“More times than I can count, I’ve been asked to write an autobiography, but the time has never been right. Usually I was raising a family or I was on tour, which has never been an ideal situation for long periods of concentration. But the one thing I’ve always managed to do, whether at home or on the road, is write new songs. Some people, when they get to a certain age, like to refer to a diary to recall day-to-day events from the past, but I have no such notebooks. What I do have is my songs - hundreds of them - which serve much the same purpose. And these songs span my entire life, because even at the age of fourteen, when I acquired my first guitar in our little house in Liverpool, my natural instinct was to start writing songs. Since then I’ve never stopped.
Over time I came to see each song as a new puzzle. It would illuminate something that was important in my life at that moment, though the meanings are not always obvious on the surface. Fans or readers, or even critics, who really want to learn more about my life should read my lyrics, which might reveal more than any single book about The Beatles could do.”1
— Paul McCartney, 2022
In the prior chapter, we left off with the suggestion that Paul’s creative unfurling — likely sparked by having been turned on to pot by Dylan in 1964 — led to tension in his creative relationship with John. To explore that possibility, the next thing we need to do is to consider the lyrics of “Got To Get You Into My Life,” the song that Paul claims he wrote in the “first flush” of his discovery of cannabis.
Before we get started with that, though, a very big meta note. This chapter will assume that you’re comfortable with two major elements that we stepped through in detail in Part One of Beautiful Possibility.
Most notably — or maybe I should say, most notoriously — Part One of Beautiful Possibility included an extended discussion of the possibility that John and Paul were a romantic as well as a creative couple.
Our discussion of what we shorthanded as “the lovers possibility” took 29.5 hours of Part One to step through — and unfortunately, it’s not something that I’ve found a way to summarize. If I could say in a paragraph or two all of what we talked about in those 29.5 hours, I wouldn’t have needed to write Part One of Beautiful Possibility in the first place.
And more than not being practical, it’s ethically problematic to short-stroke the delicate and complex discussion we had in Part One about the lovers possibility. And I think it would be a disservice to Paul and John — and to this work and the story of The Beatles as a whole — to try.
But that said, if the possibility that John and Paul were a romantic couple is new to you or if you’re not yet sure how you feel about it, let me do what I can to reassure you just a little about how we deal with that possibility here on The Abbey. The following is not in any way a substitute for 29.5 hours of material, nor is it a summary of what we talked about in Part One, but—
Beautiful Possibility is — as far as I’m aware — the first in-depth, serious, mainstream consideration of whether John and Paul were a literal romantic couple. Part One included multiple episodes in which we stepped through an extended, research-based analysis of why that possibility is credible, and why it’s important that the lovers possibility — not the certainty, just the possibility — be included in the story.
Perhaps most importantly, I proposed a way in which we can talk about the lovers possibility ethically — without “outing” anyone and without stepping on Paul and John’s absolute and inarguable right to tell (or not tell) their own story. Again, it’s not possible to summarize all of that here, but here’s what I can tell you, with regard to the ethics of talking about the lovers possibility —
When discussing a possible romantic relationship between Paul and John, only publicly available, primary research is cited (mostly from Paul and John themselves). There is no speculation re: sexual orientation or the intimate details of their relationship. And Beautiful Possibility does not seek to prove that John and Paul were lovers — only to show that the possibility is credible, and that it’s important that possibility is included in the story.
If you’re comfortable with a respectful consideration of the lovers possibility within these tightly-constrained ethical boundaries — and if you’re open-minded enough to consider the lovers possibility as credible without needing to be shown the research and analysis that supports that possibility — then you don’t need to be familiar with Beautiful Possibility before engaging with the last two chapters of Seven Levels.
If, on the other hand, you’re not yet comfortable with any of that, I definitely recommend reading Part One of Beautiful Possibility before continuing on with Seven Levels.
In Part One, we also stepped through, over the course of several episodes, the credibility and importance of using lyrics as primary source material for understanding the story of The Beatles — and more specifically, the story of Lennon/McCartney. And we also stepped through in detail why it’s virtually certain that — whether they acted on their feelings for one another or not — Paul and John would have written many songs about and for one another, beyond a handful of explicitly acknowledged, angry breakup songs.
We shouldn’t have needed to step through why lyrics are legitimate primary source material at all. There’s nothing controversial about looking for the truth of the artist in the art — and were it any artist other than Lennon/McCartney, doing so is not something we’d need to justify.
But bizarrely enough, in mainstream Beatles writing and scholarship, it is controversial — and even a frequent subject of ridicule — to suggest we look for deeper meanings in the songs of Lennon/McCartney.
As with the credibility, ethics, and importance of the lovers possibility, I haven’t found a good way to summarize the analysis and research that we stepped through in Part One for why we’d be wise to look to their songs to understand Lennon/McCartney. But for our purposes here, it might be enough to notice again what Paul has to say about his lyrics in the quote that opened this chapter, from his introduction to his 2022 memoir, The Lyrics, in which he explicitly says that his songs are a personal diary of his life—
“Over time I came to see each song as a new puzzle. It would illuminate something that was important in my life at that moment, though the meanings are not always obvious on the surface. Fans or readers, or even critics, who really want to learn more about my life should read my lyrics, which might reveal more than any single book about The Beatles could do.”2
I’m going to keep sharing this quote like a catechism until we all know it by heart — because this quote is the rock on which Beautiful Possibility and the final two chapters of Seven Levels are built.
This quote is Paul McCartney giving us explicit permission — and more than that, explicit direction — to look for the story of his life and work less in published interviews or biographies, and more in the lyrics to his songs.
There is no ambiguity here. This passage from The Lyrics is not a frankenquote. It’s not spoken casually in an interview, nor it is filtered through the agenda of a third party. It’s an intentionally written, self-authored passage in the introduction to Paul’s own book about his life’s work and legacy — a book that, by the way, tells his life story through his lyrics. And that’s made even more explicit in the title of the podcast based on the book — A Life In Lyrics.
What’s more, when Paul tells us that the meanings of his songs “are not always obvious on the surface,” he’s making clear that the truth he’s telling us to look for will not be easy to find. Instead, that truth will be hidden under more obvious and easy-to-spot meanings.
And finally, by opening the introduction to his book with this passage, Paul seems to be making it implicitly clear that while he’s not interested in sharing his innermost thoughts with us directly (as is his right and privilege), anything we’re able to deduce from his lyrics is fair game for speculation and study.
In this chapter, we’ll be taking Paul up on his invitation — on his directive, even — with our deep dive into the lyrics of “Got To Get You Into My Life” — a song that in 1980, John called, “one of [Paul’s] best songs... because the lyrics are good and I didn’t write them... when I say he could write lyrics if he took the effort, here’s an example.”3
John’s quote is — as usual for John — something of a backhanded compliment. But it’s also a pretty big hint that there’s more to “Got To Get You Into My Life” than meets the eye — if John Lennon, master of wordplay and misdirection and one of history’s most sophisticated lyricists, considers it one of Paul’s best lyrics. And it’s also important to notice that both John and Paul agree that the lyrics are entirely Paul’s. That’s going to become important, too.
Finally, before we get started on our deep lyrical dive into “Got To Get You Into My Life,” one quick housekeeping note — as with our deep dive into “Bless You” in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, this chapter includes a piece of complex lyrical interpretation. To keep the analysis as uncluttered as possible to follow along with, I’ve once again put most of the supporting research in the footnotes rather than the main text.
So with all of that said — and with both Paul and John’s blessing — here’s the opening verse (plus a little) of “Got To Get You Into My Life” —
I was alone I took a ride
I didn’t know what I would find there
Another road where maybe I
Could see another kind of mind there
Ooh then I suddenly see you4
One thing is certain about the opening verse to “Got To Get You Into My Life” — it’s unambiguously Paul describing a passionate meeting with someone for whom he felt an instant and powerful connection. And given the and I suddenly see you part of things, maybe even an experience of love at first sight.
As we talked about in the prior chapter, Paul has said that he wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about his discovery of cannabis. And his “seven levels” experience strongly suggests that he experienced cannabis — at least some of the time — as a psychedelic.
And this first verse certainly includes language that suggests that Paul is writing about his enthusiastic relationship to cannabis, and about its psychedelic properties — in phrases like I took a ride and another kind of mind.
The problem is, though, that we still have that unresolved timing problem that we noticed in the prior chapter.
Paul’s “seven levels” experience took place in August or September of 1964. But he’s also made it clear — and everything about the song makes clear — that he wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about what was happening in his life at the time. And since Paul almost certainly wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” in early 1966 — or at the earliest in late 1965 — that means there’s a year-and-a-half gap between Paul getting turned on to cannabis and his writing of the song.
A year-and-a-half gap between a new discovery and a song about that new discovery is a very long gap indeed. And this in turn makes it chronologically questionable that Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” during — as he claims — the “first flush of” his discovery of pot.
