Not a Second Time

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Not A Second Time is a song off The Beatles' 1963 album With The Beatles and it's 1964 American counterpart Meet The Beatles!. It was written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon/McCartney.

Contents

Writing

The Times' critic William Mann wrote a famous article about With The Beatles and specifically praising the song Not A Second Time for it's Aeolian cadences. This article, published on December 27, 1963, said,

"Harmonic interest is typical of their quicker songs, too, and one gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence at the end of Not A Second Time (the chord progression which ends Mahler's Song of the Earth)."

The Beatles were dismissive of the critique. In The Beatles Anthology, John Lennon is quoted as saying, "I still don't know what it means at the end, but it made us acceptable to the intellectuals. It worked and we were flattered. I wrote Not A Second Time and, really, it was just chords like any other chords. To me, I was writing a Smokey Robinson or something at the time." In 1980, John Lennon returned to the subject of Aeolian cadences, saying, "To this day I don't have any idea what they are. They sound like exotic birds." Lennon usually wrote the lyrics before the music, which might have been the case with this song.

Recording

Not A Second Time was recorded in nine takes during a 7:00 to 10:15 PM session at Abbey Road Studios on September 1, 1963.

Recording Sessions

The wiki has no info about this for now

Personnel

The Beatles

Guest Musicians

Production

Available Versions

Known Unavailable Versions

Available On

Cover Versions

Sources

Retrieved from "http://www.beatleswiki.org/wiki/Not_a_Second_Time"
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