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While listening to A Hard Day's Night, I found a few things that sort of illustrate the Beatles' progress, specifically things that make a distinction between A Hard Day's Night and their previous work. A Hard Day's Night is particularly important in this regard as it's the first Beatles album that consists entirely of material that the Beatles wrote themselves.
While watching the A Hard Day's Night movie, I found two things in "I'm Happy Just to Dance with You" that illustrate this difference. One of the verses starts with "I don't wanna kiss or hold your hand," which seems to make a distinction between the outlook presented in this song and the Beatles' earlier "I Want to Hold Your Hand." An-other verse starts with "I don't need to hug or hold you tight," which - along with its structural parallelism with "I don't wanna kiss or hold your hand" - presents the same idea, contrasting "I'm Happy Just to Dance with You" and "Hold Me Tight" from With the Beatles.
While listening to A Hard Day's Night last Thursday, I found an-other instance of this type of distinction. In "If I Fell," the lines "Love was more / Than just holding hands" also act to sort of over-write the sentiment in "I Want to Hold Your Hand."
With those phrases, the Beatles seem to be marking their new material as more advanced than their previous and placing distance between their current and past work.
