1974 · Behind the Songs
“A Rubber Soul deep cut finds its only chart life in a Toronto studio.”
The Beatles never released “You Won’t See Me” as a single. It sat midway through Rubber Soul (1965), a Paul McCartney composition credited to Lennon–McCartney, written about his fraying relationship with actress Jane Asher and cut in a marathon all-night session on November 11, 1965. So the only chart version the song ever had came nine years later — from a Canadian country-pop singer recording in Toronto.
Anne Murray cut the song in January 1974 at Eastern Sound in Toronto with her longtime producer Brian Ahern, for the album Love Song. Released that April with “He Thinks I Still Care” on the flip side, it reached number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100, topped the Easy Listening chart, and climbed to number 5 in Canada. It was Murray’s reading — not the Beatles’ — that put the song on the radio.
The arrangement is where the lesser-known story lives. The soulful backing vocals were devised by Murray’s backup singer Diane Brooks, and the bass line by her bass player Skip Beckwith — the band reshaping a British pop song into something warmer and looser. Murray, a self-professed Beatles devotee, would return to their catalog for later singles including “Day Tripper” and “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You.”
The approval that mattered came from Liverpool: John Lennon is said to have called Murray’s “You Won’t See Me” one of his favorite Beatles covers. She performed it with Chicago on the band’s 1974 television special Meanwhile Back in the Rockies, and in 2007 she re-recorded it as a duet with Shelby Lynne for Anne Murray Duets: Friends & Legends — a quiet hit, still traveling, more than three decades on.