Love You To

This song is one of the few Beatles lyrics to deal with death ('Before I'm a dead old man'), set against the motifs of philosophy and love, something they had already used on 'Run for Your Life' six months earlier. It uses anaphora, and one for the curious, the title has the word love in it and never appears in the lyric. The language is concerned with despair and alienation (mortality, betrayal, social hostility), and richer in vocabulary than most. Whether it was meant or not, the line "If you want me to" turns up in one other Beatles song, 'I Will'.

This track is one of 3 Beatles songs in C minor (the earliest of them is 'Girl' in 1965), a raga rock and Indian classical piece taken at about 100 BPM. This is furnished with Indian instruments, and they had done the same on 'Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)' six months earlier. The defining riff here is a seven-note sitar motif from alap. Also, it does without bass and a kit behind it, which almost nothing else of theirs does. The Beatles first featured tabla here.

The song was put together at EMI Studio 3. Harrison cut the basic acoustic-and-vocal track first, then overdubbed sitar with tabla player Anil Bhagwat and uncredited Asian Music Circle musicians on tambura. The Sonic Blue Fender Stratocaster was Harrison's guitar, in use since 1965 and heard on 42 Beatles records in all, such as 'Ticket to Ride' and 'The Night Before'. The sound was built with distortion, close mic'ing and ADT (double tracked vocal). Of the 19 songs they began recording in 1966, this was the 3rd, and the 105th they ever made.

The track was written and sung by Harrison. McCartney is credited with a harmony mixed out of the final, and the electric guitar on this one is a fuzz-tone lead.

Out August 5, 1966 with Revolver. It was never lifted as a single, and it reached America three days later, on the Capitol album Revolver (US). It appears in the film Yellow Submarine of 1968 as well. This is the Beatles' 108th record, and the 6th of the 16 they released in 1966.