So if “Got To Get You Into My Life” isn’t about LSD, and the timeline suggests it’s not likely to be about Paul’s discovery of cannabis, then what gives? And why are we talking about it at all, relative to untangling the deeper narrative of the Dylan story?
The answers to those questions are, as usual, not as simple as they might seem.
As we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, great art by definition includes multiple layers of meaning. And John’s comment about the song being one of Paul’s best lyrics suggests pretty strongly that there are multiple layers of meaning in “Got To Get You Into My Life.” Because it’s unlikely John Lennon — again, one of history’s most sophisticated lyricists — would offer such effusive praise for a song that has only one easy-to-discover meaning.
Any lyric of Paul’s that impressed John enough to name it as one of Paul’s best would need to hold its own with others of Paul’s lyrics that John has also singled out — including “Eleanor Rigby,” “Fool On The Hill,” and “Penny Lane” — all of which are works of lyrical sophistication that contain multiple layers of meaning.
The other thing to notice here is that while the language in the opening verse does indeed evoke the imagery of psychedelic altered consciousness, after the opening verse, that language disappears almost entirely. The majority of the lyric is what appears to be a straight-forward and somewhat non-specific love song.
In Part One of Beautiful Possibility, we talked about the common tendency among artists to conflate their initial inspiration with what a finished work actually ends up being about.
As an example, we talked about “Hey Jude,” which Paul has said was inspired by a young Julian Lennon’s struggle with his parents’ divorce — but in which only the first two lines of the finished song are in any way applicable (or appropriate) to sing to a seven-year-old boy. And we also talked about “Two of Us,” a song that Paul says was inspired by a drive in the countryside with Linda — but in which all but the first few lines point pretty clearly to the “two of us” in question fitting the relationship between Paul and John far better than the relationship between Paul and Linda.
Simply put, if an artist is inspired by apples to write a song, but everything other than the opening verse is about bananas, the finished song can reasonably be said to be inspired by apples but written about bananas. And as plain as that distinction might seem to be, artists themselves often tend to get those two things confused in their own minds, when they talk about what a piece of art is about.
Given the timing issue, the absence of cannabis-related imagery in the majority of the lyric, and the unlikelihood of John naming a song with only a single meaning as one of Paul’s best lyrics, “Got To Get You Into My Life” appears to be an example of this tendency to conflate inspiration with meaning — at least relative to Paul’s public statements on what the song is about.
So having taken the prior chapter to consider — in a more general way — Paul’s enthusiastic discovery of cannabis, we’re now going to see what happens if we set that interpretation aside and consider “Got To Get You Into My Life” as a love song.
In considering this first verse as a verse about a “love at first sight” experience, the first question to ask is, love at first sight for who? Is it possible Paul’s writing the song for Jane Asher, whom he was dating at the time it was written?
There are a lot of things we could notice about Paul’s relationship with Jane Asher, but this series is for sure not the place to get into all of that. What we can say without question is that nothing in what we know about Paul’s initial meeting with Jane suggests that meeting was anywhere near the sort of passionate “love at first sight” encounter — at least not on Paul’s part — that Paul is writing about in the first verse. And more practically, none of the details of the first verse even get close to matching the details of Paul’s first meeting with Jane.
When Paul met Jane, he was not alone, nor was he taking a ride, nor did he not know what he would find there. Instead, Paul met Jane in what might be the most ordinary possible circumstances for a rising pop star — backstage with the rest of the band, at one of The Beatles’ many BBC-TV appearances.5
Then there’s the problem, again, of the timeline.
Paul met Jane in 1963 — which is even further in the past than his discovery of cannabis. And again, everything about “Got To Get You Into My Life” — including Paul specifying that he was writing about what was happening for him at the time — suggests that Paul is writing about a feeling that he’s experiencing in real time — in the present — rather than a nostalgic memory of an event years in the past.
And finally, there’s the another kind of mind that Paul is hoping to find when he takes a ride.
While there is, of course, no way to know for sure the private details of Paul’s relationship with Jane — and again, we don’t have room here to explore the full contours of that relationship — I’ve found nothing whatsoever in Paul’s descriptions of that relationship to indicate that Paul’s attraction to Jane was based on recognising her as another kind of mind.
Instead, Jane Asher is perhaps the very picture of a very Establishment girl from a very Establishment (if somewhat eccentric) upper middle class family. And all of that is borne out in virtually everything she’s done since she first stepped into the public eye, all of it the virtual definition of respectable British upper middle class. In other words, Jane is — at least by all visible criteria — very far from the another kind of mind that Paul is hoping to meet in the first verse.
This very brief consideration of Paul and Jane’s relationship is, of course, far too short-stroked — and we’ll almost certainly talk more about Paul and Jane in Part Two of Beautiful Possibility. What matters for our purposes here is that nothing about the first verse suggests Paul’s talking about his first meeting with Jane.
Which brings us — probably not surprisingly — to the possibility that Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about and for John, who seems to be the only other person in Paul’s life at the time for whom Paul felt an intense-enough emotional connection to inspire the passionate urgency of the song.
One of the initial inspirations for the writing of Seven Levels, was a suggestion from a volunteer researcher for Beautiful Possibility that “Got To Get You Into My Life” might be a fête song — a song about the day Paul and John met.
Given the language of the first verse, it’s easy to see why she made that suggestion.
I was alone, I took a ride does indeed fit nicely with teenaged Paul riding the bus (or his bike, we don’t know which) to the fête, without any knowledge of what the day would bring or its extraordinary impact on his life — I didn’t know what I would find there — and possibly also with the hope/anticipation of meeting someone there who might be a match for Paul’s budding, as-yet-unfocused musical genius — another road where maybe I could find another kind of mind there — the “someone” who turned out to be John Lennon, the very definition of another kind of mind, and who would, starting on that day — to borrow from another Revolver song — change Paul’s life with a wave of his hand.
I don’t know about you, but I can easily imagine Paul (and John, too) thinking something akin to “got to get you into my life!” on the way home from the fête, head filled with the potential of having (at last!) met that longed-for another kind of mind. “The music meant more to John and Paul than anyone else I’ve ever known,” observed original Quarry Man drummer Colin Hanton. “They were on track almost from the moment they met.”6
So the opening verse does suggest “Got To Get You Into My Life” as a possible fête song. And if that’s so, then it’s a companion to another possible fête song — “I Saw Her Standing There.”
Both songs seem to be defined by the breathless, all-consuming ecstasy of falling in love at first sight — then I suddenly see you... I saw her standing there... say we’ll be together every day... how could I dance with another? — which is more or less how both Paul and John seem to have experienced their first meeting.7
But just as I think it’s oversimplying to call “Got To Get You Into My Life” an “ode to pot,” I also think we’d be oversimplifying to interpret “Got To Get You Into My Life” as a cannabis-infused update of “I Saw Her Standing There.”
For one thing, there’s that pesky timing issue again. Paul met John in 1957 — and that’s a significantly bigger gap than his initial meeting with either Jane or Mary Jane. And remember, Paul has told us that this isn’t a nostalgia song, it’s a song about what’s happening in Paul’s life at the time. And even if Paul hadn’t told us as much, the urgency and immediacy of the musical arrangement and Paul’s vocal makes it pretty clear that — unlike, say, “Penny Lane” — “Got To Get You Into My Life” is not a gentle meander down memory lane.
Still, “I Saw Her Standing There” isn’t exactly a gentle meander down memory lane, either — and that, too, was written years after their first meeting. It’s certainly possible that despite the timing issues— and as with “I Saw Her Standing There” — Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” retrospectively, about his memory of falling in love at first sight with someone he’s still very actively in love with.
Let’s leave that as an open possibility while we consider the next part of the song—
Ooh then I suddenly see you
Ooh did I tell you I need you
Every single day of my life
This, again, appears on first glance to be a straight-forward— even clichéd— declaration of love. But as with most Lennon/McCartney songs, there’s more going on here than might seem.
First, this section adds a new character to the mix — the you of then suddenly I see you.
When Paul tells the story of searching for his soulmate in the opening verse, it turns out he’s not talking to us, as we initially assumed. Instead, Paul’s telling the story to that soulmate, the another kind of mind he longed for when he took a ride.
And what Paul is telling his soulmate — aka, his beloved — is that he (Paul) needs the two of them to be together every single day of his life.
This is — by any measure — an extreme statement to make to another person, and especially to a new love whom you’ve only just met — then I suddenly see you — and with whom you aren’t yet in a formal relationship. But it’s also the sort of exaggerated pledge of devotion consistent with both a “love at first sight” experience and with the drama of first love — and especially teenage “love at first sight” first love. Which suggests that “Got To Get You Into My Life” is still on track to be a fête song.
