Beatles song review: "Any Time at All"

source: allmusic.com : "'Any Time at All' expresses a familiar teen love theme: the earnest yearning of a singer reaching out to a loved one and asserting his total dependability ('any time at all/all you gotta do is call/and I'll be there'). Ringo Starr kicks it off with a thundering snare drum slap followed by a moment of silence, then John Lennon's signature vocal with a Byrds-like guitar hook as accompaniment. Curiously, the song launches the refrain before the verse -- a songwriting trick the Beatles used more than once (as on 'She Loves You'), yet which is relatively rare in pop music of the rock era. Lennon's excited, edgy vocal leads the way: yet another standout performance on an album filled with definitive performances. The gutsy refrain is counterbalanced by a more formal, stately verse melody over a descending bass line. The singer is reaching out with his honest best 'you can call on me' pitch.

'Any Time at All' may be little more than a driving, vibrant rock number to flesh out the album, yet the song's irresistible catchiness is evidence that the Beatles' album filler was generally superior to most of what came out of the British Invasion. As fans of the Beatles would soon learn, all was not as simple as it first seemed. The instrumental bridge, for instance, goes off in a new direction: a doubled piano/guitar part ascending in a sweeping tide of expectant melodic triplets that peak in harmonic resolution, bringing you back to the edgy refrain (always kicked off by Ringo's snare attack). While not as adventurous a bridge as will be found in subsequent albums, it does show the band eager to invent and play with song form, even in its early work.

On each recurrence of the chorus, Lennon's energetic plea begs to be sung along with. The catchy refrain appears four times in the song -- at the beginning and end, and after the two verses -- in effect setting up a nice structural advertisement for the lyric. At "any time" in the song you're likely to latch onto the chorus; its very repeatability is itself dependable.

The song appears on A Hard Day's Night [UK]: amazon -
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