98. Michelle

Straddling the line between parody and sincerity, Michelle is a perfect and somewhat inexplicable gem

Michelle was a number one hit in many countries, and remains one of the most popular Beatles tracks to this day.¹ Pretty impressive for something Paul wrote as a teenager, mostly as a way to try to pick up girls:

I used to pretend I could speak French…I used to sit around and murmur…trying to be enigmatic to make girls think, ‘Who’s that very interesting French guy over in the corner?’ I would literally use it as that, and John knew this was one of my ploys.

He’d sit there and work on a fingerpicked tune in a French style that would hopefully enhance the verisimilitude of his terrible accent. And from this was born one of the most famous ballads in Beatles history. It’s all quite ridiculous.

It’s also one of those times (so common in the Beatles story) where contingency became the mother of genius. You see, they were under intense pressure to put out more and more records as quickly as possible. In late 1964, that had driven them to mine their back catalog of covers to fill out Beatles for Sale. But by the fall of 1965, they were done with covers. The new album needed to be all originals. But what originals? They’d scrambled to finish the last one just a few months before and then spent the entire summer on an extended tour. Arriving back in London at the end of August, they had barely two months to write and record a whole new album of material.

Under that pressure, John remembered this silly old thing and convinced Paul to try reworking it. It really shouldn’t have succeeded. But that’s just how it went for the Beatles. Even the most ridiculous ideas generally turned to gold.

In the final version, you can still hear the insouciance of the original concept. This is the tune of a young scouse lad trying to playact as a sophisticated man about town. At the same time, you can also hear that it’s Paul freaking McCartney, a certifiable musical genius. Who could have strummed any old thing, but instead decided to borrow a Chet Atkins finger-picking style and some weird jazzy chords.² And, of course, but the time they recorded it, there were probably few people on earth who less needed help in convincing girls to sleep with him.

All of this makes it a kind of Schrödinger’s Song: both parody and sincere, both needy and impossibly secure, both cool and corny. The one thing we can say for sure is that it’s thoroughly, utterly, and ridiculously charming.

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The song also has a quite personal meaning for me, which has developed in the past couple years since the birth of my daughter.

I’ve never been much for singing, but I make an exception for my kids, who quite often get to enjoy the dubious pleasure. At the changing table, while giving a bottle, while laying them down in the crib, just around the house any old time. And while in theory I strive to cover a range of artists and styles, the reality is that mostly I just sing Beatles songs.

Michelle was not a particularly prominent one with my son. But very soon after we welcomed Helen into the world, and took to calling her Helen Melon, I discovered that ‘Hel-en mel-on’ rather perfectly matched the cadence and tune of “Mi-chelle ma belle.” And so I’ve spent the subsequent two years iterating on the theme. So I’ll probably never be able to think of this song again without thinking of “Helen, Melon, what is that that I’ve been smelling?”

1. At the time of writing, it’s the third most-streamed song on Rubber Soul (behind In My Life and Norwegian Wood), and the 33rd most-streamed song from their whole catalog. One spot ahead of A Day in the Life!

2. Lacking the musical talent to describe it myself, I’ll just let Paul himself (from The Lyrics) explain:

We used to love going into this shop, even though it meant we had to pay our dues with our little books because, of course, we’d bought our guitars on an installment plan. Jim Gretty would often stand behind the counter in Hessy’s, playing a bit of guitar, as guys in music shops so often do. We really admired his skills. He was far more advanced than us. One chord we heard him play was particularly lush, and he took the trouble to demonstrate it to us. It was what we knew as an F chord, a simple F shape, down at the first position, down at the nut. But Jim used two more of his fingers to cover the first two strings up on the fourth fret, which would be A-flat and E-flat, so there was an extra component to the F chord. The good thing was that if he showed something to both of us, we were bound to remember it because if George forgot it I’d remember it, and vice versa. We called Gretty’s lush F chord ‘F demented