She Loves You - Composition

Composition

McCartney and Lennon started composing "She Loves You" after a concert at the Majestic Ballroom in Newcastle as part of their tour with Roy Orbison and Gerry & The Pacemakers. They began writing the song on the tour bus, and continued later that night at their hotel in Newcastle. In 2003, plans to install a plaque at the hotel were stalled after it turned out neither Paul McCartney nor Ringo Starr, the surviving Beatles, could recall whether it was the Imperial Hotel or the Royal Turk's Head where the group had stayed.

The other circumstances under which the song was written are generally agreed upon. In 2000, McCartney said: "There was a Bobby Rydell song out at the time, 'Forget Him', and, as often happens, you think of one song when you write another. We were in a van up in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. I'd planned an 'answering song' where a couple of us would sing 'she loves you' and the other ones would answer 'yeah yeah'. We decided that was a crummy idea but at least we then had the idea of a song called 'She Loves You'. So we sat in the hotel bedroom for a few hours and wrote it — John and I, sitting on twin beds with guitars." It was completed the following day at McCartney's family home at Forthlin Road, Liverpool. Unusual for a love song, the lyrics were not written in the first person, instead the narrator functions as a helpful go-between for the estranged lovers. This idea was attributed by Lennon to McCartney in 1980: "It was Paul's idea: instead of singing 'I love you' again, we’d have a third party. That kind of little detail is still in his work. He will write a story about someone. I'm more inclined to write about myself."

The British establishment at that time found the refrain "yeah, yeah, yeah" controversial. National radio in the form of the BBC broadcast the single and "in some quarters it was seen to hail the collapse of civilised society". Lennon, being mindful of Elvis Presley's "All Shook Up", wanted something equally as stirring: "I don't know where the 'yeah yeah yeah' came from I remember when Elvis did 'All Shook Up' it was the first time in my life that I had heard 'uh huh', 'oh yeah', and 'yeah yeah' all sung in the same song". "The 'wooooo' was taken from The Isley Brothers' 'Twist And Shout'. We stuck it in everything". McCartney recalls them playing the finished song on acoustic guitars to his father at home immediately after the song was completed: "We went into the living room 'Dad, listen to this. What do you think? And he said 'That's very nice son, but there's enough of these Americanisms around. Couldn't you sing 'She loves you, yes, yes, yes!'. At which point we collapsed in a heap and said 'No, Dad, you don't quite get it!'".

George Martin, The Beatles' producer, questioned the validity of the major sixth chord that ends the song, an idea suggested by George Harrison "They sort of finished on this curious singing chord which was a major sixth, with George doing the sixth and the others doing the third and fifth in the chord. It was just like a Glenn Miller arrangement". McCartney later reflected: "We took it to George Martin and sang 'She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeeeeeaah…' and that tight little sixth cluster we had at the end. George said: 'It's very corny, I would never end on a sixth'. But we said 'It's such a great sound, it doesn't matter'".