Beatles – "From Me to You" (1963)

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Imagine you’re a 20-year-old whose band has become the biggest pop-culture phenomenon in the entire world.

Your popularity is such that when you perform live – which is virtually every night – the screams of the early-stage adolescent girls who flock to your sold-out shows are so loud that you can’t hear your own voices or instruments.

You spend most of your days traveling to your next live gig, or doing radio and TV appearances.  Occasionally you take a day off to go into the studio in order to satisfy the unprecedented demand for your records.

Paul McCartney at age 20

You cover a lot of songs that were originally released by other artists, but  you also record original songs that you wrote with your friend and fellow band member.  Some of those songs date back to when the two of you were teenaged schoolboys, while others were cranked out in hotel rooms or on your tour bus.

Literally every record you release sells like hotcakes.  As quick as you get one out the door, your management is rushing you to get back into the studio to record the next one as quickly as you can.

Did I mention that you’re 20 years old?

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Given all that, it comes as no surprise that you cut a few corners when it comes to the songs that you and your mate write.  

The two of you have more song ideas than you know what to do with.  But what you don’t have is the time or the inclination to develop those ideas into fully-grown songs.

One of your hit songs has only one verse, which you repeat no fewer than four times.  But no matter: that record makes it to #1 anyway.  

Another of your early song-writing efforts isn’t good enough to be released as a single – both you and your partner acknowledge that fact – so you make it the B-side of a much better song.  And a funny thing happens: that B-side ends up in the top 40 on its own right.

Is it any surprise that you just keep cranking out one little “songlet” after another rather than slowing down and taking the time to create fully-realized songs with deeper and broader lyrical content?

No, that comes as no surprise at all.  I would have handled things in exactly the same way that Paul McCartney handled them if I had been in his place when I was 20 years old – which is to say that I would have sat down with John Lennon and written the best song we could write in half an hour’s time, taken a break to count my money, and then retired for the evening with as many young lovelies as I could fit into my hotel room.

(Hell, forget “when I was 20” – that’s exactly how I would handle things today.)

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John Lennon and Paul McCartney began writing “From Me to You” on February 28, 1963, while they were on a tour bus heading to Shrewsbury to open for 16-year-old headliner Helen Shapiro.  (Ever hear of Helen Shapiro before?  Neither had I.)

The song’s title was inspired by “From You to Us,” which was the letters section of the New Musical Express.  (As McCartney once noted, the Beatles’ early songs tended to include the words “I,” “me,” or “you” in them as a way of making them “very direct and personal” to the band's fans.)

More about “From Me to You” from John Lennon:

The night Paul and I wrote “From Me To You,” we were on the Helen Shapiro tour, on the coach, traveling from York to Shrewsbury.  We weren’t taking ourselves seriously – just fooling around on the guitar – when we began to get a good melody line, and we really started to work at it.  Before that journey was over, we’d completed the lyric, everything.  I think the first line was mine and we took it from there.  

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Roger Greenaway of the Kestrels – another one of the groups who were part of that Helen Shapiro tour – later told this story to an interviewer:

John and Paul were sitting at the back of the coach and Kenny Lynch, who at this time fancied himself as a songwriter, sauntered up to the back of the coach and . . . decided he would help them write a song.  After a period of about half an hour had elapsed and nothing seemed to be coming from the back, Kenny rushed to the front and shouted, “Well, that’s it.  I am not going to write any more of that bloody rubbish with those idiots.  They don't know music from their backsides.  That’s it!  No more help from me!”

You’ve probably never heard of Kenny Lynch, but he was a very successful singer/songwriter.  Two of his 1963 releases made it to the top ten in the UK, and he also wrote hit songs for Cilia Black and the Small Faces.  But he is best remembered as the first artist other than the Beatles themselves to record a Lennon-McCartney song.  That song was “Misery,” which John and Paul had written in the hope that Helen Shapiro would record it. 

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“Please Please Me” was the Beatles’ first #1 single in the UK, and “From Me to You” was their second.

Capitol Records – which had the rights to release those records in the U.S. – declined to do so.  Both records were released on lesser labels in 1963, but neither one charted.

Vee-Jay Records reissued “Please Please Me” in January 1964, just before the Fab Four appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.  It eventually peaked at the #3 spot on the Billboard “Hot 100” – trailing only “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You.”  

“From Me to You” was re-released as the B-side for “Please Please Me.”  It made it to #41 on the “Hot 100.”  

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Paul McCartney thought “From Me to You” was a songwriting milestone for John and him.  He was especially pleased with the song’s bridge, or “middle eight”:

The thing I liked about “From Me to You” was it had a very complete middle.  It went to a surprising place.  The opening chord of the middle section of that song heralded a new batch for me.  That was a pivotal song.  Our songwriting lifted a little with that song. . . . This was our real start.

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“From Me to You” is really a 50-second-long “songlet.”  That’s how long it takes for the Beatles to get through the first and second verses and the bridge.

After that, it’s all repetition.  First, the Beatles repeat both those verses and the bridge.  (The only real difference the second time through is that they turn the first half of the second verse into a four-bar harmonica solo.)

That only gets them to 1:30.  So they repeat the first verse yet again, tack on a quick outro, and call it a day a few seconds short of the two-minute mark.

One final note: “From Me To You” was the first Beatles single to feature a falsetto “Woooo,” but far from the last.  In fact, their very next single – “She Loves You” – also included this Beatles trademark.

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I could go on deconstructing early Lennon-McCartney songs for months, but I won’t.

2 or 3 lines will have more to say about the Beatles in the very near future – I think some of you have missed the point of this year’s 28 POSTS IN 28 DAYS!, and I’m going to try one more time to clear things up.

But I need to take a break and mull things over for a week or two first.  So my next few posts will be about something completely different.

Click here to listen to “From Me to You.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: