She's Leaving Home

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"She's Leaving Home"
Cover of the Northern Songs sheet music (licensed to Sonora Musikförlag)
Song by the Beatles
from the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Released26 May 1967[1]
Recorded17 March 1967,
EMI Studios, London
GenreBaroque pop[2]
Length3:26 (mono, 2017 stereo)
3:35 (1967-2009 stereo)
LabelParlophone
Songwriter(s)Lennon–McCartney
Producer(s)George Martin

"She's Leaving Home" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and released on their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Paul McCartney wrote and sang the verse and John Lennon wrote the chorus, which they sang together. Neither George Harrison nor Ringo Starr was involved in the recording. The song's instrumental background was performed entirely by a small string orchestra arranged by Mike Leander, and was one of only a handful of Beatles songs in which the members did not play any instruments on the recording.

Background

Paul McCartney said of the song:

John and I wrote "She's Leaving Home" together. It was my inspiration. We'd seen a story in the newspaper about a young girl who'd left home and not been found, there were a lot of those at the time, and that was enough to give us a story line. So I started to get the lyrics: she slips out and leaves a note and then the parents wake up ... It was rather poignant. I like it as a song, and when I showed it to John, he added the long sustained notes, and one of the nice things about the structure of the song is that it stays on those chords endlessly. Before that period in our song-writing we would have changed chords but it stays on the C chord. It really holds you. It's a really nice little trick and I think it worked very well. While I was showing that to John, he was doing the Greek chorus, the parents' view: "We gave her most of our lives, we gave her everything money could buy." I think that may have been in the runaway story, it might have been a quote from the parents. Then there's the famous little line about a man from the motor trade; people have since said that was Terry Doran, who was a friend who worked in a car showroom, but it was just fiction, like the sea captain in "Yellow Submarine", they weren't real people.[3]

The newspaper story McCartney mentioned was from the front page of the Daily Mirror, about a girl named Melanie Coe. Although McCartney invented most of the content in the song, Coe, who was 17 at the time, has said that most of it was accurate. In actuality, Coe left with her boyfriend, a croupier. She did not "meet a man from the motor trade", although her boyfriend previously had been in that trade.[4] She left in the afternoon while her parents were at work, while the girl in the song leaves early in the morning as her parents sleep. Coe was found ten days later because she had let slip where her boyfriend worked.[5] When she returned home, she was pregnant and had an abortion.[6]

By coincidence, Coe had actually met McCartney three years earlier, in 1963 when he chose her as the prize winner in a dancing contest on ITV's Ready Steady Go!.[7] An update on Coe appeared in the Daily Mail in May 2008,[8] in The Guardian in December 2008,[4] and she was interviewed about the song on the BBC programme The One Show on 24 November 2010.[citation needed] In May 2017, Rolling Stone magazine carried an interview with Coe to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the album's release.[9]

Recording

"She's Leaving Home" was recorded during the sessions for the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The day before McCartney wanted to work on the song's score, he learned that George Martin, who usually handled the Beatles' string arrangements, was not available. McCartney contacted Mike Leander, who did it in Martin's place. This was the first time a Beatles song was not arranged by Martin. Martin, though hurt by this, produced the song and conducted the string section in a session on 17 March 1967 that generated six takes.[10] The melody is composed in a modal scale, typical of English traditional music. The harp was played by Sheila Bromberg, the first female musician to appear on a Beatles record.[11][12] Three days later, McCartney's lead vocal and Lennon's backing vocal were recorded, with the two singing together on each of two vocal tracks, their voices overlapping to match the narrative.[10]

The stereo version of the song, finalized on 17 April 1967, runs at a slower speed than the mono mix, completed on 20 March 1967, and consequently is a semitone lower in pitch.[13][14] A 2007 Mojo magazine article revealed that the final mono mix was sped up to make McCartney sound younger.[15] The subsequent stereo mix was not sped up, remaining in the original tempo and key. In 2017, for the 50th anniversary edition of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Giles Martin and Sam Okell remixed the stereo version of the song to match the adjusted speed of the mono version.[16] The six-disc version of the anniversary edition also included the previously unreleased first mono mix of "She's Leaving Home", which contains a brief cello phrase at the end of the first two choruses that was removed from the released mixes of the song.[13]

Critical reception

In April 1967, McCartney visited Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys in Los Angeles, where he played "She's Leaving Home" on the piano for him and his wife. Wilson recalled: "We both just cried. It was beautiful."[6] As the credited composers of "She's Leaving Home", Lennon and McCartney received the 1967 Ivor Novello award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically.[17]

