Eight Days A Week - The Beatles (cover)

"Eight Days a Week" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles. It was written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon based on McCartney's original idea. The song was released in the United Kingdom in December 1964 on the album Beatles for Sale. In the United States, it was first issued as a single in February 1965 before appearing on the North American release Beatles VI. The song was the band's seventh number 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100, a run of US chart success achieved in just over a year. The single was also number 1 in Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The Beatles recorded "Eight Days a Week" at EMI Studios in London in October 1964. The track opens with a fade-in, marking the first time that this technique had been used on a pop studio recording. The song was reissued worldwide in 2000 on the Beatles compilation album 1. It also provided the title for director Ron Howard's 2016 documentary film on the band's years as live performers, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week.

Paul McCartney has attributed the inspiration of the song to at least two different sources. In a 1984 interview with Playboy magazine, he credited the title to one of Ringo Starr's malapropisms, which similarly provided titles for the Lennon–McCartney songs "A Hard Day's Night" and "Tomorrow Never Knows". McCartney recalled: "He said it as though he were an overworked chauffeur: 'Eight days a week.' When we heard it, we said, 'Really? Bing! Got it!'"

McCartney subsequently credited the title to an actual chauffeur who once drove him to Lennon's house in Weybridge. In the Beatles Anthology book, he states: "I usually drove myself there, but the chauffeur drove me out that day and I said, 'How've you been?' – 'Oh working hard,' he said, 'working eight days a week.'" In a 2016 interview alongside Starr and Ron Howard, in preparation for the release of the documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years, McCartney reiterated that he had heard it from a chauffeur who was driving him to Lennon's house while he was banned from driving. Starr has said he is not the source of the phrase.

"Eight Days a Week" was the first song that the Beatles took into the studio unfinished to work on the arrangement during the session, a practice that would become common for the band. The song was recorded on 6 October 1964 during two sessions that together lasted nearly seven hours, with a fifteen-minute break in between. The band tried out several ideas for the intro and outro of the song. The first take featured a simple acoustic guitar introduction. The second take introduced an "oo"-ing vocal that was experimented with until the sixth take, when it was abandoned in favour of a guitar intro. The final outro (along with unused intro takes) was recorded separately, on 18 October.

The completed song incorporated another Beatles' first, in that it begins with a fade-in. "Eight Days a Week" marked the first time that a fade-in had been used to open a pop song. The instrumentation on the track consists of acoustic guitar, electric guitar, drums, bass and overdubbed handclaps. The fade-in and coda both include guitar overdubs, played by George Harrison on his Rickenbacker 12-string.