Published Northern Songs Genre Rock Label Parlophone | Recorded 30 July 1963 Length 2:13 | |
Released 22 November 1963 (UK)
20 January 1964 (US) | ||
"It Won't Be Long" is the opening track on With the Beatles, the Beatles' second UK album, and was the first original song recorded for it. Although credited to Lennon–McCartney, it was primarily a John Lennon composition, with Paul McCartney assisting with the lyrics and arrangement.
Contents
Composition
The chorus is a play on the words "be long" and "belong". The song features early Beatles' trademarks such as call-and-response yeah-yeahs and scaling guitar riffs. Typical also of this phase of Beatles' song writing is the melodramatic ending (similar to "She Loves You", which had just been recorded and was about to be released) where the music stops, allowing Lennon a brief solo vocal improvisation before the song finishes on a major seventh chord ("She Loves You" ends on a major sixth). There is an unusual middle eight—for what is, essentially, a rock and roll song—that uses chromatically descending chords.
John Lennon, in his last interview, told Playboy magazine that the song was the beginning of a wider audience for Beatles' music than the youthful throngs that had fervently followed them from their Liverpool clubbing days. "It was only after a critic for the [London] Times said we put 'Aeolian cadences' in 'It Won't Be Long' that the middle classes started listening to us. ... To this day, I have no idea what 'Aeolian cadences' are. They sound like exotic birds." Actually the critic, William Mann, said this about the song "Not a Second Time." Bob Dylan had much the same thing in mind when he wrote that Beatles' chords were "outrageous, just outrageous." Not being versed in musical theory, the song incorporates chords it "shouldn't", being in the key of E but veering off into D, C and F# chords, and "a hybrid of D and Bm".
Recording and release
The Beatles recorded this song on 30 July 1963 in two sessions. The first session was in the morning, where they recorded 10 takes. The second session was in the afternoon, where they recorded seven takes, misnumbered as takes 17–23. The final product was a combination of takes 17 and 21, put together on 21 August.
The original release in the UK was on With the Beatles, 22 November 1963. In the US, "It Won't Be Long" first appeared on Meet the Beatles!, released 20 January 1964.
The song was never performed live or at any of the group's BBC sessions, although they did lip-synch to the track on an edition of Ready Steady Go! in March 1964.