When we talk about songwriting as an art form, no two names get mentioned more than John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The two of them are renowned for being one of the greatest musical duos in history, as the way that they could come together (no pun intended) and work out some of the most complex, sweet-sounding and transformative music ever written was truly its own kind of magic.
Why did the two work so well together? Well, it wasn’t their similarities; instead, it was their differences. They had different ideas as to what made a good song, and approached the creative process differently. It meant that rather than sitting next to one another and merely agreeing to everything, they challenged each other, and whenever one writer hit a figurative wall, the other gave them a boost to get over it.
Unfortunately, those differences grew too far apart, leading to the band’s breakdown. While The Beatles faced many problems both inside and outside the band, they were connected by the desire to make great music. When that desire fizzled out, the band broke down.
When Lennon was asked about what happened to the collective mind of The Beatles and the fact that they were often praised as having one mind, he retorted, “They remembered they were individuals.”
He continued, “You see, we believed The Beatles myth, too. I don’t know whether the others still believe it. We were four guys… I met Paul, and said, ‘You want to join me band?’ Then George joined, and then Ringo joined. We were just a band that made it very, very, big, that’s all.”
Paul McCartney tried hard to keep things running, but the band didn’t see him as a noble musician trying to keep the spark alight; instead, they saw him as somebody trying to take over the band and run it himself. Lennon left the band with a great deal of resentment towards McCartney as he felt as though he was trying to make the rest of the band his side-men.
You can hear this resentment when he spoke of The Beatles after the break-up. For example, when the band was making music in the early days, it was famously recounted that McCartney and Lennon were almost inseparable. They were constantly writing together, and this partnership led to a deal stating that all of their songs would be credited as Lennon-McCartney. This applied even later in the band’s career when they were both writing separately.
However, when Lennon was asked about their writing partnership, he even tried to distance himself from those early songs. Rather than celebrating them as a joint effort, he said that he knows precisely what he did and exactly what McCartney did. Realistically, the duo’s songwriting partnership ended shortly after the mid-1960s; however, Lennon attested it was much earlier than that.
“That ended… I don’t know, around 1962, or something, I don’t know. If you give me the albums, I can tell you exactly who wrote what and which line. We sometimes wrote together,” he concluded. “All our best work – apart from the early days, like ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, we wrote together and things like that – we wrote apart always. The ‘One After 909’, on the Let It Be LP, I wrote when I was 17 or 18. We always wrote separately, but we wrote together because we enjoyed it a lot sometimes, and also because they would say, well, you’re going to make an album, get together and knock off a few songs, just like a job.”
