The two Beatles songs with a surprising connection
The Beatles didn’t get totally self-referential in their time together as a band. ‘Glass Onion’ gave some shoutouts to old Beatles tracks, while ‘Savoy Truffle’ gave a nod to ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’. Other than that, each Beatles song was distinct in its own right. But just because direct references were rare in the band’s catalogue doesn’t mean that certain songs weren’t related to each other.
Take, for instance, the similarities between ‘If I Fell’ from A Hard Day’s Night and ‘In My Life’ from Rubber Soul. Both songs were written by John Lennon, both were introspective ballads and had similar chord sequences. The comparisons weren’t accidental, either. In an interview with David Scheff in 1980, Lennon made an explicit link between the two tracks.
“That’s my first attempt to write a ballad proper,” Lennon said about ‘If I Fell’. “That was the precursor to ‘In My Life’. It has the same chord sequence as ‘In My Life’: D and B minor and E minor, those kinds of things. And it’s semi-autobiographical, but not consciously. It shows that I wrote sentimental love ballads, silly love songs, way back when.”
Paul McCartney was a fan of the song too. “People tend to forget that John wrote some pretty nice ballads,” McCartney told Barry Miles in the book Many Years From Now. “People tend to think of him as an acerbic wit and aggressive and abrasive, but he did have a very warm side to him really which he didn’t like to show too much in case he got rejected. We wrote ‘If I Fell’ together but with the emphasis on John because he sang it. It was a nice harmony number, very much a ballad.”
‘If I Fell’ had its own lineage within some of McCartney’s favourite songs from his youth.”I was a big fan of the preamble in my early days, which you find in lots of ’50s songs,” McCartney explained to Q Magazine. “A first verse that goes: ‘I was living in Kentucky when I did, did, did and I dud-dud-dud, and then I said…’ [breathes in deeply]… then you break into the bit of the song you want everyone to know. One song I wrote a little after ‘Please Please Me’ was my best attempt at a preamble: ‘If I Fell’. [Sings] ‘If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be truuue…’ Then after the line, ‘just holding hands’, the song properly gets going. [Raises voice] That’s it, everyone!”
Check out ‘If I Fell’ down below.
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