The Beatles‘ legacy is one of experimentation, fearlessness and pioneering spirit. They’re revered as bold artists who pushed themselves and pushed boundaries in turn, but for a long time, the truth was the exact opposite.
They were always prolific. From the second John Lennon and Paul McCartney met, the pair made friends, shared influences and got straight to work. As they learnt to write songs together, they set off on a speed race, making tracks at insane volume pretty much immediately. Their archive was growing from the first moment, and quickly, it was significant.
By the time The Beatles had fostered attention, they’d met Brian Epstein, they’d finally got a record deal, there were already so many songs that some were going to have to be fated to the vault. The process of making their first albums was a tricky balance between returning to those older tracks while also honouring the fact that Lennon and McCartney were still busy.
Each and every day, there were new songs. Even as Beatlemania took hold and they were caught in the storm of global fame, the productivity never dipped.
However, the way they wrote changed. Especially as the early 1960s started crawling towards the midpoint, in 1964, McCartney noticed a change perhaps less in his actual songwriting, and more in his mindset surrounding it. When he reflects on Beatles For Sale now, that taints it as he hears it as a record led by sell-out songs as his mission because about one thing and one thing only: write a hit.
“‘Every Little Thing’, like most of the stuff I did, was my attempt at the next single,” he said of one of the main culprits. To him, the album represents a point where he wasn’t writing for greatness, but was writing for success. He was trying to write for sales, hoping to get the band a big hit or as least another huge single.
That meant that anything that wasn’t a single felt worthless to him. If a track didn’t feel like it had a certain spark or wasn’t going to be a big attention-grabbing top-seller, it was tainted to feel weak and useless. ‘Every Little Thing’ is one of them as he said, “It was something I thought was quite good but it became an album filler rather than the great almighty single. It didn’t have quite what was required.”
‘What You’re Doing’ was another, another track that didn’t have the spark of a single and so became nothing but noise to McCartney when he was on a mission. “‘What You’re Doing’ was a bit of a filler,” he said. However, he grants this one a saving grace as he added, “Maybe it’s a better recording than it is a song, some of them are. Sometimes a good recording would enhance the song,” complimenting Ringo Starr’s drumming on the track especially as a feature that adds at least some intrigue to a song he saw as a let down when he only wanted to write hits.