It's Only Love

The words touch on the motifs of self reflection, love and relationship, and the writing is confessional in manner. The light motif had already turned up on 'Till There Was You' and 'And I Love Her', 2 years before. The lyric turns to alliteration. A curiosity, the title has the word love in it, a thing the Beatles returned to 12 times across 3 years, and it reaches once for triple rhyme ("fight/night/bright"). One for the word-counters, "butterflies" turns up in no other Beatles lyric.

'It's Only Love' is a folk rock and pop piece that moves at about 107 BPM, in C major. The guitar riff here is tremolo-treated lead figure between phrases. Also, the performance shows a capo moving the shapes up (Lennon and Harrison both used one on their acoustics for the high register). The harmony reaches for an augmented chord, heard on fourteen Beatles records in all, and Lennon reached for it more than the others, on nine of them. Listen for an appoggiatura, a leaning note that resolves late. It is strophic, the same tune each time with new words, as sixteen of their songs are, such as 'Words of Love' and 'Dizzy Miss Lizzy'. Interestingly, its G → F → G → C → Am chord sequence is one 'Octopus's Garden' plays too, there as B → A → B → E → C♯m. The Beatles first took an AA form here.

Cut in six takes at EMI Studio 2, with Harrison's tremolo lead overdubbed onto the basic track, and no earlier Beatles record does it. McCartney played the Hofner 500/1, his bass, and they reached for the Ludwig Super Classic, Starr's own kit since 1964. The Beatles used double tracked vocal on it, as on 139 of their records. This was the 16th of the 33 songs the Beatles recorded in 1965, and the 85th of their career.

The track is Lennon's, words and voice. It has everybody in their usual roles, with Lennon on rhythm guitar, McCartney on bass, Harrison on lead guitar and Starr on drums, with 12-string guitar filling it out, 1965 being the year it turns up most.

The record came out with Help! on August 6, 1965. America got it four months later, on Rubber Soul (US), put out by Capitol, with a different tracklist from the UK. This song was the 12th of the 33 records the Beatles released in that year, and the 81st counting from the start.