A Hard Day's Night

By early 1964 the band had three UK number ones, an American number one, and a film deal with United Artists. A Hard Day's Night was the soundtrack to their first feature, written and recorded in pieces between February and June 1964 across studio time stolen from a punishing tour schedule. It was their first LP entirely composed by Lennon and McCartney — no covers — and the first to fully showcase Harrison's new Rickenbacker 360-12 string guitar, which would shortly inspire The Byrds' folk-rock.

By now installed on the four-track Studer J37, the band could overdub vocals and percussion separately from backing tracks. The opening title-track chord — a 12-string-and-piano Fadd9 (still the subject of musicology theses) — was a deliberate attention-grab Martin commissioned to get the film moving. Side one was the soundtrack to the Richard Lester film, Side two contemporaneous studio cuts. The most significant new sound: Harrison's chiming Rickenbacker, which would soon ring through American AM radio.

And I Love Her was the first of Paul's nylon-string ballads, a template he would refine through Yesterday and Here There and Everywhere. Can't Buy Me Love became the first single ever to top the UK and US charts simultaneously, with two million advance US orders. If I Fell paired Lennon and McCartney in the most exposed unison harmony of their career to date — a duet where any imperfection would have been audible.

UK release on 10 July 1964, simultaneous with film and single. Twelve weeks at UK number one. The film grossed $11 million on a $560,000 budget — Roger Ebert later called it 'one of the great life-affirming landmarks of the movies.' For the band, it was confirmation that they could construct an LP entirely from their own material.

A Hard Day's Night is the all-original turning point and the album where Lennon's writing dominates (he wrote eleven of its thirteen). The Rickenbacker jangle, the major-7th harmonic vocabulary, the cinematic ambition — every one of these elements would be sampled, copied or quoted by indie bands for the next sixty years.