I Want To Hold Your Hand

My kids are deep into the Beatles right now, and unlike me, they like the early stuff as much as the late stuff. So I find myself listening repeatedly to “I Want To Hold Your Hand” for the first time in basically forever. As with so many Beatles songs, the silly lyrics are sitting on top of some highly ingenious music.

The funniest day of music theory class in grad school was when the professor played us the intro to this song as an example of bad voice leading. Everybody in the room lit up with recognition: “Oh yeah, we love that riff!” If the professor was trying to illustrate the universal validity of eighteenth century voice leading conventions, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was a terrible choice. If those conventions are supposed to be universal, then why does it sound so good when the Beatles violate them? But if the conventions are limited to a particular historical and stylistic context, then why does every music major have to learn them?

Whether the voice leading is “bad” or not, the intro to “I Want To Hold Your Hand” is pretty fascinating. The groove alternates C and D chords in a syncopated Latin-sounding rhythm. Here’s a circular MIDI visualization. You can see how the C chord hits on a weak beat subdivision, the “and” of three, and the D lands on the equally weak “and” of four, half a beat before the downbeat where you are expecting it to fall.

If you had never heard the song before, you might experience that C to D groove as bVII to I in D Mixolydian mode. In fact, you are hearing IV and V in G major, but there is no way to know that before the first G chord comes in. Right before the vocals enter, George Harrison hits a remarkable blue note, bending a B up to C and then a little past it.

The verse starts out innocently enough: G to D to Em. So far, this is all diatonic boilerplate. But then there’s a weird note on top of a weird chord, on the line “I think you’ll under-STAND.” The chord is B7, supporting an F-sharp in the vocal melody. This note is the leading tone in G major, and rock songs hardly ever use leading tones in the melody. If you are in G major and you hear an F-sharp melody note with a B root underneath, you would naturally assume that the chord is Bm, the iii chord in G. It’s an atypical chord for a rock song, but it’s within the key of G major, so it’s “allowed.” But the Beatles aren’t playing Bm. They are playing B7, and that is well and truly outside the key, a “wrong” chord.

It is actually pretty common to use chords from outside the key in rock. The conventional use for this particular B7 chord would be as a secondary dominant, setting up a temporary shift into the key of E minor. The active ingredient in B7 is D-sharp. This note is the leading tone in E minor. It’s a “wrong” note in G major, but once you realize that it’s setting up E minor, then it retroactively sounds right. When the D-sharp resolves to E, your ear goes, “Oh, I get it, we’re in E minor now, so everything makes sense. Carry on.” But this is not how the Beatles use the B7 chord. They play Em first, and you hear it as being part of G major, not a new key center. After the B7, they don’t resolve to Em like you’re expecting. The first time, the B7 “resolves” to G, which makes no harmonic sense at all. The second time, the B7 “resolves” to C to kick off the chorus. On that second B7, John and Paul sing a hair-raising open fifth between F-sharp and a high B. None of this is normal!

I won’t explain the rest of the song, because I can’t improve on Alan Pollack’s analysis. Here are some of his high points.

[T]here is no actual vocal solo in the song; [Lennon and McCartney] sing in duet virtually the whole way through, albeit with frequent shifting back and forth between singing in unison and that “patented” vocal counterpoint style of theirs in which they seem to go out of their way to court open fourths and fifths, instead of the more traditional thirds and sixths.

The chromatic-scale-fill played in parallel fifths on the bass guitar during the second half of measures 2 and 6 may well be one of the most easily recognized riffs in all music history. Note, by the way, how neatly George coordinates his own little twang to coincide with the end of Paul’s riff.

The rhythmic scanning of the words breaks up the natural phrasing of the lyrics with frequent pauses, adding a sweet hint of bashful tongue-tiedness to the affair; e.g. “Oh yeah, I (pause) tell you something (pause) I think you’ll understand etc.”

We have a great example in the voice parts of how the Boys could find an opportunity in even rather mundane melodic situations to set up one of their splendid open-fifths. When the music of the intro returns here and they sing the words “I can’t hide” three times in a row, John sings the notes C -» C -» D in all three cases, whereas Paul on the top part sings E -» E -» F# the first two times, but very naturally proceeds up the scale to sing G -» G -» A the third time, creating the parallel fifths with John.

My kids have seen the Ed Sullivan Show and A Hard Day’s Night, and they have questions: why are all the early Beatles songs exclusively about love? And why are their fans screaming and chasing them? I posed these same questions to my Contemporary Music Theories class at the New School. After doing some analytical listening to “Dear Prudence“, I invited the class to speculate on why the early Lennon and McCartney songs are so compelling, in spite of their goofiness. How did these two guys get so good at writing teenage love songs? I pre-empted any discussion of innate talent, because I don’t believe that it exists. While I’m sure that there is variance in inherited musicality among humans, it is easily swamped by experience and upbringing. So what was in the Beatles’ experience and upbringing that drove them to get so good at their craft?

A student brought up one obvious theory, that Lennon and McCartney were motivated by trauma. Both of them lost their mothers as teenagers, Lennon at 17, McCartney at 14. Could this explain why they worked so hard at getting and keeping attention from girls and women? It’s a psychoanalytic cliche to listen to the songs and hear “I want to hold your hand, anybody’s hand, because my hand was not held enough”, but does that mean it’s untrue? It is definitely too simple, because there are plenty of people who lose their mothers and who don’t become brilliant songwriters, or songwriters at all. You could also point to the fact that both Lennon and McCartney grew up in musical households and got encouragement for their creative undertakings early on (though in Lennon’s case, this encouragement was ambivalent.) Any real explanation is going to be complex and multiply determined. But if, like me, you believe that musical ability is mainly learned rather than mainly innate, it’s worth trying to identify the biggest factors.