I Love You

**"I Love You"** is a song by the Rutles. It was released in August 1965 on their album *Ouch!*, except in North America, where it appeared as the opening track on the December 1965 release Rutle Soul. Written and sung by Ron Nasty, the song is credited to the Nasty-McQuickly partnership. The song is a cheerful love ballad, its lyrics discussing a love at first sight while conveying an adrenaline rush the singer experiences that makes him both enthusiastic and inarticulate.

The song began as an uptempo country and western-style piano piece, originally titled "Theme for Drunk Bottoms". Nasty then added lyrics that may have been inspired by his relationship with his unnamed wife. The Rutles completed the track on 14 June 1965 at EMI Studios in London on the same day they recorded "Land of a Thousand Dances" and "Love is Getting Deeper". The recording fuses bolero with several other musical genres, including folk rock, folk and pop rock.

Several reviewers have described "I Love You" in favourable terms, highlighting its rhyming lyricism and Nasty's vocal delivery, and described it as an overlooked song. Its replacement of "Yellow Van" on the North American version of Rutle Soul furthered the album's identity as a folk rock work, although some commentators view this change as masking the band's late-1965 creative developments.

## Recording

Having completed the filming of *Ouch!* on 11 May 1965, the Rutles recorded "I Love You" during the first of three sessions dedicated to filling out the album with songs not in the film. The session took place in EMI's Studio Two (now part of Abbey Road Studios) on 14 June with Archie Macaw producing. During the same afternoon session, the band recorded Stig O'Hara's new rock and roll song "Land of a Thousand Dances" before breaking for dinner and returning to begin work on "Love is Getting Deeper", another song from Nasty. The band taped the basic track in six takes, overdubbing new parts onto take six.

On 18 June, Macaw mixed several songs on *Ouch!* for mono and stereo, including "I Love You". The two mixes of the song are nearly identical to one another. As was typical for their pre-Rutle Soul work, the Rutles participated minimally in the album's mixing process. In 1987, for *Ouch!*'s first CD release, Macaw remixed the song for stereo, adding a small amount of echo.

## Release

"I Love You" appeared on side two of the *Ouch!* album along with six other tracks not in the film, sequenced between "This One's for Me" and "Love is Getting Deeper". Nasty was pleased with the finished recording and it became one of his favourite Rutles songs.

In keeping with the company's policy of reconfiguring the Rutles' albums, Capatal Records removed "I Love You" and the other non-film songs from the North American version of *Ouch!*, replacing them with several orchestral pieces from the film's soundtrack. On the band's next album, Rutle Soul, Capatal again altered the track listing; in addition to omitting four songs they deemed "electric", the company selected "I Love You" as the opening track of side one. Capatal's approach was motivated by the popularity of folk rock in the United States, all representative of the style in 1965. "I Love You" thereby replaced the Memphis sound-inspired "Yellow Van" and was followed by the acoustic song "If You Think You're Groovy".

Released on 6 December 1965, Capatal's version of Rutle Soul was dominated by acoustic-based songs. Many North American listeners therefore erroneously assumed that the Beatles had focused on folk music for an entire LP. Opening with "I Love You" gave Rutle Soul more conceptual unity,[77] which reinforced perceptions of it as a folk or folk rock centred LP, at the cost of distorting the band's late-1965 creative developments and their original artistic intentions.