The Beatles were not always a rock band, especially not when it came to the Paul songs. This is a frequently cited example of baroque pop, a cousin of “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home.”
Paul is playing piano and clavichord, Ringo plays drums and maracas, and the delightfully-named Alan Civil plays the French horn. (He also played in the orchestra on “A Day In The Life.”) John and George were not involved.
The recording is in B major, and is tuned about twenty cents flat. When I went to learn the song, I got suspicious of this key. It seemed more likely to me that Paul wrote and played it in C, and this is indeed what happened. Here’s Paul in the early 80s playing the song on guitar in C, and amusingly scat-singing the French horn part.
Dave Rybaczewski has collected a ton of background info on the song at Beatlesbooks.com. Paul wrote it on a skiing vacation in Switzerland with Jane Asher, specifically, in the bathroom of their rented chalet. (Sounds like there might have been some trouble in their relationship.) There’s a surviving lyric sheet with some unused verses: “But you wait / you’re too late / It’s you’re deciding why the wrong one wins / the end begins / and you will lose her.”
Paul and Ringo recorded the basic tracks on May 9th, 1966, playing piano and drum kit respectively. Then Paul overdubbed the clavichord, and Ringo overdubbed maracas and extra cymbals. Here’s the finished backing track.
Paul overdubbed his vocal a week later. They ran the backing track slower so the pitch was a semitone and twenty cents lower, presumably so it would sit in a more comfortable part of Paul’s vocal range. In the video above where he’s singing it in C, it sounds like he’s straining a bit. They left an empty space in the second verse to be filled with a solo of some kind; only later did Paul decide on the French horn.
I’m told by my Twitter friends that “For No One” is an essential part of French horn lore. Alan Civil remembers making up his part himself, but Paul remembers singing the idea to George Martin, who transcribed it. That sounds more plausible to me, because Paul asked for a note that’s higher than the instrument’s usual range. Civil was further challenged by the track’s tuning. He’s quoted in Mark Lewisohn’s book as saying that the song was “recorded in rather bad musical style, in that it was ‘in the cracks’, neither B-flat nor B-major. This posed a certain difficulty in tuning my instrument” (p. 79).
https://twitter.com/elliedwa/status/1629158848991838209
Apparently Paul was dissatisfied with the take they used and wanted another one, but George Martin talked him out of it. Paul had a point; Civil rushes the tempo in a few spots. But that’s okay, it keeps the track from feeling sterile. The “For No One” session was only one of three that Civil did that day, and he was surprised that his friends were so excited that he had done it. He told Mark Lewisohn, “Even now, while only a few people come up to me and say ‘I do like your Mozart horn concertos,’ so many others say, ‘See that big grey-haired old chap over there? – he played with The Beatles!’”
Here’s my chart of the tune, which I wrote in C for ease of understanding.
This is mostly straightforward Western tonal harmony, but with a few little interesting twists. There’s a Bb chord in the sixth bar of the verse that’s from outside C major. It would normally imply C Mixolydian, but Paul sings A-flat over the chord, implying E-flat major or C minor instead. It’s so hip! The French horn part uses A natural over this chord, for the more expected C Mixolydian sound. You would naively expect the refrain to be in A minor, but no, it’s in D minor, a step counterclockwise around the circle of fifths. At the end of the refrain, the tune returns to C major via Gsus4 to G, with gentle fermatas on each chord. The tune ends on these chords rather than resolving back to C, which I adore.
Good Beatles covers are rare and this tune is no exception. I like Brad Mehldau’s solo piano arrangement. He plays it straightahead and it’s fine, but he annoyingly leaves off the ending. Fred Hersch does a more abstracted jazz version, which I think is also fine.
When other people cover the tune, they tend to take it slow and melodramatic. Paul’s tempo on the original is surprisingly brisk, and that keeps it from being too schmaltzy.
A student of mine says that “For No One” is the best breakup song of all time. As with most Paul McCartney tunes, I find the melody to be a lot stronger than the lyrics. I mean, the lyrics are good! “She wakes up, she makes up,” that’s very elegant. But most of the power is in that tune.