Over half a century since The Beatles split, John Lennon and Paul McCartney remain the gold standard for writing partnerships in popular music. That should come as no surprise, given that the pair are responsible for some of the most enduring and fantastic songs ever to grace the airwaves. McCartney has revealed, however, that his old bandmate still has an influence over his songwriting, even after Lennon’s tragic death in 1980.
The Beatles bassist has recorded a huge amount of material since the band split in 1970, collaborating with countless other artists, including Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello and Kanye West, forming Wings and working on his own solo material.
Although his songwriting partnership with John Lennon ended with The Beatles, McCartney said on the podcast McCartney: A Life in Lyrics that he still thinks about John’s input on his songwriting, “Often I’ll sort of refer… ‘What would John think of this? He’d have thought it was too soppy, so I’ll change it’”.
The 81-year-old songwriter has often spoken about his partnership with Lennon and how their approaches to lyrics were very different, often opposing. “Mine would be doing this, his would be doing that, and the interplay was just miraculous,” he said on the podcast, “And that’s why people are still listening to the songs we wrote”. McCartney explained that he wanted to keep that feeling within his writing, and after The Beatles split, he made an effort to insert Lennon’s influence into his own writing independently.
On the contrary, Lennon was openly critical of McCartney and his songwriting in the period that followed the break-up of Liverpool’s finest. In a 1980 interview for the book All We Are Saying conducted by David Sheff, John admitted that he “never actually felt a loss” when the Lennon-McCartney partnership came to an end.
Continuing, he said, “It’s easier to say what my contribution was to him than what he gave to me”.
The sentiment of that 1980 interview was shared by the lyrics of Lennon’s scathing 1971 track ‘How Do You Sleep?’ in which he affirms that “The only thing you [McCarney] done was yesterday” in reference to The Beatles track ‘Yesterday’. McCartney expressed in a GQ interview that he found this line in the song particularly “hurtful”, though it is fair to say that the track came about at a time when tensions were high between the ex-bandmates due to the recent split.
Despite their public arguments in the early post-Beatles days, McCartney clearly still holds a lot of love for his former songwriting partner. After the recent release of the last Beatles single ‘Now and Then’, produced with the help of AI cleaning up an old demo tape, he spoke to The Times about the loss of Lennon and Harrison, “You know, when you have somebody you love so much. In many cases it’s a relative, and even though they go, you don’t want to let go — that’s what people say when somebody dies. They’re in your memory, always in your heart. And, yes, that’s certainly true of me and the boys”.
