Leaving aside the social phenomenon of Beatlemania, the myriad artistic innovations they made in and out of the studio, and their lasting legacy on pop culture as a whole, if The Beatles gave us nothing else, then the songwriting partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney would still have been a priceless gift to the world. These two young working-class skiffle enthusiasts from Liverpool transformed the way music is composed forever.
Both in terms of quality and sheer quantity, they put world-famous professional pop composers like Leiber and Stoller and Bacharach and David in the shade. And their instinct for melodic invention and fearlessness in breaking the mould after musical mould fundamentally redefined what popular music could be. Their arrival arguably signalled its greatest paradigm shift since George Gershwin and Cole Porter brought jazz to white American audiences, reducing Fats Domino, ‘Rock Around the Clock’, Little Richard and Elvis Presley to mere footnotes.
Scholars of songcraft and doyens of musical taste marvelled at how these two boys from a city they’d never heard of, with little more than a few Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly records in their record collections, worked in tandem to create compositions which appeared to draw on great classical composers like Beethoven and Bach. But just how much did Lennon and McCartney really write together?
We know that they had a hand in writing an astonishing 165 songs released either on Beatles studio albums and EPs or as singles, 162 of them released during a span of just eight years. These numbers exclude anything that ended up on the Anthology compilations or bootlegs or was given to other artists. 155 of the tracks were composed entirely by Lennon, McCartney, or the two of them working together, without input from anyone else. However, the proportion of Lennon-McCartney compositions, which are genuinely collaborative works, is much smaller than we might think.
So, how many compositions are really by Lennon and McCartney?
When The Beatles began their recording career, virtually every Lennon-McCartney original really was the joint endeavour of John and Paul, including all of their early singles with the exception of ‘Please Please Me’. Some songs might have had a primary author who just needed help finishing them off, like McCartney with ‘All My Loving’ or Lennon on ‘There’s a Place’. But the most famous and celebrated singles from the height of Beatlemania, ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, are genuine 50-50 compositions.
By early 1964, though, things had already begun to change. McCartney wrote ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, the first single from the band’s third studio album and first film, A Hard Day’s Night, alone in a Paris hotel room while the band was touring France in January 1964. Lennon responded by writing four tracks for the record totally on his own, including ‘I Should Have Known Better’ and ‘Tell Me Why’, which ended up in the movie.
The years that followed saw Lennon and McCartney increasingly branching out in different directions with their songwriting. While still honouring their agreement to mark everything either of them wrote with a joint credit, McCartney wrote and recorded ‘Yesterday’ entirely without Lennon’s involvement, and Lennon, in turn, composed four of his five main songwriting contributions to the 1966 album Revolver without any help from McCartney.
Still, until 1969, the two continued to collaborate on at least four songs per Beatles record, even if it meant fitting together their own respective unfinished songs, as with ‘A Day in the Life’ and ‘Cry Baby Cry’. Their partnership clearly wasn’t what it had been, however, and between the abortive Get Back sessions and the release of Abbey Road, only two real joint Lennon-McCartney compositions were recorded. Their last songwriting collaboration was on ‘Oh! Darling’, which was largely a McCartney number written in the spring of 1969.
All in all, John and Paul penned 65 songs together. Which still makes them the most prolific songwriting partnership of the 1960s. It also discounts the intuitive grasp each had of the other’s creative process, which was instrumental in the recording of the 100 other Beatles tracks for which they share credit.
Every Beatles song Lennon and McCartney actually wrote together:
‘All I’ve Got to Do’
‘All My Loving’
‘All Together Now’
‘And I Love Her’
‘Any Time at All’
‘Ask Me Why’
‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man’
‘Baby’s in Black’
‘Birthday’
‘Cry Baby Cry’
‘A Day in the Life’
‘Day Tripper’
‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’
‘Drive My Car’
‘Eight Days a Week’
‘From Me to You’
‘Getting Better’
‘Good Day Sunshine’
‘A Hard Day’s Night’
‘Hello, Goodbye’
‘Help!’
