Some excellent news the world doesn’t get day-after-day: There’s a model new John Lennon track from 1965 that no one knew about till now. It’s a house demo known as “Little Girl,” a beforehand unheard tune on the upcoming Rubber Soul Special Edition, which arrives on October 2. Nobody had any thought this track existed — it’s by no means been bootlegged and even rumored.
“Little Girl” is a actual thriller. How did it keep hidden till now? “Yeah, it was surprising,” producer Giles Martin tells Rolling Stone. “It was one of those things that came from the Lennon Estate — I think it was Sean. It was one of those things where they say, ‘Oh, and then there’s this.’”
It’s a fragile, attractive, bittersweet little tune, simply John and his acoustic guitar, sighing in Buddy Holly mode. He sings, “Little girl, I’ve come to say/That this has been a lovely day/I love you.” The track was found on a Lennon tape reel; Martin edited two sections collectively for the two:17 Rubber Soul model. It’s harking back to “I’m Only Sleeping,” particularly when he sings the “I love youuu” hook. It’s mind-blowing that this track exists.
It’s unusual “Little Girl” didn’t present up earlier, given how deep they’ve gone into the Beatles vaults earlier than. But that all the time occurs at any time when the Beatles do an archival challenge like this. On the Revolver box in 2022, there was a beautiful acoustic demo of “Yellow Submarine,” with John singing lonesome lyrics about his childhood — it shattered all the pieces we thought we knew about that track. On the White Album 2018 edition, there was the four-part concord model of “Good Night,” with all 4 Beatles singing collectively — a devastating lovely efficiency, however one which sat unheard within the vaults for 50 years.
Giles Martin wasn’t even sure of how unknown “Little Girl” was. “Like with all that stuff, I wasn’t sure whether people knew about it or not, or whether it was on YouTube,” he says. “Quite often I’ll find something and go, ‘This is amazing.’ Then someone goes, ‘Yeah, it’s on YouTube. Everybody knows about that.’ I’m always the last person to know.”
But no one had any trace of this one. (“If you didn’t know it existed, then no one knew,” Martin quips.) It’s a main shock. As Martin says, “I listen to that and I go, ‘Yeah, this is really interesting,’ apart from, ‘It’s another song that would have made the album.’ There’s an insatiable desire for something more. But I think it’s good to see all of the pencil drawings before you see the picture.”
Nobody appears to know when the track comes from. You can inform it isn’t any sooner than summer season 1965, as a result of John tweaks a hook from Paul’s “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” which was recorded in June and launched in August on Help! (He turns “had it been another day” to “if you’d asked me yesterday.”)
It’s particularly surprising for the reason that Beatles had been feverishly scrounging up new songs for Rubber Soul. That’s the entire backstage drama behind the classes — the Beatles went into Abbey Road in October 1965 with a deadline to crash out an album in 4 weeks, in time for Christmas. Except that they had hardly any completed songs. So they had been determined for materials. They wrote seven of the songs within the ultimate week.
But that’s how Rubber Soul turned out so free and experimental — they had been able to strive any loopy studio thought. “It’s not as though, as you know, there was anything they held back, as far as demos go, or anything like that,” Giles Martin says. They even tried jamming within the blues instrumental “12-Bar Original,” which they properly axed. (A 3-minute edit was on Anthology 2 in 1996, which was greater than anybody wanted.)
“Some people will say, why didn’t you put the ’12-Bar Original’ on it?” Martin says of the brand new version. “But well, it’s not very good in the first place, and it’s on the Anthology. And it’s not really linked to the album they were making at the same time. But ‘Little Girl’ hasn’t been heard, so it makes sense.”
The Beatles had been foraging excessive and low for scraps, proper right down to the wire. “Michelle” is a throwaway that Paul wrote in his teenagers, to impress Liverpool art-school ladies by pretending to be French. But he dusted it off for Rubber Soul. The deadline stress obtained so frantic, their engineer Norman Smith pitched them a tune. Hell, the lads obtained determined sufficient to draft Ringo into songwriting responsibility — “What Goes On” grew to become his first credit score ever. Asked in 1966 what he contributed, Ringo stated, “About five words.”
But that makes it a good larger thriller — how did “Little Girl” slip by way of the cracks? It may need come too late to make the reduce for Rubber Soul, however that’s fairly late, contemplating that John and Paul had been writing proper as much as the ultimate hours. The evening earlier than the album was due, they nonetheless wanted two extra songs, so John confirmed up with “Girl” and Paul with “You Won’t See Me”—two of their greatest. (Always competing, these two.) They additionally refurbished “Wait,” a leftover from Help!, which gave them a full fourteen songs.
