Girl

From Wikipedia:

“Girl” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1965 album Rubber Soul. It was written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney. “Girl” was the last complete song recorded for that album. “Girl” is considered to be one of the most melancholic and complex of the Beatles’ love songs.

Composition

“Girl” is real. There is no such thing as the girl, she was a dream, but the words are all right. It wasn’t just a song, and it was about that girl – that turned out to be Yoko, in the end – the one that a lot of us were looking for.

John Lennon

The song’s instrumentation has specific similarities to Greek music, as with “And I Love Her” and “Michelle“. As for the inspiration of the song’s lyrics, Lennon stated that the “girl” was an archetype he had been searching for and would finally find in Yoko Ono. In an interview for Rolling Stone magazine in 1980, Lennon said of his song “Woman“: “Reminds me of a Beatles track, but I wasn’t trying to make it sound like that. I did it as I did ‘Girl’ many years ago. So this is the grown-up version of ‘Girl’.”

McCartney claimed that he contributed the lines “Was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure” and “That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure.” However, in a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, Lennon explained that he wrote these lines as a comment on Christianity, which he was “opposed to at the time”. Lennon said: “I was just talking about Christianity, in that – a thing like you have to be tortured to attain heaven … – be tortured and then it’ll be alright, which seems to be a bit true but not in their concept of it. But I didn’t believe in that, that you have to be tortured to attain anything, it just so happens that you were”.

Recording

Author Ian MacDonald describes “Girl” as “Lennon’s answer to McCartney’s ‘Michelle‘: another Euro-song, replacing his partner’s suave mock-French with a decadent German two-step crossed with Mikis Theodorakis’s music for Zorba the Greek“. Performed by Lennon and George Harrison, the acoustic guitars on the track were played with capos, lending an extra brightness to their sound. Musicologist Walter Everett comments that one of Harrison’s guitar parts has the capo positioned so high up the neck and is played by him in a manner that creates a “nasal, sitar-like ‘bouzouki’ sound”.

Lennon’s lead vocals were initially overdubbed and featured a characteristic unheard before on a Beatles song. In McCartney’s description: “My main memory is that John wanted to hear the breathing, wanted it to be very intimate, so George Martin put a special compressor on the voice, then John dubbed it. … I remember John saying to the engineer (Norman Smith) when we did ‘Girl,’ that when he draws his breath in, he wants to hear it.” Following the Beatles’ request, the engineer added more treble to the vocal, which, in Everett’s description, matches the sound and timbre of the brushed cymbal played by Ringo Starr. In the song’s middle eight sections, McCartney and Harrison sing the word “tit” repeatedly as vocal harmony. McCartney stated that this part of the vocal arrangement was influenced by the Beach Boys particularly the song You’re So Good to Me. He recalled: “The Beach Boys had a song [You’re So Good to Me] out where they’d done ‘la la la’ and we loved the innocence of that and wanted to copy it, but not use the same phrase.”

Cancelled 1977 single release

In early 1966, “Girl” was issued as the B-side of “Michelle” in several European countries, reaching number one in Finland. It was also released as the A-side of a single in Italy, backed by “Nowhere Man“, which reached number seven on the nation’s Musica e Dischi singles chart.

In November 1977, Capitol Records scheduled the United States release of “Girl” backed with “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” as a single (Capitol 4506) to accompany the release of Love Songs, a Beatles’ compilation album that contains both of these songs. However, the single was cancelled before it was issued. Promotional copies, which featured “Girl” on both sides—one in stereo, the other mono, along with a picture sleeve, were issued. (All copies of this promotional single were pressed on black vinyl.) […]

‘Girl’ is real. There is no such thing as the girl, she was a dream, but the words are all right. It wasn’t just a song, and it was about that girl – that turned out to be Yoko, in the end – the one that a lot of us were looking for.

John Lennon – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

Listen to this one, Girl. John’s been reading a book about pain and pleasure, about the idea behind Christianity — that to have pleasure you have to have pain. The book says that’s all rubbish, it often happens that pain leads to pleasure but you don’t have to have it, all that’s a drag. So we’ve written a song about it, with I suppose a little bit of protest — though really we don’t protest. Listen to John’s breath on the word ‘girl’: we asked the engineer to put it on treble, so you get this huge intake of breath and it sounds just like a percussion instrument.

Paul McCartney – From interview for London Life, December 4, 1965

In the song Girl that John wrote, there’s a Zorba-like thing at the end that I wrote which came from that holiday. I was very impressed with another culture’s approach because it was slightly different from what we did. We just did it on acoustic guitars instead of bouzoukis. […]

My main memory is that John wanted to hear the breathing, wanted it to be very intimate, so George Martin put a special compressor on the voice, then John dubbed it. […]

It was always amusing to see if we could get a naughty word on the record: ‘fish and finger pie’, ‘prick teaser’, ‘tit tit tit tit’. The Beach Boys had a song out where they’d done ‘la la la la’ and we loved the innocence of that and wanted to copy it, but not use the same phrase. So we were looking around for another phrase, so it was ‘dit dit dit dit’, which we decided to change in our waggishness to ‘tit tit tit tit’, which is virtually indistinguishable from ‘dit dit dit dit’. And it gave us a laugh.

It was to get some light relief in the middle of this real big career that we were forging. If we could put in something that was a little bit subversive then we would. George Martin might say, ‘Was that “dit dit” or “tit tit” you were singing?’ ‘Oh, “dit dit”, George, but it does sound a bit like that, doesn’t it?’ Then we’d get in the car and break down laughing.

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

From The Usenet Guide to Beatles Recording Variations:

• [a] mono 15 Nov 1965.
  UK: Parlophone PMC 1267 Rubber Soul 1965.
  US: Capitol T 2442 Rubber Soul 1965.
• [b] stereo 15 Nov 1965.
  UK: Parlophone PCS 3075 Rubber Soul 1965, Apple PCSP 717 The Beatles 1962-1966 1973.
  US: Capitol ST 2442 Rubber Soul 1965, Apple SKBO-3403 The Beatles 1962-1966 1973.
• [c] stereo 1977.
  UK: Parlophone PCSP 721 Love Songs 1977.
  US: Capitol SKBL11711 Love Songs 1977.
• [d] stereo 1987.
  CD: EMI CDP 7 46440 2 Rubber Soul 1987, EMI CDP 7 97036 2 The Beatles 1962-1966 1993.

[c] has the vocal track in the center of the mix.

Lyrics

Variations

Officially appears on

Bootlegs

Going further

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_(The_Beatles_song)