Beatles Countdown #91 – I’ll Follow The Sun

Mar 02

Doug1960s paul mccartney, the beatles No Comments

I didn’t realize until I started counting this down, but there are a lot of Paul McCartney songs on here. I’m not trying to badmouth him, but jeez! This is the tenth song we’ve covered so far: two have been by Harrison, two by McCartney & Lennon, and the rest by him! So yeah, here’s another McCartney song at #91 from the rushed album Beatles For Sale: “I’ll Follow The Sun.”

This song is interesting. It’s one of the first Paul ever wrote having originally penned it down when he was 16 after he had just recovered from the flu. The song itself never had serious attention paid to it, but it was actually one of the first songs the band ever recorded together. In 1960 (then with the original quintet of Paul, John, George, Stu Sutcliffe, & Pete Best), the then Quarrymen recorded a version slightly briefer while on break from school. It featured different lyrics, structure, and a different guitar section, but it still kept the same feeling of the song. Pete Best would later recall how even though it wasn’t a staple of their performances, he remembers Paul playing them between sets in Hamburg by himself on piano a handful of times. The band originally had thought of themselves with a harder image (when they dressed in all leather in Hamburg) which Best says is the reason they never played it as a group. Even as the band’s image softened in the following years, Paul still maintained that ballads didn’t fit their image as a rocking band so they kept ballads as sparse as possible. Think about that – The Beatles without ballads? Where would we be without Yesterday?

So why did they finally put it on a record? Well, it wouldn’t be until the recording session for Beatles For Sale that the band gave it a chance and really only out of desperation. That aforementioned album was the band’s fourth in twenty-one months – that’s just ridiculous. Think about a band like Red Hot Chili Peppers who release an album somewhere around every four years; The Beatles released four in under two years! The recording session for this album almost directly followed A Hard Day’s Night sessions to put it into even broader terms. Lennon & McCartney might be Gods among songwriters, but even God took a day to rest so it’s understandable that they were just beat & battered. The album cover itself mirrors this as it shows a visibly drained band. What resulted was the band trying to make a Christmas deadline for an album and scrambling for material to fill it with. While the recording sessions produced some classics for The Beatles such as “Eight Days A Week” & “I Feel Fine” (the latter appearing as a single, not on the album), the band quickly turned to covers to fill out the album and older material. Enter a slightly modified “I’ll Follow The Sun” which finally made its way into The Beatles canon for all to hear and eventually vote on to this list!

Song: I’ll Follow The Sun
Album: Beatles For Sale
Year: 1964

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