1977 compilation album Love Songs, issued by EMI to exploit the band's catalogue seven years after their break-up. Critical reception Among Beatles biographers, Jonathan Gould describes "I Need You" as a "modest, mild love song" that sounded "a lot like the efforts of other contemporary songwriters to write in the style of Lennon and McCartney". In Mark Hertsgaard's view, the track is "a catchy pop tune" that showed how Harrison "had now matured into the kind of pleasantly stylized, if innocuous, songwriter that Lennon and McCartney had been in their early days". According to Alan Clayson, "for all its simplistic libretto and suspensions à la 'One Heart Between Two'", the song was "more immediately attractive" than some of the Lennon–McCartney songs on Help! Writing in the 2004 edition of The Rolling Stone Album Guide, Rob Sheffield described "I Need You" and "You Like Me Too Much" as "the finest George songs known to man". He viewed Help! as the band's "big step forward" in its exploration of themes such as "doubt, loneliness, alienation, adult sexual longing" and said that for Harrison's persona relative to Lennon and McCartney, "the Quiet One got Smart as well as Cute". By contrast, PopMatters editor John Bergstrom featured the song in his 2009 list titled "the worst of the Beatles". He said that "I Need You" justified statements subsequently made by Lennon, McCartney and Martin that until late in the Beatles' career, Harrison's songwriting presence was limited in accordance with his talent and experience, and he dismissed Harrison's vocal on the track as "flat and tentative, even as the lovelorn lyrics are sincere" and his use of the guitar volume pedal as rudimentary. Reviewing the remastered Help! that same year, for Paste magazine, Mark Kemp said that "Harrison surfaces here as a formidable songwriter, taking center stage on 'I Need You' and 'You Like Me Too Much'." According to Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic, while the two Harrison compositions pale beside Lennon and McCartney's songs on the album, "they hold their own against much of their British pop peers." Cover versions George Martin included "I Need You" on his 1965 album of instrumental versions of Beatles songs, also titled Help! The Sunshine Company recorded a version, arranged by George Tipton, for their 1967 Imperial Records LP Happy Is the Sunshine Company. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers performed "I Need You" in tribute to Harrison at