The 1964 soundtrack album A Hard Day’s Night boasted some of the last songwriting credits between John Lennon and Paul McCartney exclusively. The album featured one of George Harrison’s rare lead vocal tracks “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You”. However, the song went to Harrison because neither Paul McCartney nor John Lennon wanted to sing the song.
Objectively, it’s not a bad song at all. It’s a quintessential 1960s Beatles song, and it certainly had its place in the film and the soundtrack. So, why didn’t the songwriters and frontmen of the band like the song?
McCartney actually explained some of the background of the song for Barry Miles’ biography of the musician in 1997 titled Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now.
Why Didn’t Paul McCartney Like The Song “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You”?
“It was a bit of a formula song,” McCartney explained in the biography. “We knew that in E if you went to an A flat minor, you could always make a song with those chords; that change pretty much always excited you. This [‘I’m Happy Just To Dance With You’] is one of these. Certainly ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’ was.”
“Do You Want To Know A Secret” was a song from The Beatles’ 1963 album Please Please Me.
“This one anyway was a straight co-written song for George [Harrison],” McCartney continued. “We wouldn’t have actually wanted to sing it because it was a bit… The ones that pandered to the fans in truth were our least favorite songs, but they were good. They were good for the time. The nice thing about it was to actually pull a song off on a slim little premise like that. A simple little idea.”
McCartney closed out the discussion of “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You” with a little bit of shade.
“It was songwriting practice,” he said.
The song is a great little tune, but we can understand why McCartney wasn’t all that partial to it. George Harrison was nervous to write his own material, and he needed a song to sing lead. In fact, his performance of the song was the very first time he was depicted in a film singing lead.
But when it comes down to it, a song written for someone else is rarely a treat for the songwriter. We get where McCartney is coming from.
