Understanding Michelle

Posted On June 15, 2020

Michelle is one of McCartney’s earliest compositions. It was probably written around 1959 on his Zenith acoustic guitar. The Zenith was McCartney’s first guitar. He had been given a trumpet for his fourteenth birthday, but decided to trade it for this instrument. The Zenith made it to Hamburg on the Beatles’ first tour, having been electrified by means of a small bridge pickup.

Apart from being a very early song, Michelle is notable for perhaps two main reasons. It being quite a sophisticated composition, including a number of diminished chords and switches between F major and F minor. Secondly, it is the first original Beatles song that has an overtly national characteristic – Michelle is a love song with an overt French theme.

The French Influence

McCartney used to play Michelle at parties as a ruse to appear sophisticated. As he recalls:

There used to be a guy called Austin Mitchell who was one of John’s tutors at art school and he used to throw some pretty good all-night parities. You could maybe pull girls there, which was the main aim of every second; you could get drinks, which was another aim.

Sacha Distel and Juliette Greco

McCartney elaborated:

I member sitting around there, and my recollection is of a black turtleneck sweater and sitting very enigmatically in the corner playing this rather French tune. I used to pretend I could speak French, because everyone wanted to be like Sacha Distel or Juliette Greco.

Sacha Distel (1933-2004) was a French singer, guitarist and actor. He rose to fame in 1958 with the song Brigitte; a homage to Brigitte Bardot.

Juliette Greco (1927-) is a French singer and actress. McCartney sang her praises, “Have you ever seen her? Dark hair, real chanteuse, really happening.” John Lennon also commented, “I’d always had a fantasy about a woman who would be a beautiful, intelligent, dark-haired, high-cheek-boned, free-spirited artist à la Juliette Gréco”.

For those unacquainted with Greco, here she is singing a particularly fine and expressive ballad, Romance:

Other aspects of French popular music culture that had migrated to Britain in the 1950s included:

• Edith Piaf (1915-1963). Popular French singer, with hits such as La Vie en Rose.
• Maurice Chavalier (1888-1972). French actor and cabaret singer.
• The film Gigi (1958), starring Chavalier and set in La Belle Epoque Paris.
• The film Moulin Rouge (1952), set in late-19th century Paris.
• Charles Aznavour (1924-2018). French singer, dubbed “the French Frank Sinatra”.

How French Is Michelle?

The most obvious tribute to France is in the song’s lyrics. However, the words were only decided on when Lennon suggested that McCartney should resurrect the song for the recording sessions that became Rubber Soul.

McCartney hadn’t pursued French as an option at school (but he did pass his Spanish O-Level a year early), so he enlisted the help of the wife of his old schoolfriend, Ivan Vaughan. Jan Vaughan recalled

He asked me if I could think of a French girl’s name, with two syllables, and then a description of the girl which would rhyme. He played me the rhythm on his guitar and that’s when I came up with ‘Michelle, ma belle,’ which wasn’t actually that hard to think of! I think it was some days later that he phones me up and asked if I could translate the phrase ‘these are words that go together well’ and I told him that it should be ‘sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble.’”

Apart from this, there is nothing on a purely musical level that lends a French character to the song. Michelle evokes, in a very broad sense, the languid mood of Parisian cafe culture, with its long melodic phrases and moderate tempo. The use clever chord progressions is perhaps a generic nod to the sophistication of post-war bourgeois French society.

Harmonic Design

Michelle starts with four-bar acoustic guitar riff that begins in F minor and runs through F major7 and Fm6 before landing on Bb/F and then C major – the dominant chord of the home key.

The song uses common chord shapes, but makes use of a capo on the fifth fret. This reinforces the idea that Michelle was originally conceived as a guitar instrumental solo. If the song is played without a capo in the key of C major, it pushes the vocal in the “love you, I love you” middle eight up to the note of C5.

For this reason, when McCartney performed the song on the 1973 James Paul McCartney TV Special, he de-tuned his guitar a minor third and performs the song in the key of A major with guitar shapes in C major without a capo. In fact, the whole acoustic section makes uses the de-tuned guitar, with Blackbird in the key of E, as opposed to G major:

F major or F minor?

Much of the interest in Michelle rests on the ambiguity of the song’s tonal centre. The song’s introduction begins in F minor. The “I love you, I love you” bridge section is in F minor, but the verse begins on the chord of F major. Michelle is usually notated in F major, but some of the chords of the verse, such as Eb6 on the words “these are words” obviously belong to F minor. In addition, the prevalence of both Db and Ab in the vocal melody strongly suggest F minor.

In my opinion, Michelle is in the key of F minor, but the opening chord of F major represents a reverse take on the idea of tierce de picardie.

The “Gretty Chord”

The “Gretty chord” is a chord shape named after the shop assistant and jazz guitarist at Hessy’s music store in Liverpool, where the young Beatles purchased their first instruments. Jim Gretty showed Harrison and McCartney the chord shape in question. Being “unschooled” musicians, they did not know that the chord in question was a dominant seventh with a sharp ninth.

