When I was younger I didn’t really like The Beatles, though I did like individual songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of McCartney and The Beatles, and this quote from the Wikipedia’s A Day in the Life discussion is good:
“Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on ‘A Day in the Life’ that was a real ... The way we wrote a lot of the time: you’d write the good bit, the part that was easy, ‘I read the news today’ or whatever it was, then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it; then we would meet each other, and I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa. He was a bit shy about it because I think he thought it’s already a good song. Sometimes we wouldn’t let each other interfere with a song either, because you tend to be a bit lax with someone else’s stuff, you experiment a bit. So we were doing it in his room with the piano. He said ‘Should we do this?’; ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’”
(Here’s a link to A Day in the Life on YouTube.)
(Dear Jackie Waller: Sorry, you were right, I would have liked the Beatles if I took the time to listen to them.)