But something unexpected happens in this then I suddenly see you section of the song. And to understand what that something unexpected is and why it matters, we need to again — as we did with our deep dive into “Bless You” — talk about (I’m very sorry about this) grammar.
In addition to introducing a new character, then I suddenly see you also shifts verb tense. The first verse of “Got To Get You Into My Life” was set entirely in the past — I was alone, I took a ride. But the line then I suddenly see you shifts the focus to the present, where Paul has told us the song is set.
If the grammar is confusing — and you’d be in good company if it is — here’s another way of understanding what’s happening here:
Any story can be told in (at least) two ways — as a story happening in real time or as something that happened in the past. So for example—
Past tense: I ran down the street and I sang a song.
Present tense: I run down the street and I sing a song.
In both cases, we’re still “in the story” as it’s being told. It’s just a question of whether the narrator is telling it to us as it happens or in retrospect. In present tense or in past tense.
Usually a writer would be consistent in using one or the other of these perspectives throughout a piece, whether it’s a story or a song. But in “Got To Get You Into My Life,” Paul appears to be mixing the two, past and present — and not just in the same song, but in the same verse. In writing then I suddenly see you, did I tell you I need you what Paul has written is essentially —
I run down the street, and I sang a song.
If that sounds awkward, it’s because it is awkward. By its nature, an abrupt shift of verb tense feels disorienting — it literally disrupts our ability to orient ourselves in the time and place of the story. It’s the grammatical equivalent of a sudden and unexpected flashback or flashforward in a movie — are we in the past or the present? We don’t know and that’s largely the point of those kinds of abrupt shifts in time.
This verb tense is, btw, consistent with the disorientation of a psychedelic experience, so there’s maybe still some of that original inspiration at play here. And it’s also possible this verb tense shift from past to present is un-intentional on Paul’s part. Verb tenses tend to be one of the most difficult parts of a language to master, and even accomplished writers sometimes get themselves tangled up in sorting it out.
But we’re not just dealing with “accomplished writers,” we’re dealing with Lennon/McCartney. And as we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, the safest and most sensible way to engage with art created by a genius-level partnership is to presume mastery of craft. In other words, our default is to presume that when we’re dealing with the work of a great artist, their creative choices are intentional, whether consciously or subconsciously, and not merely sloppy writing or choosing a word or phrase — or a verb tense — just because it rhymes or fits the metre of the song.
This default presumption of mastery of craft does not, of course, mean that there aren’t wobbly bits in their songs —the Lennon/McCartney catalogue is extensive, and even geniuses aren’t infallible. But by definition, those wobbly bits appear far less frequently in the work of geniuses. And as we discovered when we looked in-depth at “Bless You” and “No Words” in Part One, presuming mastery of craft yields insights not otherwise available to us — so it’s a presumption worth continuing with here.
Also, now’s a good time to remind ourselves again that John called “Got To Get You Into My Life” one of Paul’s best lyrics. And again, I’m not sure we get better confirmation that “Got To Get You Into My Life” is a masterful lyric than John Lennon — one of music’s most iconic and sophisticated lyricists — referencing those lyrics as being especially well-crafted.
So with our usual (and useful) presumption of mastery of craft, let’s presume that the shift in verb tense that happens with then I suddenly see you is intentional, and see what that might tell us about what’s going on in the song so far.
Certainly, the abrupt shift in verb tense fits the overall vibe of the song up to this point. A sudden shift from past to present tense significantly heightens the zing! impact of Cupid’s “love at first sight” arrow as it strikes the young lovers — which again, is consistent with both Paul and John’s recounting of their meeting at the fête.
Abrupt shifts in verb tense are also the sort of scrambled, disordered language we tumble into when we’re so emotionally caught up in telling a story that we can’t be bothered to care about proper grammar — which both the music and Paul’s vocal delivery suggests is the case here. And indeed, the next line — did I tell you I need you — switches back to past tense, suggesting that the verb tense change was intentional in creating this sense of jumbled, excited disorientation.
But the shift in verb tense is even more disorienting than it might appear, because did I tell you I need you doesn’t shift fully back to past tense.
When Paul writes then I suddenly see you, he’s shifted his verb tense to the present, but he’s still “inside” the story he’s telling about what happened in the past — maybe at the fête — when he first laid eyes on his beloved, the another kind of mind from the first verse.
Put another way, when Paul writes then I suddenly see you, he’s in the present telling a story about the past to his beloved, also in the present.
Then the next line, did I tell you I need you, is Paul, still in the now-actual present day of the writing/singing of the song, asking his beloved — also in the now-actual-present — whether he (Paul) has, at any point in the past, told his beloved that he (Paul) needs him every single day of his life.
If you can wrap your mind around all of that — and remember, disorienting us might be part of the point — you may recognise this as Paul being concerned that he hasn’t done a good job of sharing his feelings with his beloved. And if you’re familiar with Beautiful Possibility, you might recognise that expressing concern that he hasn’t done a good job of sharing his feelings holds special significance, in a Paul McCartney song.
We stepped through the following in detail in Part One, so we’re not going to go into it in detail again here — but as a quick re-up, you may remember from episode 1:5 that Paul frequently acknowledges in interview his lifelong struggle to share his innermost feelings outside of song. And you might also remember that virtually the only example Paul brings up of this struggle is his worry that he wasn’t able to fully express to John that he loved him.8
In that same episode, we then noticed that Paul’s struggle to share feelings, along with a regret that he may have failed to share them, seems to be a central struggle in his life — and therefore, not surprisingly, a central theme in his songwriting. And again, the only example Paul offers of this regret is his regret that he feels he didn’t do a good job expressing his love to John. And when we put those pieces together, it strongly suggests that when themes of struggle-to-express-feelings or regret about not having expressed feelings appear in one of Paul’s songs, that song is (very) highly likely to be about John.
Did I tell you I need you every single day of my life is — without question — Paul wanting to share his feelings, and unsure and maybe a little worried about whether he’s succeeded. Thus the struggle-to-share-feelings theme — combined with the obvious references to the fête in the opening verse — suggests that “Got To Get You Into My Life” is (very) highly likely written for John.
But if you’re familiar with the public history of Paul and John’s relationship, you’ve also maybe noticed that something feels off here — or at least a little different from what we might expect. Because we also talked in Part One about how the emotional arc of Paul and John’s songs — together and separately — tends to match up with the emotional arc of their relationship more than it does with their relationships with their public romantic partners. Happy love songs when Paul and John are in a good place and not-so-happy love songs when they aren’t — regardless of what’s going on with their other relationships.
In other words, Paul’s struggle-to-share-feelings and regret songs tend to appear when Paul and John don’t seem to be in a good place — that’s part of how we discovered the “tell” of them in the first place. The theme of struggle-to-share-feelings/regret appears most frequently in Paul’s songs during and immediately after the breakup, disappears after their reconciliation during the Lost Weekend, and then reappears again after John’s murder and continues throughout Paul’s solo work up through the present day.
But that pattern doesn’t seem to hold here, because the story as it’s usually told suggests that — other than the “acid wars” — Paul and John were in a good place together during the late 1965-early 1966 time period when “Got To Get You Into My Life” was likely written. So the interpretation of the song as a struggle-to-share-feelings song doesn’t quite seem to add up.
The reason for this disconnect might simply be that — despite the obvious urgency of the song as a whole — did I tell you I need you seems to be a comparatively small struggle-to-share-his-feelings moment. Maybe the sort of passing concern anyone in a relationship might have, even during the good times — something along the lines of, “I’m so happy to have you in my life, have I ever told you how much I love you?”
Also, so far in the song, Paul seems to be doing a better-than-average job of sharing his feelings — he’s more or less shouting them from the proverbial rooftop (not that rooftop). He’s maybe even a little... manic about it — as if maybe “Got To Get You Into My Life” isn’t so much fueled by a mellow cannabis high but by having just scored a handful of Prellies off the ladies room attendant at the Kaiserkeller.
Maybe that’s just the mania of love at first sight, but even so, “Got To Get You Into My Life” seems to be somewhat singular for Paul McCartney — a song about struggling to share feelings in which there’s no apparent struggle to share feelings, during an era when there’s no apparent urgent need to share feelings — at least not relative to his relationship with John.
We’ll get back to this curious situation a bit later. For now, let’s also notice that — to add to the disorientation — when Paul asks, did I tell you I need you, it’s not clear which past he’s referencing with the did I tell you part.
Is Paul asking whether he told his beloved on the day they met that he wanted the two of them to be together every single day of my life? As we noticed earlier, that’s a pretty extreme statement to offer to someone you’ve only just met, even (and perhaps especially) if you’re a self-conscious lovestruck teenager — and perhaps even more especially if you’re a self-conscious lovestruck teenage boy newly in love with another teenage boy.
So maybe did I tell you I need you is just Paul generally checking in to make sure that — at some unspecified time in the past — he has communicated to his beloved his desire to be together every single day of his life. But this, too, feels a bit off, since up to now he’s been talking about all of this in the context of a specific event — in this case, the day he and his beloved first met.