‘Hey Bulldog’
‘Hold Me Tight’
‘I Call Your Name’
‘I Saw Her Standing There’
‘I Wanna Be Your Man’
‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’
‘If I Fell’
‘I’ll Be Back’
‘I’ll Get You’
‘I’m Happy Just to Dance with You’
‘I’ve Got a Feeling’
‘In My Life’
‘It Won’t Be Long’
‘Little Child’
‘Love Me Do’
‘Lovely Rita’
‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’
‘Magical Mystery Tour’
‘Michelle’
‘Misery’
‘Mother Nature’s Son’
‘The Night Before’
‘No Reply’
‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’
‘Oh! Darling’
‘One After 909′
‘Paperback Writer’
‘Penny Lane’
‘PS I Love You’
‘Rocky Raoccon’
‘Run for Your Life’
‘She Loves You’
‘She’s a Woman’
‘She’s Leaving Home’
‘Tell Me What You See’
‘Thank You Girl’
‘There’s a Place’
‘Ticket to Ride’
‘We Can Work It Out’
‘With a Little Help from My Friends’
‘The Word’
‘Yellow Submarine’
‘You Can’t Do That’
‘You’re Going to Lose That Girl’
Lennon-McCartney songs that were really just Lennon’s:
‘Across the Universe’
‘All You Need Is Love’
‘And Your Bird Can Sing’
‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’
‘Because’
‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!’
‘Come Together’
‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’
‘Dear Prudence’
‘Dig a Pony’
‘Doctor Robert’
‘Don’t Let Me Down’
‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey’
‘Girl’
‘Glass Onion’
‘Good Morning Good Morning’
‘Good Night’
‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’
‘I Am the Walrus’
‘I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party’
‘I Feel Fine’
‘I Should Have Known Better’
‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’
‘I’ll Cry Instead’
‘I’m a Loser’
‘I’m Only Sleeping’
‘I’m So Tired’
‘It’s Only Love’
‘Julia’
‘Mean Mr Mustard’
‘Not a Second Time’
‘Nowhere Man’
‘Please Please Me’
‘Polythene Pam’
‘Rain’
‘Revolution’
‘Revolution 1′
‘Sexy Sadie’
‘Strawberry Fields Forever’
‘Sun King’
‘Tell Me Why’
‘This Boy’
‘When I Get Home’
‘Yer Blues’
‘Yes It Is’
‘You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)’
‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’
Lennon-McCartney songs that were really just McCartney’s:
‘Another Girl’
‘Back in the USSR’
‘Blackbird’
‘Can’t Buy Me Love’
‘Carry That Weight’
‘The End’
‘Every Little Thing’
‘Fixing a Hole’
‘The Fool on the Hill’
‘For No One’
‘Get Back’
‘Golden Slumbers’
‘Got to Get You in My Life’
‘Helter Skelter’
‘Her Majesty’
‘Here, There and Everywhere’
‘Hey Jude’
‘Honey Pie’
‘I Will’
‘I’ll Follow the Sun’
‘I’m Down’
‘I’m Looking Through You’
‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’
‘Lady Madonna’
‘Let It Be’
‘The Long and Winding Road’
‘Martha My Dear’
‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’
‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’
‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’
‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)’
‘She Came In Through the Bathroom Window’
‘Things We Said Today’
‘Two of Us’
‘Wait’
‘What You’re Doing’
‘When I’m Sixty-Four’
‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road’
‘Wild Honey Pie’
‘Yesterday’
‘You Never Give Me Your Money’
‘You Won’t See Me’
‘Your Mother Should Know’
Beatles songs Lennon and/or McCartney wrote with other band members:
‘Dig It’
‘Eleanor Rigby’
‘Flying’
‘Free as a Bird’
‘Now and Then’
‘Real Love’
‘Revolution 9′
‘She Said She Said’
‘Tomorrow Never Knows’
‘What Goes On’
