Song #189: "All You Need Is Love" by The Beatles

Date: Aug 19, 1967
Weeks: 1

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I don't get this song. I've heard it referenced as one of the Beatles' great songs, but I don't see it. I wonder if people may have just connected with the poetic sentiment of chorus's lyrics, and ignored the fact that everything built around that is kind of dumb.

One of the big problems is the giant production. There's a string section, a brass section, and a chorus. And I'm not sure if the problem is that there's too much orchestra, or not enough. The song can't decide whether to be big and operatic, or a little strummy guitar song. Either choice could have worked. A little strummy guitar song can be emotionally intimate, which seems like it would work with the "All you need is love" lyrics. Conversely, an operatic song can be big, and can elevate a seemingly small message like "All you need is love" into an important statement of philosophy. Unfortunately, this mixed presentation can't quite decide what to be, and the result is that it feels like the song is trying to tell me this message is more important and more deep than it really is. "All you need is love" can be a deep message, but this song makes it feel like a shallow one.

And the orchestration might not be so big a problem if the lyrics had more to say. Apart from "all you need is love" over and over and over again, the lyrics include some basic contradictions that seem like they are trying to sound more deep than they actually are. "There's nothing you can do that can't be done. Nothing you can sing that can't be sung." So if I can do it, then it means it's possible to do? That seems kind of depressing. So if there's something everyone thinks is impossible, but I manage to do it, then the end result is only that people expand their definition of what is possible? And what does that have to do with love anyway?

So the message of this song seems to be that you don't need to try to accomplish anything in life, because the only thing that matters is sitting around blissed out on mutual affection. So don't move away from the people you love to try to do anything you enjoy or are good at, like become an international rock star. What a weird message.

There are two other points about this song that are particularly odd. The first is that it opens with the opening bars of the French national anthem. Why? Well, as I listened to the song more and more, I started to realize that the chord progression in this song sounds a lot like those opening notes of the French anthem. My best guess is that partway through the writing process, somebody in the band noticed that they had accidentally copied a song they'd heard before, recognized it, and solved the problem by just lampshading it. Tack the song onto the front and call it an intentional reference. Leave future music reviewers wondering why.
The second odd point is the unusual time signature. The song doesn't stick to a strict 4/4 time, jumping back and forth between odd signatures so that the beat isn't entirely predictable. It's disorienting, but honestly I think it's necessary to keep the listener's interest up. If this song was done is just straight 4/4 time, it would get boring quickly. Credit to this song on that point, at least. It's not boring.

My verdict: Don't like it. The Beatles had the freedom to experiment and not just make the same kinds of songs over and over again, but not every experiment was a success.

(Edit: I see from Songfacts that this song was written for the first worldwide TV special, and the Beatles chose to write a song with simple lyrics deliberately so as to communicate clearly to people who didn't speak English. I'm not sure that the somewhat complex tense parsing of "nothing you can do that can't be done" accomplishes that goal, but at least the heavy repetition of every lyric helps. Maybe in that context I would have enjoyed seeing that performance, but I don't think it stands up well as its own pop song 40+ years down the road).