I've decided to kind of do a "reboot" on our Breakfast with Behka and The Beatles segments in the morning show. I figured it might be interesting to play the songs and albums in as close to chronological order as possible.

This week, we started with the first track off of their second album, With The Beatles.

Monday started with track one, "It Won't Be Long".

The chorus is a play on the words "be long" and "belong". The song features early Beatles' trademarks such as call-and-response yeah-yeahs and scaling guitar riffs. Typical also of this phase of Beatles' song writing is the melodramatic ending (similar to "She Loves You", which had just been recorded and was about to be released) where the music stops, allowing Lennon a brief solo vocal improvisation before the song finishes. There is an unusual middle eight—for what is, essentially, a rock and roll song—that uses chromatically descending chords.

Tuesday I played "All I've Got To Do".

It was one of three songs Lennon was the principal writer for on With the Beatles, with "It Won't Be Long"[11] and "Not a Second Time". John Lennon said that it was written specifically for the American market; the idea of calling a girl on the telephone was unthinkable to a British youth in the early 1960s. For instance, Lennon said in an interview regarding "No Reply": "I had the image of walking down the street and seeing her silhouetted in the window and not answering the 'phone, although I have never called a girl on the 'phone in my life! Because 'phones weren't part of the English child's life."

Wednesday I played "All My Loving".

"All My Loving" is a song by English rock group the Beatles, written by Paul McCartney. Though it was not released as a single in the United Kingdom or the United States, it drew considerable radio airplay, prompting EMI to issue it as the title track of an EP.The song was released as a single in Canada, where it became a number one hit. The Canadian single was imported into the US in enough quantities to peak at number 45 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1964. It was the first song most Americans ever heard the group sing as it was the opening song on their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show on 9 February 1964.

On Thursday, I played "Don't Bother Me".

Harrison wrote the song while ill in bed at a hotel room in Bournemouth, England, where the Beatles were playing some shows during the summer of 1963. He considered it an exercise in whether he could write a song, later saying, "at least it showed me that all I needed to do was keep on writing, and then maybe eventually I would write something good." "Don't Bother Me" is considered Harrison's first song by most (including the composer himself).

On Friday, I played "Little Child".

Paul McCartney McCartney describes "Little Child" as being a "work song", or an "album filler". He admits to taking the line "I'm so sad and lonely" from the song "Whistle My Love" by British balladeer and actor Elton Hayes. The phrase "sad and lonely" also appears in the song "Act Naturally", which the Beatles covered (with Starr singing) for the album Help!.

Join me next week and we'll pick up with the next track on the album.

Beatlely yours,
Behka

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