The Beatles Bible

Written primarily by John Lennon, ‘It’s Only Love’ first appeared on the second side of the Help! album. It originally had the working title ‘That’s A Nice Hat’.

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Wikipedia

"It's Only Love" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney. It was first released in 1965 on the Help! album in the United Kingdom and on the Rubber Soul album in the United States.

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It’s Only Love is a Lennon song from the Help! album. It’s interesting to read (via the beatlesbible.com article) that Lennon thought that

“it was a lousy song. The lyrics were abysmal. I always hated that song.”

I listened to it a few times while preparing this entry, before reading the article and quotes. Melodically it is quite coherent, expressing a kind of world-weary sigh. Not exhausted, not depressed but weary. Lyrically it is a bit incoherent. On the one hand the protagonist is sounding romantic – “butterflies” “when I see you go by”, “Just the sight of you makes night time bright” and so on. But in the chorus, “it’s only love”, “why do I feel this way?”, “it’s so hard loving you” – the sentiment is almost opposite. A failing or frustrated relationship where the protagonist is not feeling what he should be.

It would be easy to read something into the contradictions, but given Lennon’s own remarks, maybe it’s just the result of trying to write another girl/boy, you/me song to fill a gap on the album. As McCartney puts it:

“we didn’t fight it if the lyric came out rather bland on some of those filler songs like ‘It’s Only Love’”

“it’s only a rock ‘n’ roll song. I mean, this is not literature.”

Still I couldn’t help feeling that some lines were sung with more feeling than others; and if anything it’s the “It’s so hard loving you” sentiment that wins out. Prior to Help! Lennon’s songs and collaborations with McCartney had tended to include a fair number of sunny love songs – as would be completely standard for pop songs of the time. Of course they need not be especially authentic – in some sense writing a love song is like solving a crossword puzzle where you fit the “me”s, “you”s, “moon”s and “june”s into the right order; the Beatles were of course better than most at this and introduced plenty of musical innovation into the process. But by 1965 I think they were probably tiring of this, having already achieved all their objectives as “toppermost of the poppermost”. They were tired, but also looking for new challenges.

I think this was among the last of Lennon’s “love” songs. By this stage he was already beginning to mine a deeper, more introspective seam with songs like “I’m A Loser”, “Help!” and was to continue this with “In My Life”, Nowhere Man”, “I’m So Tired”, and so on. While there are relationship songs on Rubber Soul but they are darker and definitely not love songs: “Run For Your Life”, “Girl”, “Norwegian Wood”. So perhaps the contradictions and irony in It’s Only Love capture this transition.