In 1964, The Beatles had a big hit with “Can’t Buy Me Love”. The song, written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, appears on their third studio album, A Hard Day’s Night.
One of The Beatles’ most noteworthy songs, the uptempo tune says, “Say you don’t need no diamond rings / And I’ll be satisfied / Tell me that you want the kind of things / That money just can’t buy / I don’t care too much for money / Money can’t buy me love / Can’t buy me love, everybody tells me so / Can’t buy me love, no, no, no, no.”
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Interestingly, the same year The Beatles released “Can’t Buy Me Love”, Ella Fitzgerald also released a version of the song. Fitzgerald’s version appears on Fitzgerald’s Hello, Dolly! album, which also came out in 1964. Hello, Dolly! also includes her take on Barbra Streisand’s “People”. Fitzgerald’s version of “Can’t Buy Me Love” became a Top 40 hit in the United Kingdom.
The Story Behind “Can’t Buy Me Love” by The Beatles
When McCartney and Lennon wrote “Can’t Buy Me Love”, they were trying to start a new sound, although the end result is a bit different than their original intention.
“‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ is my attempt to write a bluesy mode,” McCartney says. “The idea behind it was that all these material possessions are all very well, but they won’t buy me what I really want. It was a very hooky song. Ella Fitzgerald later did a version of it, which I was very honored by.”
Unlike most of the other songs by The Beatles, “Can’t Buy Me Love” features both an intro and an outro, something The Beatles had never done before. Fitzgerald’s version is much different than The Beatles. She did the song in part because she was reportedly a fan of The Beatles.
“I thought that we really needed a tag for the song’s ending, and a tag for the beginning, a kind of intro,” McCartney explains. “So I took the first two lines of the chorus and changed the ending, and said, ‘Let’s just have these lines. And by altering the second phrase, we can get back into the verse pretty quickly.’ And they said, ‘That’s not a bad idea, we’ll do it that way.’”
The Beatles’ version of “Can’t Buy Me Love” appears twice in the A Hard Day’s Night film, a musical comedy starring The Beatles.
Photo by David Redfern/Redferns