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TL;DR:

  • John Lennon said he designed one of The Beatles’ songs to be a single.
  • Paul McCartney compared the song in question to “Please Please Me.”
  • The tune appeared on an album that was a massive hit in the United Kingdom.
John Lennon with a guitar
John Lennon | Max Scheler – K & K / Contributor

John Lennon said he designed one of The Beatles’ songs to be a single even though it never became one. Subsequently, Paul McCartney said the tune included some clever lyrics. The track in question appeared on an album that was huge in the United Kingdom but not in the United States.

John Lennon said 1 of The Beatles’ songs has aeolian cadences

In a 1980 interview from the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, John discussed the Fab Four’s appeal. “The basic appeal of The Beatles was not their intelligence,” he said. “It was their music. 

“It was only after some guy in the London Times said there were aeolian cadences in ‘It Won’t Be Long’ that the middle classes started listening to it — because somebody put a tag on it,” he added. An aeolian cadence is a type of chord structure.

John gave fans more insight into “It Won’t Be Long.” “‘It Won’t Be Long’ is mine,” he said. “It was my attempt at writing another single. It never quite made it.”

Paul McCartney discussed the lyrics of the song

In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul said he and John liked to incorporate wordplay into their songs. Paul said this was the result of the two of them studying literature. The cute Beatle said the different uses of the word “please” in “Please Please Me” was one example of this songwriting quirk.

Paul discussed the wordplay in “It Won’t Be Long.” “‘It won’t be long till I belong to you’ it was that same trip,” he said. “We both liked to try and get a bit of double meaning in, so that was the high spot of writing that particular song. John mainly sang it so I expect that it was his original idea but we both sat down and wrote it together.”

How The Beatles’ ‘It Won’t Be Long’ performed on the charts in the United States and the United Kingdom

“It Won’t Be Long” was never a single, so it did not chart on the Billboard Hot 100. The tune appeared on the album With the Beatles, which reached No. 179 on the Billboard 200 for a single week.

According to The Official Charts Company, “It Won’t Be Long” didn’t chart in the United Kingdom either. On the other hand, With the Beatles peaked at No. 1 for 21 of its 50 weeks on the chart.

Unlike some other Fab Four songs such as “Yesterday” or “Something,” “It Won’t Be Long” never became a standard. Despite this, Evan Rachel Wood covered the tune for the film Across the Universe. The film is a jukebox musical that utilizes dozens of Fab Four songs to bring the 1960s to life.

“It Won’t Be Long” shows off The Beatles’ lyricism even if it never became a single.

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