The chord has a distinctive sound due to the clash of the minor third (or “sharp ninth”) with the major third. In the case of Michelle, the chord is Bb7#9. The chord can be heard on the words “ma belle” at 0:11. Here, the vocal melody moves from Db5 to Ab4, reinforcing the sharp ninth and minor seventh of the chord.

The “Gretty chord” also makes an appearance at the end of George Harrison’s solo (1:21) on Till There Was You from 1963. In this case, the chord is Gb7#9 and is used as a tritone substitute for the chord of C7.

Diminished Chords

Only two bars later, McCartney puls another harmonic trick out of the bag in the use of diminished chords. The vocal melody here also formed from a diminished arpeggio that begins on F:

Although it is difficult to hear in the final recording, from the James Paul McCartney TV Special, it seems that McCartney begins on the chord of Ab diminished 7, then slides up to B diminished on fret nine, then D diminished on fret twelve, and then B diminished on fret nine.

In fact, all of these diminished chords are inversions of one-another. For example, Ab diminished is formed form the notes Ab Cb Ebb Gbb, which is enharmonically identical to B diminished B (Cb) D (Ebb) F (Gbb) Ab. Of course, jazz musicians and classical players are aware of this fact, but it is impressive that a very young McCartney probably discovered the mutability of diminished seventh chords quite by accident.

Here, the Brazilian composer Villa Lobos employs a run of inversions of a diminished chord in much the same manner as McCartney:

In terms of function, the bar of diminished chords has a pre-dominant function, as it precedes the chord of C major here an also in the following bar on the words “tres bien ensemble”.

The chord of D diminished occurs in the F melodic minor scale, lending further credence to the view that each verse of Michelle is in fact more closely aligned with F minor than F major.

Bridge Section

In the early 1960s McCartney’s song consisted of the verse section only. According to an interview with Lennon shortly before his death in 1980, he came up with basis for song’s bridge:

He and I were staying somewhere and he walked in and hummed to first few bars, with the words, and he says, ‘Where do I go from here?’ I had been listening to (blues singer) Nina Simone. I think it was ‘I Put A Spell On You.’ There was a line in it that went, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ That’s what made me think of the middle-eight for ‘Michelle.

I have started this clip at the relevant point for the purpose of comparison.:

In contrast to Simone, the “I love you” vocal phrases are based on a descending melody, formed from quarter-note/crotchet triplets:

This descending triplet-based motive bears more than a passing resemblance to the end of each verse of Besame Mucho. Besame Mucho (Kiss Me A Lot) had been written as long ago as 1940 by the Mexican songwriter Consuelo Velasquez.

The Beatles had performed the song as part of their ill-fated Decca Audition and also recorded the track on the 6th June 1962 at Abbey Road. Besame Mucho more fiery and red-blooded than Michelle, but has a similarly exotic blend of chords from both parallel major and minor keys – in this case, G minor.

Guitar Solo

George Martin claimed that he composed the guitar solo for Michelle. The solo follows the chord structure of the verse and is performed on Harrison’s Epiphone Casino guitar. Interestingly, the solo dovetails over McCartney’s vocal of “I love you”.

Harmony Vocals

The vocal harmonies represent another sophisticated offering from the band. Rather than a single descant part (as had been the standard in the early period), the harmonies are in three parts in addition to the lead vocal. Two close harmonies in third form a sustained chord-effect descant and a lower part sits below the main vocal in the low-tenor range:

Bass Line

The bass part in Michelle represents McCartney’s true coming of age as a “melodic” bass player in The Beatles. McCartney himself recognises this fact:

I’ll never forget putting the bass line in ‘Michelle’… It really turned the song around. You could do that with bass, it was very exciting

Focussing on the bass, it is clear that McCartney is thinking about lending the instrument its in truly “horizontal” sense, connecting chords with short runs and passing notes that break free from the main quarter-note/crotchet pulse. This cover version focuses the attention on the bass guitar part:

Coda

The song ends with the a fade-out repeat of Harrison’s guitar solo over the chords of the verse. The major/minor ambiguity of the song is tactfully avoided through the use of this fade-out.

However, McCartney could have chosen to end the song with a more decisive major or minor chord and laid to rest the major/minor dichotomy.

As an experiment, I decided to clumsily edit the song to end decisively on either a major or minor chord. You can decide for yourself which sounds better:

Major Ending

Minor Ending

Conclusion

Michelle is a landmark in The Beatles’ recording career. With the help of John Lennon, McCartney successfully re-fashioned a very early instrumental piece into a coherent and timeless song.

It is the first original Beatles composition to embrace a strong national character. This French element can be traced back to a number of vocalists who enjoyed success in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Other outstanding features in Michelle include:

• A sophisticated harmonic design that fluctuates between F major and F minor
• The use of the sharp-ninth “Gretty chord”.
• A secure understanding of the function and versatility of diminished seventh chords
• A highly melodic bass guitar part
• Three-part vocal harmonies that sits astride the main vocal

And Finally:

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