Beatles – "Thank You Girl" (1964)

I could tell the world

A thing or two about our love

I know, little girl,

Only a fool would doubt our love

Just because 28 POSTS IN 28 DAYS! is over doesn’t mean that my unrelenting vendetta against the Beatles is over!

If you ask me, there’s nothing wrong with beating a dead horse to death – and that’s exactly what I intend to do for the next two or three 2 or 3 lines posts.

(See what I did there?)

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This year’s 28 POSTS IN 28 DAYS! was critical of a number of the early Lennon-McCartney songs – most of which were really “songlets” rather than fully-developed songs, and which were nothing special when it came to lyrics.

That’s not surprising given how busy the Beatles were in 1963 (the year they became UK superstars) and 1964 (when they exploded in popularity in the US).

According to Goldmine magazine, the Beatles released four singles, three EPs, and two albums in the UK in 1963.  In addition, they appeared on radio 49 times and on television 35 times, and made an astonishing 287 additional live appearances. 

In February of that year, for example, they played a total of 27 gigs in 25 different venues.  (They did three shows that month at the famous Cavern Club in Liverpool.  Otherwise it was all one-night stands.) 

The Fab Four played ten shows between February 1 and February 9.  After taking February 10 off, they went to London and recorded ten songs for the Please Please Me album in a little less than ten hours.  (Mark Lewisohn’s 1988 book, The Beatles Recording Sessions, states that the actual recording time was 585 minutes.)

The bill for that day’s recording session was only £400.  (By contrast, it took 14 years and cost over $13 million to produce Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy album.)

The next day, the Beatles did not one, but two live shows – the first in Sheffield, the second about an hour’s drive away in a Manchester suburb.  

That kicked off a stretch of 20 gigs in 21 days – which might have been 21 gigs in 21 days but for the fact that they took March 5 off to record “Thank You Girl” (today’s featured song) and “From Me to You” (which will be the subject of the next 2 or 3 lines).

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Lennon and McCartney rhyme “about” and “doubt” in the second verse of today’s featured song – but that rhyme is what we English majors called a “middle rhyme” rather than the more common “end rhyme.”  (In an end rhyme, the rhyming words are at the end of the line – in a middle rhyme, they aren’t.)

As soon as I heard “Thank You Girl,” I was reminded of T.I.’s 2006 hit, “What You Know,” which is one of my favorite rap songs of all time.

T.I. salutes 2 or 3 lines

“What You Know” also features an “about”/“doubt” middle rhyme – and then rhymes “out” for good measure:

Don’t talk about me, dawg

And if you doubt me, dawg

You’d better out me, dawg

(“What You Know” is such a good song, albeit a really despicable song – it glorifies drug abuse, gun violence, misogynism, and wasting energy, among other things.  Click here to listen to it.)

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Here’s the first verse of “Thank You Girl”:

You’ve been good to me

You made me glad when I was blue

And eternally 

I”ll always be in love with you

The first two lines are sooooo generic – which is true of so many of the Lennon-McCartney lyrics of this era.  (I actually think that the lyrics are the least important element of a pop song, so that’s not a fatal flaw as far as I’m concerned.  But the lyrics of most good sixties songs give you a lot more to work with than “Thank You Girl” and most of the other Lennon-McCartney songs of the Beatlemania era.)

John and Paul must have been thrilled to come up with the word “eternally” for the third line – because it had four syllables, it could do the work of four one-syllable words.  (Note how few words in this song have more than one syllable – other than “eternally,” the only multisyllabic words in the whole song are “always,” “about,” “only,” and “loving.”)

“Eternally” is redundant, of course – the next line is “I’ll always be in love with you,” and “always” and “eternally” are pretty much the same word.  (To quote the immortal David Byrne, “Say something once, why say it again?”)

But as I noted above, “eternally” does the work of four words here – so no way they’re getting rid of it.  After all, it might take two or three minutes to come up with words to replace it.  

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Several of this year’s 28 POSTS IN 28 DAYS! have quoted Matt Blick’s Beatles Songwriting Academy blog, which is an absolutely essential resource for those who want to understand what makes Beatles songs what they are.

Matt is a big Beatles fan – he describes himself as “sitting reverently at the feet of Lennon and McCartney” – but he’s not afraid to call a spade a spade.

Matt Blick

He says that “Thank You Girl” is one of only two Lennon and McCartney songs “that don’t really hold any interest for songwriters.” (“Misery” is the other.)

“It’s hard to believe that a ‘paint by numbers’ effort like ‘Thank You Girl’ was ever in the running to be a single,” Blick adds.  

But it was.  “Thank You Girl” was originally intended to be the Beatles’ third single (after “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me”), until they came up with “From Me To You.”

So “Thank You Girl” became the B-side for “From Me to You” when it was released in the UK in 1963.

The next year, “Thank You Girl” was released in the U.S. as the B-side of “Do You Want to Know a Secret?”  Even though it was a B-side, the American obsession with the Beatles was at such a fever pitch in the spring of 1964 that “Thank You Girl” became a top-forty hit in its own right. 

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More on “Thank You Girl” from The Beatles Bible (another essential Beatles resource):

Originally titled ‘Thank You, Little Girl,” the song was intended as a message of gratitude for the support from the group’s fans.  As McCartney explained, “We knew that if we wrote a song called ‘Thank You Girl’ that a lot of the girls who wrote us fan letters would take it as a genuine thank you. So a lot of our songs were directly addressed to the fans.”

In many of their early songs, such as “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” and “P.S. I Love You,” the two songwriters used the trick of including “I,” “me,” or “you” in the title to make it seem more personal.

If you were Lennon and McCartney, writing song lyrics wasn’t rocket science, boys and girls.

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Paul McCartney rarely has anything bad to say about one of his songs.  But he was honest about “Thank You Girl”:

These early songs were wonderful to learn by and were good album fillers. [“Thank You Girl” was a] bit of a hack song really, but all good practice.

He got no argument from Lennon, who had this to say about “Thank You Girl” in 1980:  

“Thank You Girl” was one of our efforts at writing a single that didn’t work. So it became a B-side.

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Click here to listen to “Thank You Girl.”  

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