Every great song by The Beatles stemmed from the massive powerhouse of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. While George Harrison had his fair share of highlights, the majority of the Fab Four’s classic tracks came from how Lennon and McCartney wrote melodies together, creating vivid pictures in the listener’s mind that are still relevant 50 years later. Although the band innovated left and right, one song left Lennon feeling a bit jaded.
Coming out of their initial mop-top phase, The Beatles were moving towards more ambitious territory when releasing albums like Rubber Soul. Featuring none of the traditional love songs that fans were used to hearing from their favourite band, these tracks tackled adult themes that The Beatles were dealing with every day, from the confident young woman in ‘Girl’ to the woman who leads her boyfriend along on ‘Drive My Car’.
It wouldn’t be until Revolver that things started to change drastically.
Following their experiments in folk-tinged rock, the band’s embrace of avant-garde songwriting styles pioneered the psychedelic movement by a few years, with tracks like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘Taxman’ being a bold step forward than the usual love song.
Of all the experiments, though, McCartney’s ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was a massive departure, featuring no rock instrumentation as McCartney tells the story of a lonely woman wasting her life away in a church. Although Lennon maintains that he helped in structuring the song, there were a few pieces of the puzzle that never sat well with him.
Before Lennon started writing his songs independently from McCartney. Thanks to his blossoming relationship with Yoko Ono, Lennon’s immersion in the artsy side of rock drove a line between the songwriting duo, starting a massive creative split that ultimately broke up the partnership.
Even though The Beatles made beautiful music together.
Both Lennon and McCartney were two very different people on different musical wavelengths. If anything, McCartney’s offer of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ may as well have been the first sign that Lennon and McCartney wouldn’t be writing together forever.