So how did John let a track like “Little Girl” go? In the Rubber Soul liner notes, legendary historian Kevin Howlett notes that there’s solely a tiny clue of the track’s existence till now. John jotted down a model of those strains on a postcard, discovered within the ebook The John Lennon Letters, edited by Hunter Davies. It’s a postcard that George Harrison obtained from a Japanese fan, dated 1965 or 1966; on the again, John wrote the strains, “Little girl I’ve come to stay/And this time I just have to say/I love you.”
These strains are a part of a longer verse within the mode of “Ticket To Ride” or “I’m a Loser,” about a girl who leaves him. The strains are so clumsy, it’s no shock he by no means used them. (“When a girl begins to become a problem/Pretty soon the girl must go/When they’re gone you find at last you love them/Pretty soon you want to know.”) But it appears he salvaged simply a fragment of the fragment.
“Little Girl” continues to be a work in progress with unfinished lyrics — John largely simply sings “I love you” and “la la la,” simply to pin down the tune. John and Paul all the time believed in placeholder lyrics, to assist bear in mind their melodies. In the early days, they didn’t have any recording units, and neither may learn music, in order that they wanted verbal cues they’d recall the following day. Paul explains within the 2021 Hulu documentary 3, 2, 1, with Rick Rubin. “Coming from Liverpool, there’s a lot of sort of Irish Celtic influence, and the Celts never wrote anything down. It’s the bardic tradition. So that’s our excuse. Me and John used to say, ‘It was the bardic tradition!’”
“Little girl” is a phrase that John sang briefly in “Twist and Shout” and “Thank You Girl,” then extra prominently in “I Feel Fine,” the place it’s the hook within the center eight, and “Run For Your Life.” But there’s no connection to any of these songs. The first track Paul ever wrote was “I Lost My Little Girl,” proper after his mom’s dying. (“Fairly obvious,” he admitted later.) For John and Paul, teenage boys who misplaced their moms, it was a secret trauma they shared. In the Get Back classes, John and Paul performed “I Lost My Little Girl” collectively, though no one else (not even the opposite Beatles) may have recognized what it meant to them.
A more in-depth connection is likely to be John’s favourite Brian Wilson track: “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” a single that the Beach Boys launched in late 1965, days earlier than Rubber Soul got here out. “It’s GOT to be a hit,” John raved in Melody Maker on the time. “It’s the greatest record I’ve heard for weeks. It’s fantastic. I hope it will be a hit. It’s all Brian Wilson.”
It additionally has a trace of “It’s Only Love,” a track that made the reduce for Help! and ended up on the U.S. model of Rubber Soul. It’s a tune the place John is singing cliches so saccharine, he spends the entire track making an attempt (and failing) to not snicker. But he can’t ship the road “Just the sight of you makes night-time bright” with a straight face, and that goes double for the following line, which is “Very bright.” That’s the type of track he was decided to stop writing on Rubber Soul — it’s why he wished to intention greater in “Norwegian Wood” and “In My Life.” He’s reaching there with the melancholy tune of “Little Girl.”
If “Little Girl” was too late for Rubber Soul, which may clarify the melodic hyperlink to “I’m Only Sleeping,” on Revolver. (When John sings “I love you,” it’s uncannily near how he sings the phrase “sleeping.”) He may need simply determined to transform this scrap into a stronger track for the following album. That’s how briskly the Fabs labored. They had been already used to cramming out materials on the final minute, once they obtained to deadline time. A 12 months earlier than Rubber Soul, on Beatles for Sale, they obtained caught quick the evening earlier than the album was due, in order that they stayed up all evening bashing out quickie oldies covers. (For some other band, we’d name this “filler.” But their filler beat nearly anybody else’s keepers.)
The Beatles had no thought Rubber Soul was a masterpiece whereas they had been making it. They had been simply racing to cobble an album collectively. But like all people else, they had been shocked once they heard the outcomes. The lads spent the remainder of their profession assuming that any last-minute whim they dreamed up can be touched by that very same Rubber Soul stroke of genius. And as a result of they had been the Beatles, they had been maddeningly proper.
It might sound insane that a John Lennon track like “Little Girl” may stay a secret for thus many a long time, unheard and unsuspected. But that’s the essence of how the Beatles labored within the frantic inventive frenzy of their youth. They cranked out music so quick, dropping masterpieces like crumbs, all the time driving arduous to the following track. That’s why the world continues to be catching up with fleeting moments they left behind a long time in the past. And that’s why the Beatles’ story retains on evolving and mutating by way of the years — each time you suppose you’ve heard all of it, there’s all the time extra. “Little Girl” took all these years to come back to gentle, but it’s definitely worth the wait. Still, you don’t remorse a single day.