Composer Ned Rorem once described "She's Leaving Home" as "equal to any song that Schubert ever wrote".[18] In one of the few non-laudatory contemporary reviews of Sgt. Pepper,[19] Richard Goldstein, writing in The New York Times, cited the song as an example of the album's reliance on production over quality songwriting. Goldstein said: "'She's Leaving Home' preserves all the orchestrated grandeur of 'Eleanor Rigby', but its framework is emaciated ... Where 'Eleanor Rigby' compressed tragedy into poignant detail, 'She's Leaving Home' is uninspired narrative, and nothing more."[20] Author Ian MacDonald considered "She's Leaving Home" to be one of the two best songs on the album, along with "A Day in the Life".[21] In his comments on Sgt. Pepper and its legacy, musicologist Allan Moore highlights these contrasting views as two music critics judging the work from "opposing criteria", with Goldstein opining during the dawn of the counterculture of the 1960s, whereas MacDonald, writing in the 1990s, is "intensely aware of [the movement's] failings".[22]

In 2018, the music staff of Time Out London ranked "She's Leaving Home" at number 5 on their list of the best Beatles songs.[23]

Personnel

According to Ian MacDonald:[21]

Live performances

Paul McCartney performed the song live for the first time by any Beatle on the (North America) second leg of his 2002 Driving World Tour. He later reprised the song on his 2003 Back in the World Tour.

Cover versions

Notes

  1. ^ Everett 1999, p. 123. "In the United Kingdom Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ... was rush-released six days ahead of its official date, June 1."
  2. ^ Kirell, Andrew (24 December 2015). "The Guide to Streaming the Beatles Now That Their Songs Are Online". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 7 May 2016.
  3. ^ Miles 1997, p. 316.
  4. ^ a b Coe, Melanie (13 December 2008). "Bet you think this song is about you". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 October 2015.
  5. ^ Turner 2010, pp. 125–127.
  6. ^ a b "100 Greatest Beatles Songs: No. 82 - 'She's Leaving Home'". Rolling Stone. 19 September 2011. Retrieved 17 June 2012.
  7. ^ YouTube 2009.
  8. ^ Hall 2008.
  9. ^ Runtagh, Jordan (23 May 2017). "Beatles' 'Sgt. Pepper' at 50: Meet the Runaway Who Inspired 'She's Leaving Home'". Rolling Stone.
  10. ^ a b Winn 2009, p. 95.
  11. ^ Martin & Hornsby 1994, pp. 207–208.
  12. ^ Lewisohn 1988, p. 103.
  13. ^ a b Howlett, Kevin (2017). Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Super Deluxe Edition (booklet). The Beatles. London: Apple Records. p. 61. {{cite AV media notes}}: Unknown parameter |titlelink= ignored (|title-link= suggested) (help)
  14. ^ Howlett, Kevin (2009). The Beatles in Mono (booklet). The Beatles. London: Apple Records. p. 3. {{cite AV media notes}}: Unknown parameter |titlelink= ignored (|title-link= suggested) (help)
  15. ^ Irvin, Jim (March 2007). "The Big Bang!". Mojo. p. 78.
  16. ^ O'Toole, Kit (11 June 2017). "The Beatles, "She's Leaving Home" from Sgt. Pepper's (1967): Deep Beatles". Something Else Reviews. Retrieved 15 January 2018.
  17. ^ Lister, David (28 May 1994). "Pop ballads bite back in lyrical fashion". The Independent. Retrieved 30 January 2017.
  18. ^ Time 1967.
  19. ^ Moore 1997, pp. 57–58.
  20. ^ Goldstein, Richard (18 June 1967). "The Beatles: Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band (Capitol)". The New York Times. Available at Rock's Backpages (subscription required).
  21. ^ a b MacDonald 2005, p. 245.
  22. ^ Moore 1997, p. 37.
  23. ^ Time Out London Music (24 May 2018). "The 50 Best Beatles songs". Time Out London. Retrieved 11 December 2018.
  24. ^ Thomas, Stephen. "Pandemonium Shadow Show - Harry Nilsson : Songs, Reviews, Credits, Awards". AllMusic. Retrieved 17 June 2013.
  25. ^ Mills, Ted. "Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father - Various Artists". AllMusic. Retrieved 17 June 2013.
  26. ^ Yanow, Scott. "A I Got No Kick Against Modern Jazz - Various Artists". AllMusic. Retrieved 17 June 2013.
  27. ^ Thomas, Stephen. "Sgt. Pepper Live - Cheap Trick". AllMusic. Retrieved 17 June 2013.

References

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