So maybe Paul isn’t talking directly to his beloved at all. Maybe the song — at least so far — is an internal dialogue in which Paul is obsessing to himself — privately — about whether he’s told his beloved about his (Paul’s) need to be with them every single day of his life.
But this also feels unlikely.
“Got To Get You Into My Life” isn’t a whisper in the dark like, say, “Yesterday.” Nor is it a tender lullaby like “Here, There and Everywhere,” in which Paul sings softly enough not to wake his (maybe) sleeping lover as he muses on their relationship. “Got To Get You Into My Life” is clearly built to make a statement — to be heard. Paul is announcing his feelings to his beloved and to the world with a literal trumpet fanfare — Listen up!!! I’m expressing my feelings!
Clearly, at this point in the song, we don’t yet have enough information to know what’s going on in “Got To Get You Into My Life.” In fact, by the end of this second section, we’re more disoriented than we were before about who’s talking to who about what, when and why. It’s no surprise John thought so highly of this lyric — we’re only a little ways in and it’s exactly his favourite kind of down-the-rabbit-hole mind-fuckery.
But we do have enough information— because of this shift in verb tense — to at least begin to question whether “Got To Get You Into My Life” is really a song about the ecstatic feeling of falling in love, despite its opening verse and its possible references to the fête.
And this brings us back to the timing problem.
We don’t know exactly when Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life,” but because of their constant struggle to meet expectations for new material that we talked about in the prior chapter, it was almost certainly during the first part of 1966, or at earliest, the final months of 1965. And by that time, Paul and John have been involved in a deeply intimate relationship — in whatever way you choose to define that phrase — for close to a decade.
If “Got To Get You Into My Life” is written to John, and if Paul is this worked up in 1966 that he’s writing a song with the intense emotional firepower of “Got To Get You Into My Life,” and if — almost ten years into their relationship — he still has a desperate need to make sure John knows that he (Paul) wants to be with him every single day of his life, that starts to shift “Got To Get You Into My Life” away from the simple ecstasy of new love to the more complicated landscape of long-term, deeply-enmeshed romantic/erotic obsession, starting on the first day they met. And this, of course, is solidly on-brand for Lennon/McCartney, whether or not they physically acted on that obsession.
Before we move on to see if things clear up in the second verse, let’s talk a little meta about this grammar business.
Especially if you aren’t yet familiar with the Beautiful Possibility episode about “Bless You” you might be thinking it’s unreasonable to hold Paul McCartney — or any artist — to the conventional rules of grammar. And it’s maybe especially unreasonable to hold artists who rewrote the rules of popular music and sparked a cultural revolution to the conventional rules of anything, including grammar. And it might be especially unreasonable to hold Paul to the conventional rules of grammar in a song inspired by (and possibly under the influence of) altered consciousness, and also maybe the disorienting euphoria of romantic and erotic obsession.
So let’s do a quick re-up of what we talked about relative to grammar when we considered “Bless You.” The short version goes something like this—
In their lyrics, both Paul and John play games with the conventions of the form — including the conventions of the English language. That’s part of the revolutionary genius of their music — they (along with Dylan) literally rewrote the rules for how songs are written. But no matter how revolutionary an artist might be, for lyrics to make sense to anyone other than the artist themselves, those lyrics still need to follow the basic rules of grammar.
Grammar is essentially the instruction manual for how to communicate in a particular language. If language doesn’t follow the same rules for everyone, it’s not language — it’s pointless gibberish.
“Got To Get You Into My Life” is obviously not pointless gibberish. It’s not even absurdism. Like “Bless You,” it seems to be intended as a direct, literal message to Paul’s beloved that— well, actually, we don’t know what it’s intended to be a message about yet.
Let’s see if Paul tells us more in the next verse—
You didn’t run you didn’t lie
You knew I wanted just to hold you
And had you gone you knew in time
We’d meet again for I had told you
There are lots of things we could notice in this verse. Maybe most unusual is Paul’s joy that his beloved didn’t lie to him during their first meeting.9
That’s another odd thing to say about a first meeting — except it’s maybe not so odd if the song is for John. Obviously, a same sex attraction in 1957 is something a teenage boy probably would have felt compelled to “lie” about, especially to another boy that he’s just met. And yet, if Paul is indeed writing about the fête, then he seems to be implying that right from the start, he and John were aware of their mutual romantic attraction to one another.10
We’ll talk more about the lie vs. truth theme in a bit. For now, notice that the first part of the verse — you didn’t run you didn’t lie / you knew I wanted just to hold you — is Paul talking about the past to his beloved in the present. This is similar to what Paul wrote in the prior verse — except that in this case, he’s talking not about literal events, but about the emotional quality of that first meeting.
Except not quite.
Up until now, Paul has talked only about his own personal experience of meeting his beloved. But with you knew I wanted just to hold you, Paul has shifted to telling his beloved about how his beloved experienced their first meeting. He’s shifted from “this is how it was for me” to “this is how it was for you.”
That’s a highly unusual perspective in a love song. Love songs virtually always deal with what the writer thinks and feels about the person they’re in love with. And of course, there’s a good reason for that — telling the person we’re in love with what they think and feel about us, instead of letting them speak for themselves, is more than a little bit presumptuous.
But to my ear — and this is admittedly subjective — “Got To Get You Into My Life” doesn’t come off as presumptuous. A little manic, yeah, as we mentioned already, but not presumptuous.
Maybe that’s just because we’re in the hands of a master songwriter. Let’s see if the rest of the verse clarifies things. Here’s the second half of it again—
And had you gone you knew in time
We’d meet again for I had told you
A Beatles countercultural writer recently observed that even the most tender of Paul McCartney’s love songs tends to come spiked with a taste of vinegar.11
This “sweet with a taste of sour” is, of course, the “pairing of opposites” frequently evoked to define Lennon/McCartney. And this John/sour vs Paul/sweet tension is often referenced as part of the distorted “John/more vs Paul/less” narrative that we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility (because in our fear-of-softness culture, “sour” is falsely perceived as edgier and more interesting than “sweet”).12
But distorted narrative or not, that pairing of opposites does seem — to some extent — accurate. Paul himself often evokes the sweet/sour tension in his example of John adding it can’t get no worse to Paul’s it’s getting better all the time — though, as Paul has also observed, this duality crudely oversimplifies their creative dynamic.
John/sour vs Paul/sweet also crudely oversimplifies Paul’s own work. Because that sweet/sour tension appears independently of Lennon/McCartney, in both Beatles songs primarily composed by Paul, and in his solo work — which is why we’re talking about it here, in a song for which John and Paul both agree that Paul wrote all of the lyrics on his own.
The “taste of vinegar” paired with the sweet is present in the very first songs Paul wrote — it’s in the title of “In Spite Of All The Danger,” and in the references to suicide and imprisonment in “A World Without Love,” and in the passive-aggressive someday you’ll know I was the one of “I’ll Follow the Sun.”
That spike of vinegar appears throughout Paul’s Beatles-era work. It’s essential to creating the tension that helps to elevate so many of his love songs out of craft and into art — and often into high art. Virtually all — and maybe actually all — of Paul’s most iconic love songs are marinated in a touch (or more) of vinegar — “Long and Winding Road,” “I Will,” “Hey Jude,” and, of course, “Yesterday,” to name only a few.
The taste of vinegar extends throughout Paul’s solo catalogue, too — all the way to his 2021 “Deep Deep Feeling,” where Paul alternates between experiencing intense love (and the expression of it) as a transcendent feeling and a hell he can’t escape from.13 And of course, it’s in the bittersweet acceptance of the passage of time of his 2026 song, “Days We Left Behind.”
These sour moments are especially evident in Paul’s Revolver songs.
We can hear the sweet/sour tension most obviously in the weary resignation of “For No One” — which is essentially sour with a touch of sweet.14 It’s more subtle in “Here, There and Everywhere,” where the tenderness of stroking his possibly-sleeping lover’s hair is set against the tension of she doesn’t know he’s there... And it’s equally subtle in the deceptively euphoric “Good Day Sunshine,” where the simple pleasure of a shared walk in the sun is undercut by the pain (and perhaps foreshadow) of his feet burning as they hit the ground.
With the phrase and had you gone, we’ve arrived at the sour taste of vinegar — the acid, if you will — at the heart of “Got To Get You Into My Life.” Not the LSD kind of acid, but the emotional kind.
We don’t consciously recognise this sour taste, tucked away as it is in the romantic urgency and musical/vocal pyrotechnics of “Got To Get You Into My Life.” But it’s there — and it’s the first hint in the lyric of trouble between the lovers. And by slipping and had you gone into the lyric as he does, Paul instantly and completely transforms the entire meaning of the song.
