Paul – lead
vocals, acoustic guitar, bass
John – backing vocals
George – backing vocals, lead guitar
Ringo – drums
Every so often, Paul comes up with a song that he has obviously crafted with care, which seems to exist almost as a showcase for his manifold talents, and in which he has exercised fine judgement and self-discipline. The timing of Revolver is such that it boasts no less than four such songs. In between an early need to churn out what George Martin liked to refer to as “pot-boilers” (that is, songs written purely for their saleability) and a later danger of tending towards the overly sentimental, come the extraordinary ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’, and the equally excellent, but often underrated ‘For No One’ and ‘Here, There And Everywhere’. Of the four, it could be argued that ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ shows the greatest degree of artistry, but this doesn’t detract from the fact that it is nevertheless a remarkable track. Paul once described his method for writing “McCartney” kind of stuff. “I just sit down and I’m in the mood and I grab a guitar and I get lucky. I’ll hit some chord that interests me and in that there is the opening chords. Simplicity is the best thing.” It is one of a handful of Paul’s songs which John felt were worthy of praise, calling it “one of my favourite songs of the Beatles.”
The style of the lyric, a good old-fashioned love song, is in the tradition of Ira Gershwin or Lorenz Hart. It even runs to a “verse” (introduction) – albeit a very short one – followed by a “refrain” with musical pattern A·A·B·A·B·A (verse, verse, bridge, verse, bridge, verse). Paul’s lyrical invention is further developed here, particularly a new technique of straddling two lines with a single word. The exploitation of the “cand” sound in “with the wave of her hand / Nobody can d / eny that there’s something there” stands comparison with songs like ‘But Not For Me’ – “I was a fool to fall / And get that way / Heigh ho! Alas! and al / so lackaday!”
Paul later revealed that the song had its roots in a different source. When recalling songs taught to John and him by Julia, John’s mother, he said, “one of them was ‘Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang Of Mine’, while another was definitely ‘Romana’. Much later, during the Beatle years, John and I often attempted to write a few songs with that similar kind of feeling, with ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ coming immediately to mind.”
But although the song as written is somewhat traditional, its treatment is sheer Beatles, with its vocal harmonies by Paul, John and George, and two-guitar arrangement. The beautiful, smooth vocal harmonies were naturally arranged by George Martin, about which he is characteristically modest – “There’s nothing very clever, no counterpoint, just moving block harmonies. Very simple to do … but very effective.” The treatment owes a lot to the Beach Boys’ elegant ‘God Only Knows’, released on Pet Sounds the previous month.
There are a number of similarities between ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ and ‘If I Fell’, even though the earlier song does not employ these block vocal harmonies. Both songs use a Gershwinesque introductory sequence – of course, many Beatles songs use an introductory device before setting about the verse, but it is nearly always taken from the body of the song. Early songs such as ‘Misery’ and later ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ simply lifted a line from the chorus, which then developed in songs like ‘Tell Me Why’ or ‘Any Time At All’ to starting the song with the chorus in its entirety. Certain songs, including ‘Hold Me Tight’ or ‘I’m Happy Just To Dance With You’ adopt a slightly different tack by taking a line from the bridge. Of those songs with an introduction, only three do not fall in one of these categories – ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’, ‘If I Fell’ and ‘Here, There And Everywhere’. The introduction in these songs is musically and lyrically independent of the rest of the song. (‘Help!’, while apparently having an independent introduction, instead uses a condensed version of the chorus while keeping the same chord sequence.)
‘Here, There And Everywhere’ also has an interesting rhythmic and melodic construction, with its 9/8 and 7/8 bars and, in the descent from Bm to Am, a flirtation with Bb, which becomes important later in the song.
There is also a similarity between the chord sequences of ‘If I Fell’ and ‘Here, There And Everywhere’, particularly in the verse. Both songs begin their verses with the same progression – here G–Am–Bm (I–ii–iii) – and end, more normally, with ii7–V7–I (Am7–D7–G).
What transforms the song from a delightful ballad to a significant piece of work centres on a fleeting moment in the middle of the verse. On “wave of her hand” Paul takes us to new territory, F#m–B7–F#m–B7–Em, flirting with the darker key of the relative minor, Em (ii–V7–i). Paul used the same shift for what Dominic Pedler calls “the single most famous songwriting move of McCartney’s career”, on the line “all my troubles seemed so far away” in ‘Yesterday’. The move originally seems to have come from the pen of a songwriting hero – “It was great to meet Hank Mancini, because like most people we’d loved ‘Moon River’. The line ‘my huckleberry friend’ had done us in.” Mancini’s song features an equivalent (ii7b5–V7–i) move after “I’m crossing you in style someday”.
(Paul also exploits ii7b5 rather than simply ii in the repeat of the phrase, as the melody includes a C natural – “no-bo-dy can deny” – creating a b5 in the F#m.)
The bridges of ‘If I Fell’ and ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ also use major-minor juxtaposition to good effect. While the bridge of ‘If I Fell’ uses a G–Gm (IV–iv) progression, ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ actually moves into G minor (the minor key of the tonic) via an interesting Bb (the relative major of G minor, if you’re following this), which was seen fleetingly in the introduction. It then follows a repeated Gm–Cm–D7 (i–iv–V7) progression, and, on the second repetition, moves to G major instead of the expected G minor. A song featuring a home key (G), its relative minor (Em), its parallel minor (Gm), and the relative major of the parallel minor (Bb) is rare, even for the Beatles. There was clearly no stopping Paul in 1966.
The two songs also differ in their basic melodic structure. ‘If I Fell’ used the octave leap, featured in songs as early as ‘Please Please Me’. ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ moves on a step and employs non-standard leaps to basically dissonant notes, often to a ninth or a seventh (a note above or below the octave) – “making each day of the year”, “deny that there’s some-thing there”. Possibly not coincidentally, ‘Moon River’ also features a leap of a seventh – “My huck-leberry friend …”.
The treatment of ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ is also rather different to ‘If I Fell’. The texture of the vocal gives this song a fragile, childlike quality. It is sung gently, almost whispered in places – particularly on the words “never care”. Also, because the vocals were recorded with the tape running slower than usual and played back at normal speed, Paul’s voice is pitched almost unrecognisably high, adding to the innocence. “I used an almost falsetto voice, and double-tracked it. My Marianne Faithfull impression.”
There is some evidence of the dropping of a new vocal track into a previous take. After both occurrences of “But to love her is to need her everywhere”, there is audible tape flutter in the left-hand vocal channel.
The lead guitar appears only briefly – for a mandolin-like series of chromatics after “I need never care”, and for the descending horn-like coda, beautifully complementing the final ascending “everywhere”. There are also very understated finger-snaps throughout the final verse. Again and again, whatever the style of song, Paul uses voices, instruments and effects with sensitivity and restraint.
“If a song is really great, you shouldn’t really notice what’s going on, like key changes or tempo changes. I like a song to appear to be seamless. I like a trick to have happened but I don’t notice until later, then I go, Jesus Christ! and try to work out how they did it. Though I say so myself, I think one of my best bits of that kind of craftsmanship is ‘Here, There And Everywhere’.”
