The 1968 song Paul McCartney thought was beyond John Lennon: “A very sweet tune”
There was always a certain rhythm to the way that John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote all of their classics.
Even if they complemented each other perfectly, it was always expected that Macca would be the one writing most of the whimsical songs while Lennon would bring everything back down to Earth whenever he wrote his tunes. But when you look at Lennon’s track record, he could get just as sentimental as his writing partner could whenever he had the right idea for a song.
And it’s not like McCartney was that black and white when it came to his tunes. A lot of the best moments of the bands career came from him getting wacky behind the scenes, and anyone who still thinks that all that McCartney ever wrote was tunes like ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Penny Lane’ really needs to get their ears checked the next time they listen to a song like ‘Helter Skelter’ or ‘Oh Darling’. But Lennon was always the one unwilling to let his guard down whenever he performed his tunes.
He wasn’t ready to talk about his innermost feelings until he started working on his solo career, and while he could still write traditional love songs, he wasn’t really relating to every single one of them. The teenybopper era of the band was a lot more of a workjob for him and Macca when they had to fill out the rest of an album, but some time after Revolver, Lennon wasn’t going to spend time making the same rock and roll tunes anymore.
He needed the chance to spread out, and while The White Album is still divisive among some Beatles fans, there’s a reason why Lennon considered it one of his favourites. The entire record is just a hot mess from one song to the next, but for someone who embraced the blemishes, Lennon loved the idea of the band being really human. He could make off-the-wall experiments like ‘Glass Onion’, but the fact that he could still give Ringo Starr the song ‘Good Night’ showed how far he had come as a songwriter.
Compared to all of the band’s best ballads, the schmaltziness of this tune is something that even McCartney had a hard time pulling off in some of his tunes. He was already used to making tunes like ‘Honey Pie’, but seeing his writing partner write this gentle lullaby after the massive cacophony of noise on ‘Revolution 9’ was the biggest bait-and-switch he could have ever pulled.
McCartney was still impressed by what Lennon had done, but he was more shocked than anything else that he could have pulled off a tune like this, saying, “John wrote it, mainly. It’s his tune, uhh, which is surprising for John– ‘cuz he doesn’t normally write this kind of tune. It’s a very sweet tune, and Ringo sings it great, I think. The arrangement was done by George Martin, uhh, ‘cuz he’s very good at that kind of arrangement, you know– very sort of lush, sweet arrangement.”
And that kind of lush arrangement is probably why Lennon ended up giving it to Starr to sing. The original arrangement of Lennon singing it may have never been recorded, but the idea of hearing him over those sweeping strings would have been a little too far out of his comfort zone since he was the same guy known for writing tunes like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ only a few records before.
But Lennon never needed to be ashamed of the more sensitive side of his lyrics by any stretch. He was usually more than happy to write the best tunes that he could every single time he made a record, and if he could be proud of a song like ‘In My Life’, there was no reason to sweep a song like this under the rug, no matter how uncool it might have seemed at the time.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.