The “pivotal” Beatles song that was “a little trick”
Songwriting wasn’t an exact science for The Beatles. Especially within the John Lennon/Paul McCartney partnership, different duties were handed out for different situations. Sometimes songs would be written “eyeball to eyeball”. Sometimes one member would only contribute a few elements, and sometimes only one of them would be responsible for the song.
‘From Me To You’ was a case where the two wrote nearly every element of the song together. It was while the pair were on tour, and instead of sleeping, the duo were hard at work creating their next single.
“The night Paul and I wrote ‘From Me To You’, we were on the Helen Shapiro tour, on the coach, travelling from York to Shrewsbury,” John Lennon explained in Anthology. “We weren’t taking ourselves seriously – just fooling around on the guitar – when we began to get a good melody line, and we really started to work at it. Before that journey was over, we’d completed the lyric, everything.”
“There was a little trick we developed early on and got bored with later, which was to put I, Me or You in it, so it was very direct and personal: ‘Love Me Do’; ‘Please Please Me’; ‘From Me To You’ – we got two of them in there,” Paul McCartney explained in the book Many Years From Now. McCartney spoke positively of the track, although he remembers being on tour with another singer in his memories of writing the track.
“That was a pivotal song. Our songwriting lifted a little with that song. It was very much co-written,” McCartney confirmed. “We were starting to meet other musicians then, and we’d start to see other people writing. After that, on another tour bus with Roy Orbison, we saw Roy sitting in the back of the bus, writing ‘Pretty Woman’. It was lovely. We could trade off with each other. This was our real start.”
“I think the first line was mine, and we took it from there,” Lennon recalled. “What puzzled us was why we’d thought of a name like ‘From Me To You’. It had me thinking when I picked up the NME to see how we were doing in the charts. Then I realised – we’d got the inspiration from reading a copy on the coach. Paul and I had been talking about one of the letters in the From You To Us column.”
“That middle eight was a very big departure for us,” McCartney added. “Say you’re in C then go to A minor, fairly ordinary, C, change it to G. And then F, pretty ordinary. But then it goes, ‘I got arms…’ and that’s a G minor. Going to G minor and a C takes you to a whole new world. It was exciting.”
Check out ‘From Me To You’ down below.
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.