known Better" on the
B-side, and released by Capitol Records. Capitol had been in a
quandary about cashing in on the success of the movie
A Hard Day's Night, as United Artists held the
publishing rights for the soundtrack (thus owning the rights to
release the album of the same title). However, there was
nothing preventing Capitol from releasing the songs in other
forms, leading to six out of the seven songs from the movie's
soundtrack coming out on singles.
The American single began its 13-week chart run on five days
after release, and on 1 August started a two-week long run at
the top, setting a new record—nobody before had ever held the
number one position on both the album and singles charts in the
United Kingdom and the United States at the same time. The
Beatles were the first to do so, and continued to be the only
ones who had done this until 1970 when Simon and Garfunkel
achieved the same feat with their album
Bridge over Troubled Waterand its title track. "A Hard
Day's Night" went on to sell one million copies in America
within just over five weeks.
In 1965, "A Hard Day's Night" won the Beatles the Grammy
Award for Best Performance by a Vocal Group. In 2004, this song
was ranked number 153 on
Rolling Stonemagazine's list of the 500 greatest songs
of all time.
"A Hard Day's Night" is immediately identifiable before the
vocals even begin, thanks to George Harrison's unmistakable
Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string guitar's "mighty opening chord".
According to George Martin, "We knew it would open both the
film and the soundtrack LP, so we wanted a particularly strong
and effective beginning. The strident guitar chord was the
perfect launch" having what Ian MacDonald calls "a significance
in Beatles lore matched only by the concluding E major of "A
Day in the Life", the two opening and closing the group's
middle period of peak creativity". "That sound you just
associate with those early 1960s Beatles records".
Listen to the opening chord (·)
Analysis of the chord has been the subject of considerable
debate, with it being described as G7add9sus4, G7sus4, or
G11sus4 and others below.
The exact chord is an Fadd9 confirmed by Harrison during an
online chat on 15 February 2001:
According to Walter Everett, the opening chord has an
introductory dominant function because McCartney plays D in the
bass; Harrison and Martin play F A C G in twelve string guitar
and piano, over the bass D, giving the chord a mixture-coloured
neighbor, F; two diatonic neighbors, A and C; plus an
anticipation of the tonic, G — the major subtonic as played on
guitar being a borrowed chord commonly used by the Beatles,
first in "P.S. I Love You" (see mode mixture), and later in
"Every Little Thing", "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Got to Get
You into My Life" (in the latter two against a tonic
pedal).
In contrast, Alan W. Pollack interprets the chord as a
surrogate dominant (surrogate V, the dominant preparing or
leading to the tonic chord), in G major the dominant being D,
with the G being an anticipation that resolves in the G major
chord that opens the verse. He also suggests it is a mixture of
d minor, F major, and G major (missing the B). Tony Bacon calls
it a Dm7sus4 (D F G A C), which is the dominant seventh (plus
the fourth, G).
(For more information regarding chord functions see diatonic
function.)
Everett points out that the chord relates to the Beatles'
interest in pandiatonic harmony.
Dominic Pedler has also provided an interpretation of the
famous chord, with the Beatles and George Martin playing the
following:
This gives the notes: G-B-D-F-A-C (the B is a harmonic). One
of the interesting things about this chord (as described by
Pedler) is how McCartney's high bass note reverberates inside
the soundbox of Lennon's acoustic guitar and begins to be
picked up on Lennon's microphone or pickup during the sounding
of the chord. This gives the chord its special "wavy" and
unstable quality. Pedler describes the effect as a "virtual
pull-off".
Jason Brown, Professor for the Faculty of Computer Science
at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, whose
research interests include graph theory, combinatorics, and
combinatorial algorithms, announced in October 2004 that after
six months of research he succeeded in analyzing the opening
chord by de-composing the sound into original frequencies using
a mathematical technique known as the Fourier transform.
According to Brown, the Rickenbacker guitar wasn't the only
instrument used. "It wasn't just George Harrison playing it and
it wasn't just the Beatles playing on it... There was a piano
in the mix." Specifically, he claims that Harrison was playing
the following notes on his 12 string guitar: a2, a3, d3, d4,
g3, g4, c4, and another c4; McCartney played a d3 on his bass;
producer George Martin was playing d3, f3, d5, g5, and e6 on
the piano, while Lennon played a loud c5 on his six-string
guitar.
A repeated arpeggio outlining the notes of the opening chord
ends the song in a circular fashion, fading out with the sound
of helicopter blades. This provides "a sonic confirmation that
the thirty-six hours we have just seen [in the movie] will go
on and on and on". The song contains 12 other chords.
The song is composed in the key of G major and in a 4/4 time
signature. The verse features the ♭VII or major subtonic chord
that was a part of the opening chord as an ornament or
embellishment below the tonic. Transposed down a perfect fifth,
the modal frame of the song though pentatonic features a ladder
of thirds axially centered on G with a ceiling note of B♭ and
floor note of E♭ (the low C being a passing tone)
According to Middleton, the song, "at first glance
major-key-with-modal-touches," reveals through its "Line of
Latent Mode" "a deep kinship with typical blues melodic
structures: it is centered on three of the notes of the
minor-pentatonic mode (E♭-G-B♭), with the contradictory major
seventh (B♮) set against that. Morever, the
shapeassumed by these notes - the modal
frame- as well as the abstract scale they represent, is
revealed, too; and this - an initial, repeated circling round
the dominant (G), with an excursion to its minor third (B♭),
'answered' by a fall to the 'symmetrical' minor third of the
tonic (E♭) - is a common pattern in blues."
Lennon opens the twelve measure-long verse and carries it
along, suddenly joined at the end by McCartney, who then sings
the bridge.
The instrumental break, is often credited to George Harrison
on a 12-string guitar. This is not entirely accurate. The break
was played by George Harrison on 12-string guitar with George
Martin doubling the solo on a piano.
According to the book
Recording the Beatles, Martin plays a piano not
harpsichord at half speed, speeded back up (see note at
bottom).
The song closes with Harrison playing the arpeggio during
the fade-out, the first time the Beatles had used such a
technique — most, if not all, of their earlier work had closed
with a final chord (and cadence), such as "She Loves You" and
"I Want to Hold Your Hand".
The lyrics speak about the singer's undying devotion to his
lover, and how he toils so she can purchase the items she
fancies. The singer sings about his tiredness when he comes
home from work, but how the things that his lover does perk him
up.
On the day the song was written, Lennon is purported to have
shown reporter Maureen Cleave of London's
Evening Standardthe lyrics, and she said that word
"tiredness" sounded weak in the line "I find my tiredness is
through/And I feel alright." Lennon subsequently replaced the
lines in question with "I find the things that you do/They make
me feel all right".
The solo and outro features Harrison on his Rickenbacker 12
and Martin simultaneously playing the same notes at half speed
then speeding them backup to include on track 4 based on a
detailed description of this recording in the book
Recording the Beatlesby Brain Kehew and Kevin Ryan.
During the recording of "A Hard Days Night", Lennon and
McCartney double track their vocals throughout including the
chorus. Lennon sings the main lead vocal and Paul sings the
middle eight. During the chorus McCartney handles the high
harmony and Lennon the low harmony. Take 7 reveals that the
lyrics were still not set with Lennon singing "you make me feel
all right" and McCartney still unsteady with his bass line
during the middle eight which ends with Lennon chiding him with
the line "I heard a funny chord".
"A Hard Day's Night" was used as wakeup music on Space
Shuttle Missions STS-30, STS-61, and STS-69.