The Beatles BibleOriginally intended for the A Hard Day’s Night soundtrack, ‘I’ll Cry Instead’ was replaced with ‘Can’t By Me Love’ at the request of director Richard Lester. It was restored for an opening collage sequence during the film’s 1986 VHS reissue.
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WikipediaI’ll Cry Instead is a song from the A Hard Day’s Night album, and one of eight on that album written wholly or mainly by John Lennon. Like several other songs of this period it is a well-crafted pop song, but maybe not especially memorable or moving. One sign that it may not have benefitted from as much inspiration or received as much loving attention as the Beatles greater songs is that the entire middle eight and verse 3 is repeated at the end of the song which still comes in at less than 2 minutes long.
Listening again one of the main concerns I had listening to it again in preparing this entry, is that it highlights further issues with my ranking, coming ahead of 159: Long, Long, Long, which is plainly a much stronger song. There are several reasons for this:
First, it’s not quite as stark as it seems as I’ll Cry Instead and Long, Long, Long are in fact tied in the scoring system along with a couple of other songs.
Second, when I created the scores, I didn’t work through the songs in this order so the contrast between them was not immediately apparent – it might have been several days or weeks between hearing and evaluating each song.
Third, my initial scores were likely biased by my first impressions of the songs. So for example, I initially (as a teenager) found Long, Long, Long to be a difficult listen partly because of the strangely muffled and quiet mixing and mastering, but these days I am much more ready to accept those issues (which are less apparent in streaming versions) and to put more weight on the ideas, words and music. But first impressions can be hard to shift.
Fourth, I think I misjudged both songs even taking those factors into account. For example I rated I’ll Cry Instead higher on lyrics that Long, Long, Long, which is not right. Either my taste has radically changed (which is possible) or I just got it wrong when I considered the songs one at a time.
Fifth, as I pointed out at the start of my Bluesky thread, and several times since, it doesn’t really make sense to rank art. The whole point of art is to create something unique and original. To rank them is to miss that point. Each individual will have a subjective response. Our responses to a work vary on many dimensions. What one person responds to at a particular time, or in a particular context may not be the same on a different occasion.
But the ranking does serve to put the songs into a sequence, so that they can be considered one at a time, and it does make some kind of sense to consider the features that might make a song great – even if one knows that they can never be isolated and that they change from time to time. And if that kind of consideration helps crystallize the problems with ranking and scoring art, then maybe that is a helpful thing in a world where we are starting to lose sight of what makes art so valuable: made by human beings to express something and to create varied and subjective responses in other people. In other words, to make you feel something.