To understand how and why that transformation happens, we need to (I’m sorry to tell you this) talk just a bit more about grammar.
And had you gone is similar to a couplet in Brian Wilson's “God Only Knows” — if you should ever leave me / life would still go on believe me — in which the writer is speculating about a hypothetical event — his beloved leaving him — that has not happened but might happen in the future.15
And had you gone is also hypothetical. Paul is speculating about an event — also his beloved leaving him — that has not happened. But in this case, the hypothetical event is not in the future, but in the past.
And because Paul is speculating not about the future but about the past — and especially because he’s chosen to say “had you gone,” rather than the more speculative “if you had gone” — the most likely read of and had you gone is that Paul is referring not to some vague, abstract possibility that his beloved might have at some point in the past left him, but rather that there was an actual, specific time in the past when his beloved might have left, but didn’t. In other words, that the leaving in question did not happen, but almost happened.
And if this is the meaning that Paul is intending, it suggests an answer to the timing question — because judging by Paul’s manic, adrenaline-fueled vocal, that almost-leaving likely happened in the fairly recent past. Recently enough that Paul still sounds seriously freaked out about it, but distant enough that it’s become an almost-happened rather than a still-might-happen or an in-the-process-of-happening.
And it’s that almost-happened that drives the urgency of “Got To Get You Into My Life.”
And had you gone is, without question, the sour taste of vinegar that turns “Got To Get You Into My Life” from a joyful song of new love — or perhaps more accurately, longer-term romantic/erotic obsession — into something darker and more complex. In other words, a lyric that John Lennon might especially admire.
And had you gone is also likely the sort of thing Paul was talking about when he said, “Fans or readers, or even critics, who really want to learn more about my life should read my lyrics, which might reveal more than any single book about The Beatles could do.”16
— because if “Got To Get You Into My Life” is written to and about John — as it seems to be, given the references to the fête and that it’s a struggle-to-share-feelings song — then and had you gone would seem to tell us that there was an actual, specific moment, probably sometime in the later part of 1965, when John got very close to ending his creative and personal relationship with Paul. And, by extension, breaking up The Beatles.
And obviously Lennon/McCartney almost breaking up sometime in 1965 — when the global cultural earthquake they were shaping and leading was only just getting started — would be a significant new piece of information when it comes to understanding the music and the story that shaped our modern world.
If this is an accurate read of and had you gone, it is — by any measure — an unexpected plot twist that Paul has inserted into the lyric. Let’s continue on, and see how this interpretation fits into the overall song.
Here’s the next section—
Ooh you were meant to be near me
Ooh and I want you to hear me
Say we’ll be together every day
Taken on its own, this triplet would be an ordinary declaration of love — albeit intense, obsessive love, which, of course, isn’t all that ordinary. But this triplet is not on its own. It’s set in the context of and had you gone — the sour, vinegar-spiked ghost that haunts “Got To Get You Into My Life,” fundamentally changing the meaning of everything else in the song, including this triplet.
Grammatically, there are at least three ways to interpret these three lines, which — depending on how they’re read — are maybe the most structurally complex part of the lyric. So let’s take it slow and go step by step.
The first interpretation is that the triplet is a self-contained section, and that within the triplet, the first two lines are a separate thought from the third line. In this read, Paul wants his beloved to hear him when he says that his beloved was meant to be near him. Paul then follows that stated desire with a request — and maybe even a demand — that his beloved promise that the two of them will be together every day.
Here’s the triplet written out in prose, with slightly adjusted language to clarify this interpretation—
You were meant to be near me, and I want you to hear me. [Tell me, my beloved] we’ll be together ev’ry day.
This read works well with our working interpretation of and had you gone. If Paul’s beloved almost left sometime in the not-too-distant past, then it makes sense that Paul would be pushing for assurance that his beloved won’t leave in the future, and will promise to be with him every day.
The second way of reading this triplet assumes, again, that the triplet is a self-contained section of the song. But in this version, all three lines are united into a single thought — which means the third line is not Paul asking for assurance that his beloved will be with him every day. Instead, it’s the opposite — it’s Paul who is now doing the assuring.
Once again, here’s the triplet written out in prose, again with a small adjustment help to clarify this interpretation—
You were meant to be near me, and I want you to hear me [when I tell you] we’ll be together ev’ry day.
A third possible read is similar to this one, in that all three lines again form a single thought. But in this read, the triplet is not self-contained within the song. Instead, these lines are a continuation of the prior and had you gone verse that ends with you knew in time we’d meet again for I had told you.
In this third version, Paul is reminding his beloved of what he (Paul) has said in the past — for I had told you— which he’s now reaffirming once again in the present — that he wants the two of them to be together every day.
Again, to help clarify, here’s the section of the song we’re considering, converted to regular prose with some adjusted language—
And had you gone, you knew in time we’d meet again, for I had told you you were meant to be near me, and I want you to hear me [when I tell you] we’ll be together ev’ry day.
This third read — which seems the most elegant of the three — also echoes the struggle-to-share-feelings line from earlier in the song, did I tell you I need you every single day of my life, as Paul continuing to reassure his beloved — and perhaps himself — that he did indeed tell his beloved these things in the past, and that his message was received, even as he continues to try to get that message across in the present day — I want you to hear me [when I] say we’ll be together every day.
The musical cues in the song suggest this third read as the correct read. We won’t go into the music theory of what’s happening here — we’ve got enough on our hands with just the grammar — but you can probably intuitively sense that up-speak at the end of the verse — on the “you” of for I had told you — suggests that Paul isn’t finished with his thought at the end of that verse — and that his thought instead continues on into the first line of the triplet — you were meant to be near me.
But despite the clear musical signal that this is the correct read, this reassurance doesn’t seem to quite fit, in the context of and had you gone. If Paul’s beloved almost left, then it makes sense for Paul to ask for assurance that his beloved will stay with him in the future. But if Paul’s beloved almost left — and if Paul is deeply upset about that almost-leaving, as the song suggests that he is — then why would Paul need to reassure his beloved that he (Paul) won’t leave?
It seems we’re going to need a bit more context to determine which of these three meanings is the more likely, so let’s see what happens in the next verse—
What can I do what can I be
When I’m with you I want to stay there
If I am true I’ll never leave
And if I do I know the way there17
To start with, let’s notice that if I am true I’ll never leave is a parallel/contrasting line to you didn’t lie in the prior verse. Those two phrases — contrasting truth and lies between the two lovers — are very nearly a split couplet, which is a term we invented when we talked about “Bless You” to refer to two lines that are separated in the lyric, but intimately related in their meaning.
As we touched on earlier, the question of truth and lies in a romantic relationship is obviously profoundly relevant to a story of two boys growing up in a culture in which same sex love and desire was illegal and widely condemned, and thus mostly had to be hidden away. Lied about, if you will.
In this context — and if Paul is indeed writing to John — what can I do what can I be / when I’m with you I want to stay there would be a poignant articulation of the confusion and anguish of being unable to express love honestly and openly in a culture that does not allow a man to express romantic or erotic love to another man.
And that might offer us a clue about and had you gone — that whatever happened to motivate and had you gone might be related to Paul’s struggle to be emotionally truthful — his struggle to share his innermost feelings with John in a larger culture in which those particular innermost feelings are especially dangerous to share.
And that, in turn, might offer insight into the triplet we just considered — the one where Paul seems to be reassuring his beloved that he (Paul) will not leave, despite it having been his beloved who almost left in the past.
In the song, Paul is equating his beloved’s role in the relationship with truth — you didn’t lie — and his own role as involving a struggle with truth — if I’m true. If Paul is writing about and for John, then Paul’s association of John with truth and himself with the lie — or at least with a struggle with truth — is a hint that right from the start, John may have been more willing to be truthful — both with Paul and with the rest of the world — about how he felt than Paul was able to be with John.
If the song is written for John, then maybe from John’s point of view, Paul is the one who “left” — not literally, but in terms of his inability to be more committed and emotionally forthcoming in the relationship, both because of the cultural restrictions on committing to a same sex relationship and also because of Paul’s own personal difficulties with expressing his innermost feelings outside of song.
And if this is an accurate interpretation, then this is consistent with what we know about their relationship from those videos and photographs we looked at in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — where John’s obviously erotic/romantic gazes at Paul are far more frequent and more easily noticed than Paul’s gazes back at John.18
In this context — as the musical cues tell us — the third and more interconnected read of the prior triplet — in which Paul is reassuring John that he (Paul) wants to be with him every single day — makes all kinds of sense. Combined with the overall extreme willingness to share his feelings in the song as a whole, the I want you to hear me triplet can easily be understood as Paul reassuring a romantic partner that he (Paul) is now — in light of the near-miss of and had you gone — prepared to offer the emotional presence and commitment that’s necessary in an intimate relationship.
