Beatles – "Not a Second Time" (1964)

And now you’ve changed your mind

I see no reason to change mine

Matt Blick started writing the “Beatles Songwriting Academy” blog in 2009.  Since then he’s been working his way through the entire Beatles oeuvre, examining each of their 211 recorded songs in turn in hopes of sussing out the particular elements that are characteristic of the best Lennon-McCartney songs.  

Matt Blick

Although he describes himself as “sitting reverently at the feet of Lennon and McCartney” – he’s clearly a big fan of John and Paul’s songwriting – Blick was not impressed with today’s featured song:

In every great artist’s bottom drawer there are a million failed experiments and “nearly great” works of art.

“Not A Second Time” is one. . . .

[T]he song plods along aimlessly, stopping by a soporific piano solo before (horror of horrors!) fading out (perhaps through lack of interest). . . .

I think the song is killed by an overdose of melisma and the fact that nothing happens lyrically.

Lennon’s not doing anything.  Not even crying.  And he’s certainly going to go out with her again.

Meh.

[NOTE: You may not be familiar with the term melisma, but pop singers use melisma all the time.  In melismatic singing, the singer sings several different notes to the same syllable.  (The opposite of melismatic singing is syllabic singing, where the singer sings one note per syllable.)  There’s a good example of a melisma just five seconds into “Not a Second Time,” when Lennon holds the word “why” as he sings five different notes.]

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“Not a Second Time” is the next-to-last track on the Beatles’ second UK album (With the Beatles), which was released on November 22, 1963 – the same day that President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed.  It was the last track on the Beatles’ first U.S. album (Meet the Beatles!), which was released two months later.

I don’t recall ever hearing “Not a Second Time” before listening to it today – it’s certainly one of the more obscure Lennon-McCartney songs.  (It’s officially a Lennon-McCartney song even though everyone agrees that John Lennon was wholly responsible for it.  That’s because John and Paul agreed when they were teenagers that all the songs written by them – whether individually or jointly – would be credited to both of them.)

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I don’t think “Not a Second Time” is a very good song, but it’s not an uninteresting song musically.  

The chord progressions in “Not a Second Time” are quite original.  Unfortunately, the result is a song that doesn’t have much musical flow – it’s not a user-friendly song.

There’s no vocal harmonizing on “Not a Second Time” – presumably because Lennon and McCartney and George Martin had no idea how to add harmonies to Lennon’s rather eccentric melody and chord structure.

I wonder what “Not a Second Time” might have become if John (and Paul) had continued to work on it for a year to two instead of recording it in 1963.

I also wonder what Brian Wilson might have done with Lennon’s rough draft of a song.  (Who knows?  He might have been to figure out a way to add vocal harmonizing.)

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In December 1963, The Times of London published a much-talked-about article (presumably written by music critic William Mann) that praised Lennon and McCartney’s harmonic and melodic gifts (albeit with one caveat):

[O]ne gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence at the end of “Not A Second Time” (the chord progression which ends Mahler’s Song of the Earth).

Those submediant switches from C major into A flat major . . . are a trademark of Lennon-McCartney songs – they do not figure much in other pop repertories, or in the Beatles’ arrangements of borrowed material – and show signs of becoming a mannerism. 

Mann’s reference to “the Aeolian cadence at the end of” today’s featured song has generated a lot of commentary over the years – most of which can be summed up as asking “WTF”?

Here’s an excerpt from Aaron Krerowicz’s “Flip Side Beatles” blog:

As a well-educated musician, I am both intrigued and confused by Mann's words.  While I know what the terms “Aeolian” and “cadence” mean separately, I have never previously encountered them used together.  

In his book A Hard Day's Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Song, Steve Turner is equally perplexed: “An ‘Aeolian cadence’ is not a recognised musical description and generations of music critics have puzzled over exactly what Mann was referring to.”

A quick Google search of the term “Aeolian cadence” produces two basic types of results: first, those quoting Mann's article; second, those asking what Mann's article means. 

After spending a fair amount of time trying to figure out what Mann was talking about, Krerowicz finally gives up.  (You can click here to read his entire post, but I don’t recommend that unless you have a pretty sophisticated understanding of music theory.)

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What’s most interesting to me about all this is that there is absolutely no reason to think that John and Paul would have had a clue concerning what Mann was talking about.  (None of the Beatles could even read or write music.)

John Lennon had this to say about Mann’s piece in 1972:

[I have a] quiet giggle when straight-faced critics start feeding all sorts of hidden meanings into the stuff we write.  William Mann wrote the intellectual article about the Beatles. He uses a whole lot of musical terminology and he's a twit. . . . I still don’t know what it means at the end, but it made us acceptable to the intellectuals.”

John Lennon in 1980

Lennon added this in a 1980 interview:

To this day I don't have any idea what [Aeolian cadences] are.  They sound like exotic birds.

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“Not a Second Time” is yet another Beatles “songlet.”  The Fab Four definitely took it  out of the oven a little early.

John wrote two short verses, then a bridge – and he was done.  But that only gets us to the 45-second mark, and 45 seconds just isn’t long enough for a record.  

So George Martin inserts a lame instrumental break based on the bridge, and follows up with a repeat of the two verses and the bridge, followed by a brief outdo.  That gets us to just over the two-minute mark, which is enough for filling-out-an-album purposes.

Some hardcore fans of this song like the fact that the verses are seven bars long rather than the usual eight – they pitch that as an example of John’s originality.  But I think the reason he cut off the verse after seven bars is that he had nothing left to fill up that eighth bar – it was a stretch to make the verse even seven bars long, much less eight.

Click here to listen to “Not a Second Time.”

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