88. I'll Be Back

A groundbreaking piece of songwriting, and a truly incredible album closer

In some ways, this is the most astonishing song on A Hard Day’s Night, an album that was already full of astonishing material. It pushes the envelope on what it’s even possible for a pop group to do, in a way that clearly prefigured some of the major changes to come over the ensuing five years, but which also stands a bit outside the rest of the Beatles’ story of musical development.

It’s not that they have no other songs that occupy this same kind of compositional space (Cry Baby Cry, for example, shares a lot of the same DNA), but there’s something sui generis about the way they bounce minor and major chords off one another in this song, something that feels more of a piece with Bach or Bacharach than with Lennon and McCartney.

It’s actually the sort of thing that Paul himself would later dabble in quite a bit more heavily some decades later. I hear a lot of the same sentiment, for example, in Flowers in the Dirt or McCartney III.

Which, I suppose, is one way of saying that I’ll Be Back feels like the sort of song that an older man would write. Both in terms of subject matter, and in terms of its pathos. It’s a song of heartsickness, but also one of deep maturity and composure. Beautifully melodic, but also beautifully restrained.

It’s frankly incredible that they could write something like this at any stage of their lives, but particularly impossible to believe it could be the product of this particular moment in early 1964, when they had rocketed from local fame to previously untouched heights of global superstardom.

There’s a terrible pathos in “I wanna go, but I hate to leave you” – the lament of someone who is trapped in a situation where they are not loved as they should be, but who can’t help but come back for more. That feeling of disrespect is a pretty common theme in John’s work during this period, but I don’t think it was ever handled more deftly or with more careful attention to the feeling of dissociation that accompanies it.

That dissociation is bolstered by the delicate dance between major and minor keys. As I’ve said before, I have absolutely no musical talent, and struggle to understand even the most basic elements of music theory. But I find those pieces interesting, and enjoy taking songs I know very well as an opportunity to try to learn a bit about what’s going on underneath the hood. As I understand it (helpfully guided by a wonderful conversation on Your Own Personal Beatles) the specific device employed in this song is called a Picardy Third, in which a musical section in a minor key resolves in the major chord of the tonic. The effect of which is generally to add an element of brightness to a melancholic line. Which is essential in this case. That glimmer of sunlight in each resolving phrase adds an element of wistfulness that entirely defines the song. As a result, lines that could otherwise read as bitter or self-negating instead present as fragile and tentative. The singer knows that he is trapped, but also can’t help but feeling that there’s something beautiful in his confinement.

This effect is further supported by the trick of repeatedly starting lines on the downbeat (you know…, cause I…, this time…) and by an unusual structure: no chorus, two different bridges.

And again, this is all happening at the close of this magisterial album, filled entirely with Lennon/McCartney originals, composed at the height of Beatlemania. No one was expecting them to pull out these kind of stops, to write something this mature, to compose something this thoughtful. They could easily have closed the album with something like You Can’t Do That and left the people on an adrenaline rush. Instead, they went for this, and in doing so added significant heft to everything that had come before.

For me, that makes it probably the best album-closer of the early Beatles period. While it doesn’t blow the house down like Twist and Shout, it presents an argument, encouraging the listener to step forward into the unknown. Much like the Picardy Third itself, which resolves a musical section by pushing outward rather than returning to the expected tonic, I’ll Be Back resolves the entire record by pointing forward. It invites the listener who has appreciated an all-time great record to not simply return to the origin and enjoy it again, but instead to take the risk of stepping out with them, into the great unknown. They would do this two more times in their career, with Tomorrow Never Knows and A Day in the Life. In each case, the final track represents a culmination but also a radical break from what has been.

It’s not my favorite song on A Hard Day’s Night, but I think it’s almost certainly the most impressive, and the one that most fundamentally challenges the idea of pop music itself.