Who really wrote The Beatles’ 1965 track ‘In My Life’?
By the time The Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney and John Lennon were learning that it was best to just agree to disagree.
For the good of the band, there were some arguments simply left untouched, and the pair would have to grimace their way through recording sessions and hope an opportunity to gripe about it would come up later. In fact, Lennon famously slated McCartney’s masterpiece Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, reductively describing the aspiring concept album as just a bunch of songs.
But learning to co-parent The Beatles was what continued to make them great during their periods of innovation. They knew that their yin and yang artistic approach was what actually made them the perfect pairing, counterbalancing each other’s lightness and darkness while simultaneously overlapping at crucial musical moments.
For the most part, keen Beatles fans can tell whose song is whose, and they can easily be categorised through the lens of said difference. There’s a fundamental sweetness to McCartney’s melody writing that is easily identifiable, while Lennon’s digs deeper into introspection, giving The Beatles their more surrealist edge.
But what about the songs that exist in the overlap? What about a song like ‘In My Life’, which feels part Macca and part Lennon? Well, that’s seemingly a sore subject for the pair who never agreed on the truth of how that came about.
“As I recall, he didn’t have a tune to it,” McCartney claimed, “I said, ‘Well, you haven’t got a tune, let me just go and work on it’. And I went down to the half-landing, where John had a mellotron, and I sat there and put together a tune… I recall writing the whole melody. And it actually does sound very like me, if you analyse it.”
McCartney is right; there is very much a ‘Paulness’ to the melody that floats through the ether. But then the lyrics feel inherently Lennon, for their existentialism couldn’t have possibly come from the mind of Macca. So maybe, this was something that felt increasingly rare during the latter stages of The Beatles: a song that both Lennon and McCartney worked on in equal parts? No, it appears not, as a disgruntled Lennon was quick to refute Macca’s claims.
“Paul helped with the middle eight,” he said, adding, “I wrote that in Kenwood [his home at the time]. I used to write upstairs where I had about ten Brunell tape recorders all linked up. I still have them, I’d mastered them over the period of a year or two. I could never make a rock and roll record, but I could make some far-out stuff on it. I wrote it upstairs, that was one where I wrote the lyrics first and then sang it.”
Ultimately, there was a level of cooperation on the track which is undoubtedly what made it one of their very best. However, the harmless disagreement over the finer details of the song foreshadowed the wider problems that lay ahead for the band after ‘In My Life’ and Rubber Soul.
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