Beatles – "You're Going to Lose That Girl" (1965)

You’re gonna lose that girl 

You’re gonna lose that girl 

You’re gonna lose that girl 

 

The Beatles recorded a lot of songs that I think are more accurately described as “songlets.”

If you strip away the unnecessary repetition of verses and bridges in those songs, you’re left with only 80 or 90 seconds of music – which is not enough for an album track or a 45 side even by the somewhat loose standards of the sixties.

In addition to “Another Girl” and “I Need You” – which were discussed at some length in the previous 2 or 3 lines – virtually every other song on the Help! album qualifies as a “songlet.”

For example, there’s “The Night Before,” which really should have ended at about 1:30.

Since that’s too short, the Beatles lengthened the track to 2:37 by essentially repeating the second verse, the bridge, and the third verse.  (To give them credit, the way they handled the second second verse was clever.  Instead of simply repeating the entire, they replaced the first two lines of that verse with a brief guitar solo, and then repeated the second two lines.)

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The more shameless case of using repetition to stretch a song from the Help! album is “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” which has barely a minute’s worth of original material.  

The Beatles start stretching from the outset of that song by opening up with the chorus: “You’re gonna lose that girl (Yes, yes, you’re gonna lose that girl)/You’re gonna lose that girl (Yes, yes, you’re gonna lose that girl).”

Next is verse one, which is of the most unimaginative verses ever written:

If you don’t take her out tonight

She’s gonna change her mind 

And I will take her out tonight

And I will treat her kind 

After another chorus, we’re presented with verse two, which is just as unimaginative as verse one (which it closely resembles):

If you don’t treat her right, my friend

You’re gonna find her gone

‘Cause I will treat her right, and then

You’ll be the lonely one 

What’s next – that lame one-line chorus, repeated a third time.

After that, there’s a bridge.  (Hooray!  Something different!)

That’s followed by a brief guitar solo and yet another presentation of our old friend, the chorus.

Which is followed by the bridge – bridges in short pop songs really shouldn’t be repeated, but the Beatles made a habit of doing so – and a repetition of verse one.

Last and certainly least, we get the chorus yet again.  (The phrase “You’re gonna lose that girl” is repeated some 28 times – but who’s counting?)

What the Beatles did was the musical equivalent of a teenaged girl stuffing her bra with socks.  But even with all that padding, and the song is still only 2:20 long – barely a B-cup.  

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The Beatles didn’t repeat the bridge to stretch out “Tell Me What You See” – which was on the British version of Help! but was released in the United States on Beatles VI (which was actually the 7th Capitol Records studio album released by the Beatles in the U.S.) but only because there is no bridge in that song.

Instead, they stretched that song to an acceptable length by turning two and a half verses into four – the second rhyming couplet in the third verse is word-for-word the same as the second rhyming couplet of the first verse, while the fourth and final verse simply repeats the third verse – and by repeating the electric piano solo note for note.

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Here’s what Paul had to said about “Tell Me What You See” in a 1997 book: “[This song is] not awfully memorable. Not one of the better songs, but they did a job, they were very handy for albums or ‘B’ sides.”  

But the Beatles didn’t use the trick of repeating verses and bridges willy-nilly in order to stretch a single into a song only in their lesser-known “B” sides and album fillers.  In fact, some of the Beatles’ biggest hits were terribly repetitive.

In the next 2 or 3 lines, we’ll discuss three Beatles singles that were number one hits in 1965 – each one a “songlet” that would have fallen short of the minimum length expected of a sixties record if it hadn’t been stretched through pointless repetition.

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The entire American version of the Help! album was less than 29 minutes long.  That meant that each of its 12 tracks average less than two and a half minutes in length.

And that’s not the half of it.  Five of those 12 tracks were instrumentals taken from the movie’s orchestral score, which was composed and conducted by a chap named Ken Thorne.  I don’t know much about Ken Thorne, but I know that he wasn’t one of the Beatles!

If you paid good money for the Help! album, you got roughly one-third original Beatles songlets, one-third repetition, and one-third orchestral filler.  I’d ask for my money back if I were you.  

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Click here to listen to “You’re Going to Lose That Girl.”

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