134. It's Only Love

John hated this song, but what does John Lennon know about good music anyway

Many people over the years have mistaken the early Beatles as unsophisticated teenyboppers, writing sappy love songs with their ‘oooooh’s and their ‘yeah yeah yeah’s. They were dismissed in the moment by folks who insisted that it was all a fad that would die out within a year. When those predictions almost immediately burst into flames, they were replaced by a new set of critiques. As the band moved into drugs and heavier themes, a new brand of sophisticates emerged who tended to regard the early stuff as simplistic at best, and mostly embarrassing.

Those people are all ridiculous, and obviously wrong. As anyone who wants to spend even a few minutes listening to She Loves You or I’ll Be Back or similar songs would be perfectly capable of telling you.

But still, there’s a slightly more reasonable group—who regard the early Beatles as a great rock and roll band, but still lament the filler. The sort of people who might say “Sure, they could swing with the best of ‘em, but the less said about Every Little Thing or It’s Only Love the better.” These folks get a major boost from John Lennon himself, who was happy to offer some extremely dismissive comments about these tracks. He was particularly scathing about It’s Only Love, saying it was maybe his least favorite Beatles song.

Now, far be it from me to tell John his own business, but It’s Only Love is a great song!

It’s not visceral. It doesn’t tell us anything about John’s inner soul. It’s just an exercise in finding chords, sticking them together, and laying down a track. So what? It’s Only Love doesn’t need to carry the weight of their artistic genius. It’s on an album that’s bookended by Help! and Yesterday; the genius part is already covered.

For the spaces in between, it’s more than enough to just have some solid tunes. And this is absolutely a solid tune.

John was particularly scathing about the lyrics: “I always thought it was a lousy song. The lyrics were abysmal. I always hated that song.” And Paul sort of concurs, though in a nicer way: “Sometimes we didn’t fight it if the lyric came out rather bland on some of those filler songs like ‘It’s Only Love’. If a lyric was really bad we’d edit it, but we weren’t that fussy about it, because it’s only a rock ‘n’ roll song. I mean, this is not literature.”

I can see their point. The lyric for this song is admittedly rather cliche. Still, I think it’s sold in an interesting way. Consider:

I get high when I see you go by
My, oh, my
When you sigh, my, my inside just flies
Butterflies
Why am I so shy when I’m beside you?

That’s the sort of thing you’d absolutely expect to find in any old bubblegum pop song of the era. It’s certainly not ‘literature’ as Paul says, but it’s also not any more ridiculous than Little Child or Do You Want to Know a Secret or many other songs.

But the chorus (or perhaps we should call it a refrain) actually scrambles things up quite nicely:

It’s only love and that is all
Why should I feel the way I do?
It’s only love, and that is all
But it’s so hard loving you

This actually shifts the entire context of the song. No longer are we in the zone of butterflies and puppy love. When he sings “it’s only love” we’re actually invited to wonder: why is it only love? And you start to think that the singer he is actually quite uncomfortable with the level of risk that comes from being in a relationship. The extent to which you put your own emotions into the hands of another and just have to…hope that they treat them well.

Like so many of John’s songs from this period, it’s not about his own life. At least not directly. But it comes from a period in which he was actually quite depressed, seemingly because he had achieved everything but still felt lost. And I see this song as a reflection on that state, in the same sort of way that you also find in songs that are more obviously depressive, like Help! or I’m a Loser or I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party. But there’s a certain frisson here that’s genuinely interesting, and which is explicitly a product of the tossed-off lyrics. Because this is the song of someone who is disillusioned in the idea of love, but who still feels obliged to write love songs. And he can’t quite square those feelings, which results in this strange mishmash of giddiness and cynicism.

Would the song be ‘better’ if he’d really invested himself in it, come up with better lyrics? Probably. But the very fact that the lyrics are unrefined opens an interesting window that we’d never otherwise see.

I’m not saying that it’s one of their great works.¹ But it works well enough as a nice little pop song, and contains enough ambiguity to make me think. That’s a pretty good result for a filler track on a rushed album.

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There’s a game I sometimes like to play with myself where I try to imagine that the Beatles song I’m listening to never actually existed, and instead was released in the 70s by the Rutles. How would I feel about it in that case? For the inner-circle greats, it’s impossible to imagine even a genius like Neil Innes having come up with them. But in many cases, it’s actually pretty plausible. If you turn off your memory of the song, you can just about imagine Nasty and Stig shaking their heads to it.

I think that It’s Only Love is probably the pinnacle example. If it had been a Rutles release, you would call it a near-perfect mid-60s Beatles pastiche.

1. Though, testing the theory that almost any Beatles song is probably someone’s favorite, I did see this Reddit thread where a couple people say it tops their lists.