100. There's a Place

One of the earliest signs that Lennon/McCartney were something truly special

When he was four years old, my son declared that his favorite song was Please Please Me. A few days later, we were playing together and listening to the Beatles (as one does), when There’s a Place came on. Maybe ten seconds into the song, he asked “is this Please Please Me”? Which just goes to show that the early Beatles had already found a sound for themselves that was so distinctive, even a four year old can hear it.

When I explained that it wasn’t the same song but that it was from the same album, he became fascinated by the idea of ‘albums’ with songs that sound similar.¹ Which is a funny little parenting anecdote, but also I think helps to illuminate part of the magic that was already present in the Beatles’ recordings right from the start. Because this song really does structure the experience of the Please Please Me album, even if it doesn’t appear on the scene until nearly the end (it’s the penultimate track).

On that famous day when the Beatles gathered together at EMI studios for a marathon session to record the record, the very first track they laid down was There’s a Place. And it set the stage for everything else they did that day.

---

It was early February 1963, and Please Please Me (the song) was climbing the charts. They were surely aware that something special was in the works. But at the point when they entered the studio, they were still a brand new recording entity, with only a few tracks to their name. By the end of the day, they had worked out a dozen new tracks and had all the pieces needed to assemble a long-playing record.

This was a big deal in one sense—they recorded more songs in that one day than they had recorded in their previous nine-month tenure with Parlophone. But still, to any outside observer, it would have been just another day’s business. After all, these were only album tracks.

At the time ‘the album’ wasn’t a particularly important concept. Singles were what mattered, what people listened to, what people bought. The album was something you filled out with your extra tracks to maybe juice a few more sales. Certainly, no one was thinking about albums as distinct works of art with songs that were designed to hang together. And as the standard narrative goes, it would still be a few more years—with Sgt. Pepper­ in 1967—that ‘the album’ would take its true form.

That’s actually the main reason why Sgt. Pepper was so universally understood as The Greatest Album of All-Time for so many years. Because it argued, definitively, the idea that the album was the thing. There were, to be sure, some very intentional albums earlier than Sgt. Pepper—with Pet Sounds being the most obvious example. But Sgt. Pepper became the stand-in for the idea. It took the notion that albums mattered and crystallized it.

But as is often the case with a popular narrative, this theory of albums as mere collections of songs actually obscures nearly as much as it clarifies.

Because Please Please Me actually is quite a strong statement of intent. It’s not a ‘concept’ album (whatever that means) but it absolutely is an attempt to create an independent and complete object, with good songs from top to bottom, which engage the entire emotional range of love and relationships. It has some corny love songs about holding hands and dancing. It has songs about heartbreak and misery. It has songs about devotion. It has songs about lust. It has frenetic songs and contemplative ones.

And I think There’s a Place has a central role in rounding out the scope of the album, and pointing toward the even greater works still to come. Because right here, in early February 1963, when they had a grand total of four songs released to the world, they were already pushing the boundaries of what it was possible to sing about.

It’s often said that they exclusively wrote love songs for the first five albums, only breaking that mold on Rubber Soul. But it’s not actually true. What is true is that everything up until Nowhere Man used love as a hook to hang the rest of the song on. But tracks like There’s a Place (or Help! or She Loves You) aren’t ‘love songs’ in any normal sense of the word.² They’re songs about friendship, about suffering and loss, about the things we do to keep ourselves together.

The first verse and the bridge say nothing about love. And the second verse is about the singer’s memories of a loved one. He’s not saying that he’s happy to be in love, or to have someone who cares for him. He’s saying that he treasures solitude because it allows him to focus on things that bring (and have brought) him joy. The line is enigmatic enough—with its mixture of present and past tense—to allow for different readings. Maybe it’s just a comment about how two people in a relationship might process feelings differently, with him saying that he needs time and space to think. Or maybe it’s primarily a reminiscence. Maybe both. But in any case, it’s fundamentally a song about the distance between us.³

In that sense, it feels very much of a piece with later songs like In My Life, I’m Only Sleeping, and Strawberry Fields. They are all songs about the slow and careful workings of a self in solitude, who turns over and considers those things happening outside, and wonders. And dreams.

Of course, this is all balanced against the style of the song, which is enthusiastic, with a fantastic beat. And which shares a lot of DNA with the title track (confirming my son’s intuition). The most obvious overlap is the harmonica, which is something that binds together a lot of the 1963 Beatles records. But even more than that, it sounds similar because it borrows the same sort of magic Beatles harmony. I’ve seen it described as a ‘close harmony’ with Paul taking the higher part. And I suppose it is that. But to my ears it really just sounds like they’re singing together, with John’s vocals placed higher in the mix.

In any case, what really makes it work is that the layering of the vocals doesn’t (quite) fit together right. It’s beautiful but also slightly dissonant. In a way that makes it sound hurried and insistent. Which I’m sure it was—given their intense need to fill an entire album in this one long session. And I do wonder if they had written this a bit later in their career, might they have taken the time to smooth it all out a bit to round out the tone? Maybe, but also maybe not. As Rob Sheffield notes in Dreaming the Beatles when discussing Eight Days a Week, they were sometimes perfectly willing to spend hours on a song in order to make it sound like it was tossed off in 15 minutes. This song has that same vibe. It feels like something that’s very intentionally raw, just sloppy enough to help you understand that they really mean what they’re singing, but that ‘meaning it’ doesn’t necessarily make it true. Because that’s really the most powerful thing about this song: the disconnect between the singer’s professed sense of security and peace in the mind and the plain fact (which anyone who hears the song can discern) that this is not the sound of someone who is calm or ‘without sorrow.’

And again, that’s something that really defines the whole Please Please Me album, and so many of their other great songs from the early days. The music from this period sounds less refined than their later stuff, when they spent hours, days, or even weeks perfecting a song. And it’s natural to assume that means the early stuff is unsophisticated or even sophomoric. But it’s not at all.

They were still so incredibly young when they wrote this. But were already seeing angles that no one else could see. Writing in ways that no one else could write. In ways that no one else had ever even thought that someone could try to write.

1. Maybe a month after that he heard the song Heartthrob by Indigo De Souza (one of my favorite songs of 2025) and said “this sounds like Dancing in the Dark” and then asked if it was from the same album. Kids are pretty cool.

2. They’re only ‘love songs’ in the way that Watership Down is a ‘book about rabbits’

3. As George would sing four years later: “we were talking about the space between us all”