The Beatles needed 'love' in their songs -- and other things, too, book shows

May 8, 5:09 PMBeatles ExaminerSteve Marinucci

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  A sign advertising the Beatles "Love" show in Las Vegas.
  (Photo: Steve Marinucci.)

Today, we pulled an older but still interesting Beatle reference book off the shelf called "Things We Said Today: The Complete Lyrics and a Concordance to the Beatles' Songs, 1962-1970" by Colin Campbell and Allan Murphy.

The book is more than a simple tome of song lyrics. It has computer listings with sentence by sentence and word by word information of every word contained in the canon of Beatles lyrics on the original albums, where it was used and how often. The book took four years to assemble.

One of the best parts of the book are the listings at the end that list the mostly frequently used words both numerically and alphabetically.

So what are the most frequent words in Beatle lyrics?

As it turns out, all they need was "the" (used 1,127 times). It's followed by "me" (825), "to" (7263), you (731) and "a" (643). Next comes "and" (626), then "love" (485), "be" (426), "it" (422) and "in" (410).

I won't reprint the whole list (sorry!), but here are a few highlights: "yeah" (360), "oh" (348), "I" (290), "don't" (296), "girl" (154), "no" (130), "man" (109), "yes" (105), "baby" (103) and "hey" (101). 

There are over two pages of words used only once. They include "nurse", "returning," "spinal", "snow-peaked," "sexy," "trampoline" and "Raleigh." (A good trivia question would be to put a long list of those down and see how many a person could get right.)

Of significant words, note how high "love" is on the list. The Beatles, especially in touting "Real Love" and the "Love" Cirque du Soleil show, have always made reference to how often the Beatles referred to "love" in their lyrics. Turns out it was true.

What does all this say? Not much, really. Anyone who has studied the Beatles' lyrics, especially the earlier Lennon and McCartney songs, know they were very much first-person ("She was just seventeen if you know what I mean," for example.)But I could have sworn "girl" would have been used more often. "Yeah," as well.

But really, it's how the words are used. And statistics don't tell that part of the story.  Beep beep, mmmm, beep beep, yeah.

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