All of this might be the more specific reason why “Got To Get You Into My Life” is strikingly different from most of Paul’s struggle-to-share-feelings songs.
As we noticed earlier, Paul’s struggle to share his feelings in “Got To Get You Into My Life” isn’t about being tentative or emotionally-distant — not by any measure. It’s not I can’t tell you how I feel or I couldn’t say the words or even the gentle metaphor of a language barrier in “Michelle.”
The difference in Paul being tongue-tied versus willing/able to share his feelings so urgently and openly might be the presence of and had you gone.
If “Got To Get You Into My Life” is indeed written to John, then Whatever Happened to shake John’s faith in the relationship was clearly a near-miss that scared the hell out of both of them. It seems to have scared John enough to threaten to leave, and it seems to have scared Paul enough to motivate him to overcome his fear of expressing his emotions, so as to plead for John to stay.
And had you gone makes it clear that the intensity of both the lyric and Paul’s performance of it is not the ecstatic, breathless euphoria of new love — or even romantic/erotic obsession — but the dizzying relief of having barely averted the devastating loss of that love.
And had you gone is why Paul doesn’t have the luxury of being tentative or indirect about his feelings. What can I do what can I be / When I’m with you I want to stay there — but really, the whole song — is Paul giving (literal) full-throated voice to his frantic need to convince his beloved of the constancy of his love, and the urgent need to do whatever is necessary to keep whatever happened from happening again.
What can I do what can I be is the sort of thing we say when we feel we’ve fucked up with our beloved and we’re pleading for something — anything — that we can do to make it right again. Essentially — “Tell me how to make it better. Anything, you name it and I’ll do it. Just please, whatever you do, don’t go.”
This is what it’s like, when we’re desperate to win back the trust of our beloved, when we’re willing to promise anything, but we’re afraid we won’t be heard or believed. We repeat ourselves, one word tumbling over the next — what can I do what can I be? — urgently grasping for the words to fix what’s broken, saying the same thing in multiple ways — you were meant to be near me... we’ll be together every day — hoping we’ll somehow stumble upon the combination of words that will make things right before we lose our beloved forever.
In this way, “Got To Get You Into My Life” might more accurately be a companion song to “Oh! Darling” — Paul pleading his case of love and fidelity — I’d never do you no harm... if I’m true, I’ll never leave — to a partner whose trust in the relationship has been shaken.19
What’s different from “Oh! Darling” is the manic urgency of “Got To Get You Into My Life” — in the song itself and in Paul’s vocal. And that difference reveals itself in the two parallel phrases in each of the songs — and had you gone, sung for a lover who almost left but didn’t, and “Oh! Darling”’s if you leave me — sung for a lover who’s partway out the door. And unlike “Oh! Darling,” where Paul lingers on every phrase as if stalling for time before the inevitable happens, in “Got To Get You Into My Life,” Paul doesn’t even have time to finish one word before moving on to the next, fueled — perhaps — by the euphoria of that last-minute stay of execution.
“Got To Get You Into My Life” ends with a repeat of the “fete” intro verse — the verse that includes the “love at first sight” imagery of I was alone, I took a ride, etc. It’s bookended on either side by—
Ooh, then I suddenly see you,
Ooh, did I tell you I need you
Every single day of my life?
If “Got To Get You Into My Life” is written for John — as it appears to be — then maybe the return to their meeting at the fête is simply Paul reminding himself of the joy of their first meeting. Maybe Whatever Happened to shake the foundations of Lennon/McCartney in 1965 got Paul thinking about — and longing for — the magick “love at first sight” of the day they met, before the world exploded around them and made it all so very complicated.
But in the context of and had you gone, recalling that joy might also be part of Paul’s what can I do what can I say strategy. And it might also offer us an explanation for that quasi-presumptuous second verse in which Paul tells his beloved — can we just say John at this point? — how he, John, felt on the day they met. Essentially — “let me tell you the story of the day we met and fell in love as part of proving to you how much I love you, and maybe also reminding you of how much you love me.”
Paul sings the fête verse very differently this final time — faster, louder, ragged and raw-throated, pushing the edge of his vocal and emotional control, as he pleads his case with escalating fervor — as if sensing that Whatever Happened might not be as much in the past and fixed as he hoped.
And then there’s did I tell you I need you, which initially appeared to be a relatively minor articulation of Paul’s struggle-to-express-feelings — but in the context of and had you gone, turns out to be not so minor after all.
In the context of and had you gone, it’s now easy to hear did I tell you I need you every single day of my life for what it might more truly be — Paul’s reassurance to his beloved — to John — whose faith in the relationship has been shaken and who is deeply insecure about being abandoned, and who feels the need to be loved by someone who will offer 100% of his time and attention every single day of his life — which based on what we see in the observable history, seems to be a pretty accurate description of John’s (and Paul’s) expectations of a romantic relationship.
“Got To Get You Into My Life” does not seem to be a simple, generalised love song, nor does it seem to be an ecstatic and nostalgic celebration of love at first sight. What it seems clearly to be is a testament — Paul’s proof-of-love to his beloved — to John — in the aftermath of a near-miss end to their love affair. And he’s building his case for the constancy of their love around evoking their first meeting — I was alone I took a ride — when they fell in love at first sight — then I suddenly see you. “Remember,” Paul is urging, “remember how good it felt, how real it was for both of us, right from the start. How real it still is, for me and hopefully for you.”
And if there’s no specific regret in this struggle-to-share-feelings song, it’s only because Paul is leveraging the full force of his musical and lyrical genius and emotional courage to ensure there will be nothing to regret.
As we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, Paul will spend much of the rest of his creative career — right up to the present day — attempting to reassure John of his love. Song after song, reassurance after reassurance — perhaps reassuring himself as much as John — that Paul did say “I love you” and that John did hear it, in the end.
All of this, of course, begs the question — if this analysis is accurate, what was the Whatever Happened that motivated Paul to write “Got To Get You Into My Life”? Because it’s hopefully self-evident that if Lennon/McCartney almost imploded in 1965, that’s a missing piece that matters a great deal in our understanding of the music and the story.
The answer to that question doesn’t appear in mainstream Beatles writing, because mainstream writing doesn’t even notice and had you gone because mainstream Beatles writers refuse to consider lyrics as primary source material and don’t pay attention to pesky details like that and wouldn’t know what to do with them if they did.
Norman Smith, The Beatles’ first studio engineer, paid attention, though. Here he is in an interview published in 2006—
“After the first LP in 1963, the following albums had been wonderful. But the Rubber Soul album was the most difficult one for me. It was much less enjoyable. I can’t remember how long the gap was between Help! and Rubber Soul, but there certainly had been one hell of a change in the relationship between the boys — mainly between John and Paul. It was very noticeable, and it made me quite sad in actual fact. Something had happened between those two albums, but I’m not sure what it was. That was the beginning of the end, really. That’s when it started.”20
Smith’s observation also hasn’t made it into the story as it’s usually told. And before we consider his observation about the “something that happened” between John and Paul during this time period, it’s worth considering how seriously to take Norman Smith as a primary source.
The job of a studio engineer includes observing for long hours from behind glass in the relative isolation of the control room. That set-up provides a uniquely valuable perspective on the people being observed and their interactions with one another. In some ways, it’s not unlike a “blind” that field biologists use to study animals in the wild to avoid disrupting their natural behaviour patterns.
What’s more, the unusual layout of Studio 2 — where The Beatles did most of their recording — is especially suited to this kind of “wildlife observation.” The control room is set high above the studio floor, which means the engineer has a good view of the artist, but the artist usually can’t see the engineer — so it’s easier to forget the engineer is there.21
We talked about this in Part One of Beautiful Possibility relative to Geoff Emerick, who replaced Norman Smith as the Beatles studio engineer at the end of 1965. But unlike the later albums that Emerick worked on, The Beatles’ early albums that Smith engineered were recorded in extremely short bursts of time — sometimes as short as a single day.
That means that unlike Emerick, Smith didn’t spend long hours observing John and Paul in the studio. But also unlike Emerick, Smith seems to have socialized with them at least a little bit outside of the studio. Smith writes a lot about his friendship with John in particular in his self-published 2008 memoir, John Lennon Called Me Normal — though given Smith is rarely mentioned in any of the research, it’s hard to know from his book if he’s exaggerating the significance of that relationship in an effort to position himself closer to a culturally significant event.
Also, observing behaviour is one thing. Interpreting that behaviour is quite another. And both Smith and Emerick consistently fall short when it comes to their “Grail fluency” — aka, their ability to perceive and interpret emotional subtext.
So maybe Smith is just misinterpreting his observational data — as Emerick frequently does. Maybe there was no big Whatever Happened between John and Paul. Maybe what Smith observed was just a passing storm cloud between two volatile artists working together under intense pressure and tight time constraints — the affectionate “tug of war” that George Martin talks about, surfacing for the first time in earnest as The Beatles gained confidence as recording artists and started calling their own shots in the studio.
