"I Want to Hold Your Hand" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Recorded on 17 October 1963 and released on 29 November 1963 in the United Kingdom, it was the first Beatles record to be made using four-track recording equipment.
With advance orders exceeding one million copies in the UK, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" would have gone straight to the top of the British record charts on its day of release had it not been blocked by the group's first million-seller "She Loves You", their previous UK single, which was having a resurgence of popularity following intense media coverage of the group. Taking two weeks to dislodge its predecessor, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" stayed at number one for five weeks and remained in the UK top 50 for 21 weeks in total, and was the Christmas number one of 1963.
It was also the group's first American number-one hit, entering the Billboard Hot 100 chart on 18 January 1964 at number 45 and starting the British Invasion of the American music industry. By 1 February, it topped the Hot 100 and stayed there for seven weeks before being replaced by "She Loves You". It remained on the Billboard chart for 15 weeks. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" became the Beatles' best-selling single worldwide, selling more than 12 million copies. In 2018, Billboard magazine named it the 48th biggest hit of all time on the Billboard Hot 100. In the UK, it was the second-highest-selling single of the 1960s, behind "She Loves You".
Background and composition Capitol Records' rejection of the group's recordings in the US was now Brian Epstein's primary concern, and he encouraged Lennon and McCartney to write a song to appeal specifically to the American market. George Martin, however, had no such explicit recollections, believing that Capitol was left with no alternative but to release "I Want to Hold Your Hand" due to increasing demand for the group's product.
McCartney had recently moved into 57 Wimpole Street, London, where he was lodging as a guest of Dr Richard and Margaret Asher, and whose daughter, actress Jane Asher, had become McCartney's girlfriend earlier in the year. This location briefly became Lennon and McCartney's new writing base, taking over from McCartney's Forthlin Road home in Liverpool. Margaret Asher taught the oboe in the "small, rather stuffy music room" in the basement where Lennon and McCartney sat at the piano and composed "I Want to Hold Your Hand". In September 1980, Lennon told Playboy magazine:
In 1994, McCartney agreed with Lennon's description of the circumstances surrounding the composition of "I Want to Hold Your Hand", saying: "'Eyeball to eyeball' is a very good description of it. That's exactly how it was. 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' was very co-written." According to Ian MacDonald, in keeping with how Lennon and McCartney collaborated at that time, lyrically bland, random phrases were most likely called out by the pair; if the phrases fitted the overall sound, they would stay. The song's title was probably a variation of "I Wanna Be Your Man", which the Beatles had recently recorded at EMI Studios.
Musical structure
Reminiscent of Tin Pan Alley and Brill Building techniques and an example of modified 32-bar form, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" is written on a two-bridge model, with only an intervening verse to connect them. The song has no real "lead" singer, as Lennon and McCartney sing alternately in unison and in harmony.
The song is in the key of G major and lyrically opens two beats early with "Oh yeah, I'll tell you something" with a D-B, B-D melody note drop and rise over an I (G) chord. Controversy exists over the landmark chord that Lennon stated McCartney hit on the piano while they were composing the song. Wolf Marshall considers it to be the minor vi (Em) chord (the third chord in the I–V7–vi (G–D7–Em) progression).Wolf Marshall. Guitar One. 1966 Vol 6, p16 Walter Everett is of the same opinion. Dominic Pedler claims, however, that more surprising is the melody note drop from B to F against a III7 (B7) chord on "understand".
Recording The Beatles recorded "I Want to Hold Your Hand" at EMI Studios in Studio 2 on 17 October 1963. This song, along with the single's B-side, "This Boy", was the first Beatles song to be recorded with four-track technology. The two songs were recorded on the same day, each needing seventeen takes. Mono and stereo mixing was done by George Martin on 21 October 1963; further stereo mixes were done on 8 June 1965, for compilations released by EMI affiliates in Australia and the Netherlands, and on 7 November 1966.
"I Want to Hold Your Hand" was one of two Beatles songs (along with "She Loves You" as "Sie liebt dich") to be later recorded in German, entitled "Komm, gib mir deine Hand" (literally "Come, give me your hand"). Both songs were translated by Luxembourger musician Camillo Felgen, under the pseudonym of "Jean Nicolas". Odeon, the German arm of EMI (the parent company of the Beatles' record label, Parlophone) was convinced that the Beatles' records would not sell in Germany unless they were sung in German. The Beatles detested the idea, and when they were due to record the German version on 27 January 1964 at EMI's Pathe Marconi Studios in Paris (where the Beatles were performing 18 days of concerts at the Olympia Theatre), they chose to boycott the session. Their record producer, George Martin, having waited some hours for them to show up, was outraged and insisted that they give it a try. Two days later, the Beatles recorded "Komm, gib mir deine Hand", one of the few times in their career that they recorded outside London. However, Martin later conceded: "They were right, actually, it wasn't necessary for them to record in German, but they weren't graceless, they did a good job".
