The Night Before is a track in the Help! album written by Paul McCartney. It is a bright, uptempo pop song with a very Beatley flavour combining an R’n’B/soul flavour with a strong call-response type vocal arrangement with lyrics that seem like an ironic answer to Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

This song was one of the first to make use of electric piano, which became a regular feature of Help! and continued to be part of the Beatles sonic palette from that point onward. It also features a doubled guitar solo the same part played two octaves in unison by McCartney and Harrison. It was recorded in just two takes with some overdubs.

The Beatles Bible

Written mainly by Paul McCartney, ‘The Night Before’ was featured in the Help! film during a scene filmed on Salisbury Plain, England.

Continue reading on Beatles Bible →

Wikipedia

"The Night Before" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1965 film Help! and soundtrack album of the same name. It was written primarily by Paul McCartney and credited to the Lennon–McCartney partnership. Described as a pop rock o…

Continue reading on Wikipedia →

Although it is not the Beatles most profound or moving record it is an example of something that helped them stand apart; an album track that is as strong as many hit singles. In retrospect it’s easy to focus on the Beatles as exceptional creative innovators and artists, but the impact they had was also a function of the scale of their audience and their mass appeal. To develop this the Beatles combined their moments of inspiration with an understanding of what people wanted to hear; something new, something uplifting, emotional, or thought-provoking, something memorable, tuneful, energetic. Something good. The Beatles had a highly calibrated sense of what made a record good, and they held themselves to high standards. They wanted to be “toppermost of the poppermost”.

At this stage of their career, in early 1965, they were consolidating their position as the world’s leading pop group. They were aiming at making commercial songs that would appeal to the widest possible audience around the world, selling singles, albums, and tickets for movies and concerts, and they were succeeding.

Side one of the Help! is particularly strong, in between the first and last songs (the hit singles Help! and Ticket To Ride) is a sequence of relentlessly accessible and commercial tracks; The Night Before, You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away (which was US top 10 hit for The Silkie), I Need You, Another Girl, and You’re Going To Lose That Girl.

I don’t always agree with Rolling Stone magazine, but in this case (a listing of 100 greatest Beatles songs from 2020) they sum it up neatly:

For any other band, a pop gem as magnificent as “The Night Before” would have turned into a career-making hit single, if not the foundation of a legend. But for the Beatles, it was just another great album track, slipping through the cracks as they sped from A Hard Day’s Night through Help! on their way to Rubber Soul. The band was writing and cutting masterpieces faster than fans could even absorb them.