In other words, it would be reckless and irresponsible to conclude anything about the relationship between John and Paul — in 1965 or at any other time — based on a single quote from Norman Smith, and a single, oddly-placed grammatical phrase in a single song written during a time period when John and Paul seemed from what we can see with our own eyeballs to have been getting along just fine.
But we have a bit more than just this single quote.
We also know from observable history that Norman Smith did indeed quit working with The Beatles after Rubber Soul — just as The Beatles were getting started in earnest on their revolutionary musical innovations that would culminate in Sgt. Pepper, when virtually any studio engineer in the world would have done virtually anything to sit in that chair. And even factoring in that Smith occasionally says he left to pursue other professional opportunities, his timing strongly suggests that something unusual precipitated his resignation.
We also have more than just a single phrase in a single song. Because there’s the matter of that emotional arc that we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — where the emotional arc of Paul and John’s songs, together and solo, seems to mirror the emotional arc of their relationship with each other better than their relationships with their public romantic partners.
And this brings us to another hard limit on the usefulness of even primary research.
In the prior chapter, I suggested that the story of The Beatles is first and foremost a story of human relationships — between John, Paul, George, and Ringo. And — as we’ve talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — even more so, between John and Paul. And the reality is that the vast majority of what happens between any two people in a relationship — famous or otherwise, romantic or otherwise — happens in private.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney are two of history’s most famous people, and together, one of history’s most famous couples — but nonetheless, we’re never going to know most of what happened between them in private, which is, of course, as it should be. That’s a secret code never to be spoken — as Paul has made clear.22
Mostly what we get are glimpses of their relationship — in photographs and videos, occasionally but not really in interview — because John and Paul are especially guarded when talking about their relationship. Have you noticed that despite the length and depth and intensity of their partnership, and the multitudes of interviews, separately and together, they’ve given us only a tiny handful of anecdotes about their time together, mostly from Paul — who carefully repeats the same handful of stories about him and John over and over?
All of this is almost certainly why Paul has told us to look to his songs — to their songs — for the truth of his life, and by extension, the truth of his relationship with John.
And when we consider those songs with a Grail-fluent gaze, it becomes obvious that since the emotional arc of their songs so closely matches the emotional arc of their relationship when we seem to have a good sense of the state of their relationship — for example, during the breakup — that same emotional arc in their songs might work in reverse. It might point us to what’s happening between them when it’s not otherwise visible (except apparently, to Norman Smith).
This correlation might be what Paul is talking about, when he says that the truth of his life is in his songs, rather than in the written history.
We need to be very careful here though, because there’s an obvious danger lurking. It’s easy to let that correlation drift into selectively choosing which to believe — the songs or the research — depending on what we want to believe. When the songs match the research, ah ha! see, the songs match the research. When the songs don’t match the research — well, that’s because the research is wrong.
This sort of confirmation bias is a danger common to all fields of study and a danger that all scholars are vulnerable to. It’s why there needs to be a constant back-and-forth, checking one kind of research against another. And as we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, it’s the confirmation bias that Grail-phobic writers are caught in, when they categorically reject the credibility of the lovers possibility by dismissing as not credible the considerable body of research that points in that direction, because it points them in a direction they do not want to — and do not know how to — go.
But with that caution in mind, it’s an indisputable truth that art reflects the life of the artist and that Paul has directed us to look at the songs more than the research. So let’s take a quick look at some of the songs in the time period before “Got To Get You Into My Life” when the Whatever Happened that might have motivated the and had you gone would likely have happened.
Before we do, though, a caution — Paul’s told us that in looking to his songs for the truth of his life, “the meanings aren’t always obvious on the surface.” And that in turn means that — especially since we’re dealing with world-class wordsmiths — it takes time and effort to tease out meanings from their lyrics, as maybe you’re seeing with “Got To Get You Into My Life.”
It’s also always dangerous to pull a single line or couplet out of a song instead of considering the whole song and its context — as again, hopefully you’re seeing with “Got To Get You Into My Life.” And the songs during the Rubber Soul period — which would be just prior to Revolver — are especially hard to untangle because of the disintegration of Paul’s relationship with Jane during this time.
All of which is to say that the following is not the way lyrical interpretation should really be done, especially relative to Lennon/McCartney — so please bear that in mind.
But that said, it’s possible that Whatever Happened between them might be the sour taste of vinegar in the Rubber Soul-era single “We Can Work It Out,” and it might be the cause of Paul’s desperation to communicate his feelings in “Michelle,” the lyrics of which were written in 1965—
I need to I need to I need to
I need to make you see
Oh what you mean to me
Until I do I’m hoping you will know what I mean
—which you might recognise could easily be a verse of “Got To Get You Into My Life.”
And while we for sure don’t yet have enough context to talk about “Girl,” it’s hard not to notice this verse—
When I think of all the times I’ve tried so hard to leave her
She will turn to me and start to cry
And she promises the earth to me and I believe her
After all this time I don’t know why
Factoring in the by-necessity gender-swapped pronouns, you might now recognise this verse of “Girl” as an almost beat-for-beat retelling (or foretelling) of “Got To Get You Into My Life,” in which Paul does indeed “promise the earth” to his beloved — only this time, the story is told from John’s perspective.
If “Girl” is written about Paul — as it may well be — John seems to be referencing a pattern of behaviour — all the times I tried so hard to leave her — rather than a single, acute incident. But crises in relationships generally don’t rise up out of the blue. And overall this is virtually the identical narrative that Paul is telling in “Got To Get You Into My Life”— except in “Girl,” it’s told from the perspective of an insecure, skittish John Lennon, in love but on the verge of leaving, and coaxed into staying — and she promises the earth to me and I believe her — by his own enmeshment in the relationship and by his partner’s panicked, over-the-top declarations of love and devotion.
And let’s also notice “Here, There & Everywhere.” In the context of and had you gone, language like I want her everywhere / And if she’s beside me I know I need never care / But to love her is to need her everywhere is easily read as yet another iteration of “Michelle” and “Got To Get You Into My Life” — Paul’s reassurance, tender and plaintive this time, that he’ll never abandon his beloved.
Again, we’re short-stroking a lot here and these are possibilities only. While I do think John and Paul wrote these songs for and about one another, I’m aware that I’m not fully making the case for that here, based only on a few lines from the lyrics. Each of these songs — and especially “Girl” — could itself be considered in a deep lyrical analysis like the one we’re currently doing for “Got To Get You Into My Life.” And we will, of course, revisit this part of the story in context in Part Two of Beautiful Possibility.
But there is certainly a pattern here. And that pattern is consistent with both Norman Smith’s observation of new tension between John and Paul during Rubber Soul, and with the lyrics of “Got To Get You Into My Life.”
Before we continue, I want to point out that all of this is another example of why we do a disservice to the story and the music by dismissing both the lovers possibility and Paul’s explicit directive to look for the truth of his life in his songs. Dismissing one or the other is bad enough — but dismissing both together starts to feel... purposeful, maybe because the best way not to find something you don’t want to find is to refuse to go looking for it in its most likely location.
But when we settle for superficial interpretations of the lyrics of Lennon/McCartney, we lose the opportunity to see the more complex — and I’d suggest, more beautiful — layers of meaning in their songs. Without the willingness to notice the specific and complex grammar of and had you gone and how it sets the context for the rest of the lyric, “Got To Get You Into My Life” is just an “ode to pot” and a simple, relatively generic love song.
What might be most masterful about “Got To Get You Into My Life” is that with one tiny phrase — and had you gone — Paul completely flips the emotional ‘direction’ of the song. Written as a song of obsession/possession, “Got To Get You Into My Life” is Paul begging to get something from his beloved — “please tell me you’ll never leave me.” But and had you gone turns “Got To Get You Into My Life” into a song of reassurance, Paul offering something to his beloved — “please take this song as proof that I love you.”
That’s not, of course, an either/or — great art has multiple layers, and “Got To Get You Into My Life” is no exception. Both the “getting” and the “giving” are contained in the song, lyrically and musically, making it a complete cycle of love, loss, regret and redemption— which might be one of the many reasons John cites it as one of Paul’s best lyrics.
We’re nearly done with our lyrical deep dive into “Got To Get You Into My Life.” But you may have noticed there’s one last part we haven’t yet talked about — the hook that’s also the title, repeated throughout the song in escalating intensity and fragmentation.
To understand what might be the deeper meaning of the title — and to answer the question of Whatever Happened between Paul and John that troubled Norman Smith so much he quit The Beatles on the eve of their musical revolution and that may have motivated the and had you gone of “Got To Get You Into My Life” — we need to go back and pick up the thread we left hanging in the prior chapter, with the Dylan story and Paul’s creative unfurling and “Yesterday.”
