Baby It's You
“It's not the way you smile that touched my heart”
What is unique about this song?
This song is one of two songs that were recorded with a Schiedmayer celesta, alongside 'Good Night', and one of three that came out of Brill Building, the others are 'Boys' and 'Chains'. It is the only Beatles recording of a song by Burt Bacharach and Mack David. Fourteen Beatles records are sung with scat singing, 'Run for Your Life' and 'Nowhere Man' among them, and this one is the earliest. This is among the first of 24 Beatles records to use the Vox AC30, cut the same day as 'Chains' and 'Twist and Shout'. Worth noting, this song is the earliest Beatles song to lean on ballad, which they use on 39 songs in all.
What happened around it?
see full timeline →'Twist and Shout' and 'There's a Place' came off the same tape, and it was cut in the single session that made most of Please Please Me. In the same weeks, 11 days after the session, Northern Songs Ltd was formed.
The line "What can I do" turns up in 3 Beatles songs: 'Baby It's You', 'Baby's in Black', and 'Got to Get You into My Life'.
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Text228 tags
Some of it is put as a question ('What can I do?' repeated), and the lyric touches the motifs of relationship and love. Formally it is confessional in manner, most at home in the Beatles' 1968 writing. Chance or not, the line "What can I do" turns up in 3 Beatles songs, among them 'Got to Get You into My Life' and 'Baby's in Black'.
Cover-shared words
Cover-shared shape
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Music108 tags
'Baby It's You' is a pop and R&B piece, written in G major and taken at about 80 BPM. The tune carries call and response (Sha-la-la answers each line), and 1963 is the year the Beatles reached for it most. It has a keyboard solo. Also, the record has scat singing (la-la, sha-la-la hook). By accident or design, the harmony moves A7 → Dm → Gm → C7, the same shape 'Golden Slumbers' takes as E7 → Am → Dm9 → G7.
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Studio12 tags
This song came out of EMI Studio 2, cut in three takes during the band's ten-hour marathon Please Please Me session, with George Martin overdubbing celesta the following week. Lennon is on the Gibson J-160E, his acoustic-electric, in use since 1962 and heard on 66 Beatles records in all, such as 'Ask Me Why' and 'Anna (Go to Him)'. The record closes with a fade-out, and ten songs came off that day's tapes, the 5th to the 14th of the career.
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People14 tags
Burt Bacharach, Mack David and Luther Dixon wrote it, and Lennon sings lead. George Martin played celesta, as he also did on 'Good Night'.
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Info18 tags
The song was never a single, and it reached the public with Please Please Me, on March 22, 1963. In America it arrived ten months later, on Introducing The Beatles, a Vee-Jay record. This is their 10th record, and the 8th of the 32 they released in that year.
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Sources & references
Tags on this page are original analysis, transcribed and cross-checked against the fine work of others: Alan W. Pollack's “Notes on…” series, the Beatles Complete Scores (Hal Leonard), Mark Lewisohn's session histories, Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head, Dave Rybaczewski's Beatles Music History and Andy Babiuk's Beatles Gear for the instruments and studio equipment, and others besides - then verified by ear against the recordings. Full bibliography: Sources & thanks.
External entity links: Wikipedia · MusicBrainz recording · MusicBrainz work · Wikidata
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