"Komm, gib mir deine Hand" was released as a German single in March 1964. In July that year, the song appeared on the Capitol Records release Something New. It was also included on the 1988 compilation Past Masters.
Promotion and release
In the United Kingdom, "She Loves You" (released in August) shot back to the number-one position in November following blanket media coverage of the Beatles (described as Beatlemania). Mark Lewisohn later wrote: "'She Loves You' had already sold an industry-boggling three-quarters of a million before these fresh converts were pushing it into seven figures. And at this very moment, just four weeks before Christmas, with everyone connected to the music and relevant retail industries already lying prone in paroxysms of unimaginable delight, EMI pulled the trigger and released 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'. And then it was bloody pandemonium."
On 29 November 1963, Parlophone Records released "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in the UK, with "This Boy" as the single's B-side. Demand had been building for quite a while, as evidenced by the one million advance orders for the single. When it was finally released, the response was phenomenal. A week after it entered the British charts, on 14 December 1963, it knocked "She Loves You" off the top spot, the first instance of an act taking over from itself at number one in British history, and it clung to the top spot for five weeks, becoming the Christmas number one of 1963. It stayed in the charts for another 15 weeks and made a one-week return to the charts on 16 May 1964. Beatlemania was peaking at that time; during the same period, the Beatles set a record by occupying the top two positions on both the album and single charts in the UK.
EMI and Brian Epstein finally convinced American label Capitol Records, a subsidiary of EMI, that the Beatles could make an impact in the US, leading to the release of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" with "I Saw Her Standing There" on the B-side as a single on 26 December 1963. Capitol had previously resisted issuing Beatle recordings in the US. This resulted in the relatively modest Vee-Jay and Swan labels releasing the group's earlier Parlophone counterparts in the US. Seizing the opportunity, Epstein demanded US$40,000 from Capitol to promote the single (the most the Beatles had ever previously spent on an advertising campaign was US$5,000). The single had actually been intended for release in mid-January 1964, coinciding with the planned appearance of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. However, a fourteen-year-old fan of the Beatles, Marsha Albert, wanted to hear the Beatles on the radio earlier. Later she said:
James was the DJ for WWDC, a radio station in Washington, DC. Eventually, he decided to pursue Albert's suggestion. He asked the station's promotion director to get British Overseas Airways Corporation to ship in a copy of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" from Britain. Albert related what happened next: "Carroll James called me up the day he got the record and said, 'If you can get down here by 5 o'clock, we'll let you introduce it.'" Albert managed to get to the station in time and introduced the record with: "Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time on the air in the United States, here are the Beatles singing 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'."
The song proved to be a huge hit, a surprise for the station since they catered mainly to a more staid audience, which would typically be expecting songs from singers such as Andy Williams or Bobby Vinton instead of rock and roll. James took to playing the song repeatedly on the station, often turning it down in the middle to make the declaration, "This is a Carroll James exclusive", to avoid theft of the song by other stations.
Capitol threatened to seek a court order banning airplay of "I Want to Hold Your Hand", which was already being spread by James to a couple of DJs in Chicago and St. Louis. James and WWDC ignored the threat, and Capitol concluded that they could take advantage of the publicity, releasing the single two weeks ahead of schedule on 26 December.
The demand was insatiable; in the first three days alone, a quarter of a million copies had already been sold (10,000 copies in New York City every hour). The demand so overloaded Capitol that it contracted part of the job of pressing copies off to Columbia Records and RCA. By 18 January, the song had started its 15-week chart run. On 1 February, the Beatles finally achieved their first number one on Billboard (replacing "There! I've Said It Again" by Bobby Vinton, emulating the success of another British group, the Tornados with "Telstar", which topped the Billboard chart for three weeks in December 1962. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" finally relinquished the number-one spot after seven weeks, succeeded by the song they had knocked off the top in Britain: "She Loves You". "I Want to Hold Your Hand" sold around five million copies in the US alone.Tepper, Ron. "Alan Livingston, Capitol's Former President When The Beatles Came Calling, Recalls The 'British Invasion'" Billboard 4 May 1974: M-18 The replacement of themselves at the top of the US charts was the first time since Elvis Presley in 1956, with "Love Me Tender" beating out "Don't Be Cruel", that an act had dropped off the top of the American charts only to be replaced by another of their releases. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" also finished as the number one song for 1964, according to Billboard." Top Records of 1964", Billboard, 2 January 1965. p. 6. Retrieved 14 March 2022. In 2013, Billboard listed it as the 44th most successful song of all-time on the Hot 100.
With that, the "British Invasion" of America had been launched. Throughout 1964, British pop and rock artists enjoyed unprecedented success on the American charts.
The American single's front and back sleeves featured a photograph of the Beatles with Paul McCartney holding a cigarette. In 1984, Capitol Records airbrushed out the cigarette for the re-release of the single.