It’s March of 1965. Last month, as the Beatles started work on their second feature film (the working title, Eight Arms to Hold You, eventually becomes Help!), Ringo married his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Maureen Cox, a hairdresser from Liverpool, and moved into the same St. George’s Hill estate where John lives with Cyn, their two-year-old son, Julian, and a cat named Mimi, after John’s aunt. George is living at the Claremont estate, in nearby Esher, with his girlfriend, model Pattie Boyd (whom he’d met when she was an extra on A Hard Day’s Night).

Although a former assistant claims that “John was basically a lazy bastard” who “was quite happy to stay down in Weybridge, doing fuck-all,” John counters, “I wanted to live in London…but I wouldn’t risk it until it’s quietened down.”

There’s no sense of anything quieting down anytime soon, however. The Beatles have been on a tremendous roll—“I Feel Fine,” their next single after “A Hard Day’s Night,” hits number 1 in both America and Britain, where it knocks the Rolling Stones’ cover of the Howlin’ Wolf classic “Little Red Rooster” from the top slot. Lennon and McCartney have coauthored seven number-one hits that year (in addition to “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Love Me Do,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” and “I Feel Fine,” there’s “A World Without Love,” a song they wrote but deemed not good enough for the Beatles, so they passed it along to the British duo Peter and Gordon—Peter being Peter Asher, brother of Paul’s girlfriend, Jane), giving them the all-time songwriting record for most songs to top the US charts in a calendar year.

Bachelor Paul usually drives his own sporty Aston Martin to songwriting sessions at John’s home in St. George’s Hill, in Weybridge, but one morning he decides to have a car take him.

The chauffeur looks exhausted, offering a metaphorical description of his work schedule.

Eight days a week.

Like Ringo’s “a hard day’s night,” the phrase resonates with the band, though John says, “We struggled to record it and struggled to make it into a song.” They end up releasing it in December of 1964, on their album Beatles for Sale, and in February of 1965 as a single in the United States, where it becomes their seventh US number-one hit. All this success has a punishing pace, however.

“The band,” the BBC says in a review, referring to the album’s cover photo, “looks, frankly, knackered” from two years of nearly nonstop recording, touring, and filming.

There has hardly been a moment to pause and reflect, yet ironically it was during this busy songwriting time that “I started thinking about my own emotions,” John later says, pinpointing the subsequent change in his songwriting to a darker, more personal style.