BEATLES RUNDOWN: "Eight Days a Week" (1964)
Here's an alternate version from ANTHOLOGY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INzYN9lhCSs
"Eight days a week, I love you/Eight days a week is not enough to show I care"
From BEATLES FOR SALE (and released as a single in the US), this was a catchy song with a great title to draw you in. Like "A Hard Day's Night" and "Tomorrow Never Knows," "Eight Days a Week" was attributed to Ringo's knack for malapropisms*. This was written by John and Paul, with maybe Paul initiating it; John sings lead vocals with Paul providing harmonies in almost a duet. The song has an unusual beginning where it fades in, growing louder until the vocals. I imagine more than a few fans cranked it up on the radio when it first started to play, thinking 'well, that's not near loud enough,' only to have to turn it down again. Bit of a prank there.
"Love you every day, girl/Always on my mind/One thing I can say, girl/Love you all the time"
As a snappy little song, I like it well enough but it's only a pretty straightforward declaration of love with no twist or shading. The band does their usual fine job and it has that youthful energy and zest they would soon start to lose as they got more experimental. The Beatles never played "Eight Days a Week" live. Maybe I'm reading into it because I know from history what was to happen with them, but I get the feeling they were already feeling songs like this were something they were ready to outgrow.
Of course, there were plenty of songwriters pounding their heads on the desk and struggling in vain to come up with ONE song that would be as much of a hit, and there were many bands trying to make it who would have been happy hitting the level the Beatles were ready to leave behind. So it's all relative. Honestly, Paul and John (and soon George) could have batted out hits like this effortlessly for years to come and no one would have complained. But they wanted to grow and move on.
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*I've also seen a quote from Paul that he actually heard the line from his chaffeur. Decades go by, memories get edited even if unconsciously, and what we genuinely remember varies. Listen to friends discuss something that happened ten or more years earlier and notice if their recollections match yours exactly. Probably not. That's why I tend not to get into debates over details like this. I suppose someone somewhere has decided that Ringo was driving Paul that day, reconciling the two versions.