The John Lennon and Paul McCartney song that George Harrison co-wrote for The Beatles
For most of The Beatles‘ careers, John Lennon and Paul McCartney dominated the songwriting field. Since Ringo Starr had little interest in writing material and George Harrison was still coming into his own as a songwriter, both Lennon and McCartney were responsible for chalking up some of the biggest hits of the time, from ‘She Loves You’ to ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. When going into their first feature film, though, McCartney remembers getting some help from the ‘Quiet Beatle’.
While making the album With The Beatles, Harrison made his first contribution as a songwriter on the album’s dark track ‘Don’t Bother Me’. While Harrison was never that happy with his initial attempt at writing a hit, his strong suit in the early days came from his arrangements.
Despite George Martin steering the group in the right direction, McCartney remembered each of his bandmates having an inherent sixth sense when it came to music, recalling in Living in the Material World, “John and I would come with a song, and we’d say, ‘It goes like this ‘She loves you yeah yeah yeah’, or whatever it was, and George would go ‘Mmm-hmm’, and cop the chords—not writing them down. It was like, ‘I see because I’m one of you. I didn’t write it, but I saw what you did.’”
After filling out their albums with covers of classic rock and roll tunes, A Hard Day’s Night would be the first Beatles album to feature only Lennon and McCartney credited as songwriters. During the recording process, though, the band’s need to fill the album with more downtempo material led to McCartney creating one of his first brilliant ballads, ‘And I Love Her’.
While Macca was originally impressed with how quickly he was able to create the tune, it was Harrison who would land the killing blow of the tune. When discussing the power behind the track, McCartney thought Harrison should deserve a writing credit on the song, recalling, “I was thinking about my song ‘And I Love Her’. I brought it to the band, and George comes in with [sings guitar figure]. And if you think about it, that’s the song. But he made that up on the session. He just said, ‘It needs a riff’. I didn’t write that.”
As the band started to become comfortable in the studio, they would often use each other to bounce ideas off of. Even when Harrison started to write some of his own classic material like ‘Taxman’, John Lennon was known to step in to help Harrison finish a handful of lines that he wasn’t sure of.
When talking about his approach to songwriting, Martin always felt that Harrison was a bit of a lone wolf, telling Rolling Stone, “He was nervous about his songs because he wasn’t the number-one songwriter in the group. He always had to try harder.” While it wouldn’t be easy to crack the Lennon/McCartney foundation, Harrison could easily work his magic on any number of classic Beatles songs with the power of his guitar.
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