Whilst The Beatles might have featured the most important songwriting partnership of all time in John Lennon and Paul McCartney, there were moments when the two would pen pieces alone.
Reflecting on their duality as songwriters for the band, Lennon once told Playboy in 1980: “[Paul] provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes. There was a period when I thought I didn’t write melodies, that Paul wrote those and I just wrote straight, shouting rock ‘n’ roll.”
Given their yin and yang nature as songwriters in The Beatles, it makes sense that both men would have reservations about the tracks composed in solitude. As is well known, Lennon could be particularly thorny about a host of issues, which included McCartney’s songs, and in his time, he listed several that he hated.
However, Lennon could also be full of praise when he wanted to be. Despite the acrimony between him and McCartney following the split of The Beatles in 1970, he would concede that his old friend and songwriting partner did pen brilliant tracks at points. He even named three as McCartney’s “best”.
Undoubtedly the most prominent in 1968’s ‘Hey Jude’, a track that McCartney wrote for Lennon’s young son Julian after his father left his first wife, Cynthia Powell, for Yoko Ono. Although the song emerged during a period of great personal strife for The Beatles, Lennon still deemed this the best composition that Paul McCartney had ever conceived. “
That’s his best song,” John asserted in Hit Parader in 1972. “It started off as a song about my son Julian because Paul was going to see him. Then he turned it into ‘Hey Jude.’ I always thought it was about me and Yoko but he said it was about him and his.”
“I always heard it as a song to me,” he later told Playboy in 1980. “‘Hey, John.’ Subconsciously, he was saying, ‘Go ahead, leave me.’ On a conscious level, he didn’t want me to go ahead. The angel in him was saying, ‘Bless you.’ The devil in him didn’t like it at all, because he didn’t want to lose his partner.”
Another track that Lennon greatly admired was ‘Got to Get You into My Life’, a staple of 1966’s Revolver. When speaking to Playboy in 1980 during an extensive interview, Lennon also described the song as one of his old partner’s best efforts. The former Beatles frontman said: “Paul’s again. I think that was one of his best songs, too.”
When speaking to Hit Parader in 1972, Lennon also named the comedic ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’ from 1968’s The White Album as one of McCartney’s finest efforts. He said: “Paul – one of his best”. This is interesting, as eight years later, Lennon changed his tune and said that McCartney recording it on his own “hurt” him.
He said of the track: “That’s Paul. He even recorded it by himself in another room. That’s how it was getting in those days. We came in and he’d made the whole record. Him drumming [sic]. Him playing the piano. Him singing. But he couldn’t—he couldn’t—maybe he couldn’t make the break from the Beatles. I don’t know what it was, you know. I enjoyed the track. Still, I can’t speak for George, but I was always hurt when Paul would knock something off without involving us. But that’s just the way it was then.”