Because the truth of the artist might be in the art, but not always all of it — which is why things are about to get a little tricky.
In the final chapter of this series, we’ll look at what was happening in the time period between Help! and Rubber Soul that Norman Smith specifies. And I’ll offer you my best and most educated guess about how all of what we’ve talked about to this point might have come together to become the Whatever Happened that might have led to and had you gone.
Until next week.
Peace, love, and strawberry fields,
Faith 🍓
PS You’ll get more out of the final chapter of Seven Levels if you’re familiar with the history of “Yesterday” as it relates to Lennon/McCartney, considered in the piece below—
Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, Liveright, 2022.
The quote from The Lyrics is by far the most explicit and directive from Paul, relative to looking for the truth of his life in his Lyrics. But it’s not the only time Paul has pointed to his songs as the place to find the truth of his life. There are dozens of examples in which he makes this explicit, many of which we considered in episode 1:5 (“He Said He Said Part 1”) of Beautiful Possibilty.
Here one I haven’t yet shared, from a 1997 interview with Record Collector, in which he also makes clear that the meanings he’s referring to are not always obvious on the surface—
“Q: Have you ever written a song and thought afterwards, “That’s too personal, too embarrassing?
Paul McCartney: No, unfortunately not. The more embarrassingly personal they are, they somehow seem to be alright. You can get away with things in songs that you couldn’t actually say to people, because by the nature of them they’re a little more poetic. I veil things in songs — I’m very conscious of doing that.
Paul also seems to have been referencing the need to dig beneath the surface for the meaning of his songs in “Days We Left Behind.”
While he’s not as explicit as he is in the quotes from The Lyrics and his Record Collector interview, it seems all-but-certain that the “secret code” that “will never be spoken” that he references in the middle eight of the song— which he’s explicitly acknowledged in interview is written about him and John — refers to the songs of Lennon/McCartney.
For a lyrical analysis of the middle eight of “Days We Left Behind” — https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/secret-codes-and-promises.
Sheff: “Got To Get You Into My Life”?
John: Paul’s again. That-- I think that was one of his best songs too, because the lyrics are good and I didn’t write ‘em. You see? I mean, so when I say that he could write lyrics if he took the effort, then there’s the occasional song like that where he says “I took a ride...” and-- and you know I mean it’s-- it’s-- it’s not sort of wishy-washy, it actually describes his experience on taking acid. I think that’s what he’s talking about, really. But I couldn’t swear to it, but I think it was a result of that. (transcription from audio of interview with David Sheff, September 1980)
One of the first things to do with lyrical interpretation is strip out all of the punctuation. It’s usually not accurate in online lyrics anyway because unlike poetry, songs are intended to be sung, and punctuation marks aren’t audible when a song is sung. They’re only implied by pauses for breath — and that is a very subjective thing. Clearing out the punctuation marks opens the lyric to being experienced as it’s intended to be experienced — sung, not read.
It’s also a good idea to listen to the song itself rather than relying on the printed lyrics — not only because printed lyrics (yes, including the ones on the official Beatles website) are riddled with inaccuracies, but also because Paul and John often sing lyrics that are different from the official printed version.
I was alone, I took a ride might also be an erotic metaphor for, shall we say, a... solo excursion into sexual fantasy. Which is somewhat supported by the remainder of the lyrics. But even if that line is a reference to the joys of self-love, that still doesn’t tell us who the erotic fantasy Paul is describing is about.
Colin Hanton and Colin Hall, Pre-Fab, The Book Guild, 2018.
We’ll almost certainly dedicate a full episode to the fête in Part Two of Beautiful Possibility.
For now, it’s worth noticing that John once explicitly described their meeting as love at first sight (don’t be misled by the “not”)—
‘Meeting Paul was just like two people meeting,’ says John. ‘Not falling in love or anything. Just us. It went on. It worked.” (John Lennon interviewed for The Beatles, Hunter Davies, 1968.)
As for Paul’s reaction to John on the day they met, that’s less about a single quote and more about a collection of behaviours that suggests an instant — and maybe pre-existing — attraction. Again, we’ll get there in Part Two.
We talked in detail about this regret in Part One, especially in episode 1:5 (“He Said He Said”). Here’s one quote from Paul that we considered in that episode—
“It’s funny because just in real life, I find that a challenge. I like to sort of, not give too much away. Like you said, I’m quite private. Why should people know my innermost thoughts? That’s for me, they’re innermost. But in a song, that’s where you can do it. That’s the place to put them. You can start to reveal truths and feelings. You know, like in ‘Here Today’ where I’m saying to John “I love you”. I couldn’t have said that, really, to him. But you find, I think, that you can put these emotions and these deeper truths – and sometimes awkward truths; I was scared to say ‘I love you.’ So that’s one of the things that I like about songs.” (Paul McCartney interviewed by John Wilson for BBC 4’s Mastertapes, May 24, 2016.)
As I mentioned in a footnote in episode 1:5 of Beautiful Possibility, Paul has on a handful of occasions also shared in interview his difficulty in telling his wife Nancy that he loves her. But “Got To Get You Into My Life” obviously predates Paul’s marriage to Nancy by several decades.
Also, to my knowledge, Paul has never expressed his regret at not having said “I love you” to Nancy — which makes sense, of course, because there’s no need for that kind of regret, given he’s still married to her and still has the opportunity to share his feelings with her.
To my knowledge, Paul has also never expressed any regret at not having told Linda he loved her. Which either means he told her that he loved her or that he has no regrets about not having told her he loves her, and untangling that is well beyond the scope of this series — and maybe beyond the scope of any series, I’m not sure yet.
The point here is, it’s only John he’s ever mentioned when he talks about his regret at not having been able to say “I love you” the way he wished he could.
Again, this is a very short summary and episode 1:5 of Beautiful Possibilitydeals with this regret in depth.
The unexpected substitution of “lie” for the more expected “hide” as the contrast to “run” is a small example of what John might have especially admired about this lyric, given John’s appreciation for wordplay and poetry.
In the Playlist Commentary Rabbit Hole in Part One, we talked about the first song that John and Paul wrote together, “Just Fun,” as another example of how deep their bond seems to have been right from the start.
As virtually always with Beatles countercultural research, the writer in question publishes anonymously. I’d very much like to credit you more directly for this perceptive insight — if you’d like me to do that, please email me and let me know.
The sweet/sour split in “John vs Paul” is discussed in detail in episode 1:7 (“The Measure of a Man”).
And yes, I think given “Deep Deep Feeling” is a struggle-to-share feelings song as well as a song of erotic obsession, there’s a very good chance it’s written about John.
“For No One” might be one of the few songs Paul wrote — at least in part — about his relationship with Jane Asher. If so, it’s not surprising that it’s mostly sour, given Paul has several times acknowledged that his relationship with Jane was never a love match, and that he and Jane never really clicked. And again, we’ll probably talk more about that in Part Two of Beautiful Possibility.
Paul has named “Got Only Knows” as one of his favourite songs, but it’s unlikely the song had an influence on “Got To Get You Into My Life” because it wasn’t released in the UK until after “Got To Get You Into My Life” was recorded. It’s possible Brian Wilson sent Paul an advance copy of the song, but that seems unlikely given how difficult that sort of thing was in the pre-internet days.
Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, Liveright, 2022.
Note the foreshadowing of let me know the way in “Long And Winding Road” (another song that’s highly likely to be about John) — both in the specific revisit of I’ll know the way there a nd the general motif of finding his “way” back to his beloved, the central theme of “Long and Winding Road.”
We stepped through extended a priori analysis of the photographs and videos of John and Paul together in both episode 1:4 (“Are You Afraid Or Is It True?”) and the Rabbit Hole on Beatlemania.
Also notice the line if you leave me, I’ll never make it alone in “Oh! Darling,” another articulation of and had you gone. But it’s more than just another grammatical form. And to see why, we need to go back to verb tenses for a minute.
In “Got To Get You Into My Life,” Paul’s and had you gone seems to reference an event in the past that almost happened, but didn’t. With “Oh! Darling”’s if you leave me, Paul’s now in the present tense, articulating a danger that looms in the future. Again, it’s not speculative or abstract — that would be “if you ever leave me.’ Paul is calling up the spectre of a real and present danger — which, of course, it is, given “Oh! Darling” is written in 1969, as the breakup is escalating, and as John is very much on the verge of leaving the band — and Paul — for Yoko.
We’ll come back to all of this when we get there in the story, because there is — obviously — a lot more context swirling around “Oh! Darling,” relative to its lyrical interpretation.
Norman Smith interviewed in Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums, Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, Curvebender, 2006.
In later years, after Smith’s departure, The Beatles erected barriers to keep parts of the studio floor shielded from those observing eyes up in the control room.
For more on the “secret code” and why it’s almost certain Paul is referring to his and John’s songs, see https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/secret-codes-and-promises.
