The Beatles - Please Mr. Postman

I’ve been standing here, waiting, Mr. Postman: The Beatles are little less than the musical equivalent of elementary school for me. As virtually everybody in my family was a Beatles fan at some moment, I first got the exposure necessary to get me interested at the age of 8 I believe. I subsequently started to record their albums on cassettes for me to listen to while I spent the time in my room, playing games of patience, instead of meeting friends and playing with them, which upon reflection seems a little autistic for an 8-year old – certainly music impacted me a lot from a very young age. I remember that in our needlework classes at elementary school we were allowed to bring cassettes to listen to while we worked, and I monopolized this privilege, bringing Beatles cassettes and constantly pointing out and leading my classmates’ attention to what I thought were the most noteworthy parts, up to the point where the teacher banned me from bringing any more cassettes as I was not progressing on my needlework at all (to this day, needlework is not one of my greater talents). I first listened to the blue and red best-of-albums and then moved on to other ones we had at home: Meet the Beatles which we had a vinyl LP of, Beatles for Sale, With the Beatles, three discs which I got as birthday gifts – Please Please Me, the black Past Masters record and the Free as a Bird single – later also Help, (to a lesser degree) A Hard Day’s Night, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road and finally the White Album. So much great music! As a child, my first favourite was “Do you want to know a secret” and I pretty much listened to nothing but the Beatles for the next three years. Incidentally, the Beatles also originally got me interested in learning English in order to understand what I was hearing, so I started asking my father lots of questions about lines I had heard in their songs and ended up speaking some kind of English before I ever attended a single English class (in my high school English classes started only at age 13, two years after Latin). More than enough has been said and written about the Beatles and I hardly aim to add to this wealth of narratives and interpretations with anything more than a few minor observations. I agree that the Beatles worked as a band with four members none of whom was expendable for the Beatles being the Beatles, despite the fact that Ringo’s drumming lacks greatness and Paul McCartney is a bit of an embarrassment (although he was always my favourite member of “The Wings” to borrow the joke from Weird Al Yankovic). My favourite Beatle, the one I can identify with most is certainly Lennon as the craziest of the Beatles, full of ideals that he didn’t live up to, as well as hypocrisy, but at the same time source of some of the most groundbreaking songwriting ideas and in, my opinion, the best voice among the Beatles. It has been especially interesting to come back to Beatles at several points of my life, as my outlook and taste in music had changed, first towards punk rock and heavy metal as a teenager, and later towards classical music at the beginning of my twenties. Despite these changes in taste, I never stopped liking the Beatles, but I did start paying attention to some very different songs than the ones I had liked as a child. Now able to understand English, I started feeling a little bit underwhelmed by the lyrics, noticed that musically some things were rather simple and at times got annoyed by the Beatles’ British snottiness, acutely realizing that when they started out they were little more than a bunch of ignorant punks; but I never got to the point that I’d agree with pianist Glenn Gould’s wonderfully flippant dismissal of the Beatles for “bad voice-leading” (more on that later though). Please Mr. Postman is one of the Beatles songs I like best nowadays. Of course it is not by the Beatles, but was performed by the Marvelettes originally, complete with dance and all (if you haven’t seen it, you should watch it NOW). However, it feels like a different song in the version by the Beatles. I have just checked again: the voices singing harmony seem pretty much unchanged from the original. What has changed is to a certain degree the melody of the lead vocals during the verses, but most significantly the overall mood of the song. The Beatles have replaced the light-hearted and slightly swingy feel, the thinner texture and the falsetto of the background vocals in the original with something else entirely: Rather crooning lead vocals, a more dense and pounding texture with loud guitars and a slightly opened hi-hat on the drums, backing vocals in a lower register, making it a more massive song, apt to express the despair of the protagonist waiting for mail from his sweetheart. Needless to say, Lennon’s idiosyncratic singing style is just perfect in this song, too. All in all, I think this is a perfect song in its version by the Beatles, despite consisting of only four chords repeated over and over, a perfect balance in the structure (Intro – verse – verse – chorus – verse – chorus – outro) that never feels as if something is being repeated too often (balance in song structures is incidentally one of the Beatles’ greatest songwriting skills) and I never get tired of hearing it. The multi-part singing, of course one of the Beatles’ trademark characteristics are one of the great tools of expressivity in this song, maybe the crucial one. For once, Mr. Gould might have been satisfied: The voice-leading in this song is not bad at all, even by the Baroque standards he may have had in mind (maybe the original composer had some formal music training?). Not bad – as in not running in thirds the entire time, for example; instead we mostly have oblique motion between the parts of George and Paul, while John is mostly singing into the breaks between their lines (in the chorus at least where the multi-voice texture is most prominent) – possibly a remnant from older call and response structures in genres like gospel which are, of course, at the root of rock and roll, though this kind of structure is no stranger to the voice-leading of Baroque music either where it is favoured as it makes for a less dense texture and takes away difficulty where a multi-part piece is played on a single key instrument (cf. for example the fugues BWV 532 and 564 by Bach and how the first counterpoint plays into the breaks of the subject). Still the Beatles’ voice-leading does stand comparison to Bach’s of course, but then neither does the voice-leading of virtually anyone who lived after Bach. Finally, it is funny to think that I as someone who belongs to the last generation which remembers a world without internet am possibly one of the last generation of people to sing this who fully understand what the song is talking about. Maybe future songwriters will write songs imploring their smart phones or tablets for that long-awaited message from their sweethearts but mailmen bringing love letters certainly seem an endangered species.