How did Lennon & McCartney write together?
People always ask us how we sit down and write a song. Well, first we sit down. Then we write a song.
John Lennon was only half joking. From the their earliest ‘eyeball to eyeball’ collaborations in Paul’s front room at 20 Forthlin Road, Lennon and McCartney did not differentiate songwriting roles.
Usually, one of us wrote most of the song and the other just helped finish it off, adding a bit of tune or a bit of lyric.
Their first single — see here — was a typical example of this process:
Paul wrote the main structure to ‘Love Me Do’ when he was 16. I helped him with the middle.
As neither read music, they worked by ear or from scribbled chord charts. Lyrics were often a collection of scraps of paper. Tunes had to be remembered without notation and then demonstrated. They would sing snatches and improvise chords, building harmony as they went along
They also continued to write some songs separately, but collaborated closely during the early phase of Beatlemania when there were the need to provide instant hits created a new urgency and time pressure..
We wrote From Me To You together in a van. The first line was mine and then after that we took it from there.’
Similarly She Loves You was written by the two working together in their hotel room while on tour.
Songwriting side-gig
The only thing we knew about songwriting was that it was done by people like…Lerner and Loewe. Paul McCartney Anthology
The Lennon and McCartney partnership was a commercial as well as creative project. In the early 60s, even successful British pop acts were expected to have a short shelf life. Writing songs was a route towards expanding their income and extending their stay in the showbiz sun.
Traditionally, songwriting teams librettist (Loew) and lyricist (Lerner) lines but this was more a merger of two singer-songwriters. From the start there was an explicit agreement that all songwriting credits were shared, whatever the contribution of the other.
Paul McCartney did not write The Beatles first (dispute) British number one, Please Please Me. Arguably George Martin had a better claim to a credit but the names on the labels and royalty cheques were Lennon and McCartney.
Likewise John Lennon would later receive a handsome stipend for his non contribution to Yesterday. In later years he would be serenaded in restaurants for this composition literally dreamt up by his partner.
Ultimately, the arrangement worked well. It meant that the 179 joint song credits would even include songs outside The Beatles orbit. Some of these were joint: I Wanna be Your Man for the Stones in 1964, for example. Some like Give Peace a Chance (Plastic Ono Band/Lennon) and Goodbye (Mary Hopkin/McCartney) were clearly solo projects.
Royalties flowed into both bank accounts regardless of the actual authorship. This fact did not escape the notice of George Harrison, who began to rethink his relative indifference to songwriting.
Later minor quibbles crept in as the partners/rivals battled over their stupendous legacy. John made some implausible (if sincere) claims about his contributions to Paul songs. Paul even tried reversing their name order when printing the lyrics. We fans were left looking at our shoes: It’s the alphabet, Paul. You can’t argue with the alphabet.
Over time, the joint songwriting sessions became much less frequent. In his explosive Lennon Remembers (1971) John emphasises their growing musical differences, dismissing Sergeant Pepper as ‘a bunch of Paul songs.’
As the Queen they both admired would later remark, “recollections may differ”. Paul insists that they worked together closely on what MacDonald calls ‘their finest achievement, A Day in the Life. And they certainly collaborated on Getting Better as Hunter Davies confirmed in this BBC radio interview from 15.00
Interestingly, both partners struggled more with words than music. With McCartney this was always apparent — after all his sub-conscious had only gifted him the tune of Yesterday. Converting Scrambled Eggs into appropriate words required much more trial and error.
That Lennon experienced difficulties is intriguing. He is often credited with writing more consistently distinctive lyrics. And yet:
“The music is sort of easy. I sometimes envy Elton John. Bernie Taupin sends him a big stack of words, and he writes all the songs in five days. I could do that. But I am too egocentric to use other people’s words. That’s the problem.
This also highlights a major difference in their musical philosophies. Lennon complained loudly about McCartney’s preference for third person narrative (‘Paul’s story songs’ or, even more waspishly, ‘granny songs’). His preference was for the confessional — and few could argue with quality of Julia, I’m So Tired and other products of his tortured psyche.
Not every musical therapy session hit the sweet spot, however. And the, ahem, more challenging output (Two Virgins etc) might have benefited from Paul’s more pragmatic counsul.
Guitar Men
Dick Rowe of Decca famously dismissed The Beatles as a ‘guitar group’. A costly misjudgement but one based on an accurate description. The Beatles wrote, played and understood music largely through the instrument three of them were comfortable with.
John composed exclusively on guitar, though later he did switch to piano to expand his creative options post break-up. Paul had always dabbled with piano and in fact wrote When I’m 64 on the family one at Forthlin Road Road — at the age of fifteen. He was self-conscious about his technical limitations but began to experiment more extensively after moving into the family home of his girlfriend, Jane Asher in 1963.
As Jane’s brother, Peter Asher recalls:
In the basement there was a small music room …Paul used to use the ….small upright piano. Shortly after Paul had moved in, John came over. Paul stuck his head up the stairs and asked me if I wanted to come hear the song that they’d written…. And they sat side by side on the piano bench and played “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for the first time to anybody, anywhere.
While living at Wimpole Street, Paul worked on improving his piano technique. The impact can be seen on keyboard-lead compositions like Lady Madonna, Let it Be and The Long and Winding Road.
During one practice session he knocked off this thing about his dog, as a piano exercise. As you do. Or rather as Paul McCartney does.
it’s slightly above my level or competence really, but I wrote it as that, something a bit more complex for me to play. Then while I was blocking out words — you just mouth out sounds and some things come — I found the words ‘Martha my dear’.
