Girl (Beatles song)

"Girl"
Italian single cover, backed by "Nowhere Man"
Song by The Beatles from the album Rubber Soul
Released	3 December 1965
Recorded	11 November 1965, EMI Studios, London
Genre	Folk
Length	2:33
Label	Parlophone
Writer(s)	Lennon–McCartney
Producer(s)	George Martin

"Girl" is a song written by John Lennon (credited to Lennon–McCartney) and performed by the Beatles on their 1965 album Rubber Soul. "Girl" was the last complete song recorded for that album.

"Girl" is one of the most melancholic and complex of the Beatles' earlier love songs. The song's instrumentalization has specific similarities to Greek music; similar to "And I Love Her" and "Michelle". Lennon and George Harrison played acoustic guitars on the basic track and in addition, Harrison overdubbed a bouzouki, an instrument once given to producer George Martin.

McCartney claimed that he contributed the lines "Was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure" and "That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure." However, in a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, John Lennon explained that he wrote these lines as a comment on Christianity which he was "opposed to at the time". Lennon said: "I was just talking about Christianity, in that - a thing like you have to be tortured to attain heaven. [...] - be tortured and then it'll be alright, which seems to be a bit true but not in their concept of it. But I didn't believe in that, that you have to be tortured to attain anything, it just so happens that you were." McCartney also stated that the song's backing vocals were influenced by a recent work by the Beach Boys:

The Beach Boys had a song out where they'd done 'la la la' and we loved the innocence of that and wanted to copy it, but not use the same phrase".

Lennon said that the fantasy girl in the song's lyric was an archetype he had been searching for his entire life ("There is no such thing as the girl — she was a dream") and finally found in Yoko Ono. In an interview for Rolling Stone magazine on 5 December 1980, Lennon said his 1980 song "Woman":

Reminds me of a Beatles track, but I wasn't trying to make it sound like that. I did it as I did 'Girl' many years ago. So this is the grown-up version of 'Girl.'"