I'm Happy Just to Dance with You

The record reaches for motifs of plea, love and softness. The same dance motif runs through 'I Saw Her Standing There' and 'Twist and Shout', a year before. The lyric turns to anaphora. As it happens, the title is one of the longest the Beatles wrote, and it is on more of their 1967 records than any other year's. It reaches once for triple rhyme. The writing draws on R&B. A small coincidence, but the line "I'm in love with you" turns up in 4 Beatles songs, among them 'Do You Want to Know a Secret', 'Old Brown Shoe' and 'I'll Get You'.

'I'm Happy Just to Dance with You' is a pop and merseybeat piece, written in E major and taken at about 118 BPM. The harmony takes in an augmented chord, one that fourteen of the Beatles' records feature, and Lennon reached for it more than the others, on nine of them. Worth a footnote, the chords run B → C♯m → A → B → C♯m → A6 → B6 → E6, the same shape 'Octopus's Garden' plays as B → C♯m → A → B → C♯m → A → B → E.

Cut at EMI Studio 2 on March 1, 1964 in just four takes - among the quickest A Hard Day's Night sessions - with George Martin producing, Norman Smith engineering, and a 17-year-old Geoff Emerick assisting as second engineer. McCartney used the Hofner 500/1 here, his bass. The session was set up with the Ludwig Downbeat, Starr's own kit since 1963, and it is on more of their 1963 records than any other year's. The Beatles used double tracked vocal on it, as on 139 of their records. It shares its session day with two others, the 43rd to the 45th of their career.

Lennon wrote it, and it gave George the lead, with 12-string guitar in the arrangement. Starr is credited with an arabian drum overdub, most at home in their 1963 writing.

The track was issued as an album track on side one of the UK A Hard Day's Night soundtrack. In the US issued as the B-side of the 'I'll Cry Instead' Capitol single (#95 Hot 100) and included on Capitol's Something New LP. In America it arrived two weeks earlier, on A Hard Day's Night (US), a United Artists record. Unlike the all-Beatles UK version, the US release included orchestral score tracks by George Martin on side two. The song is in one of their films as well as on the record. This is their 46th record, and the 12th of the 35 they released in 1964.