John Lennon on his two melodies that are up there “with the best of them”
Part of what made John Lennon and Paul McCartney such a powerful musical duo was their ability to weave between each other’s skill sets. At the start, they were a perfect harmony of Ying and Yang, with McCartney managing the melodies while Lennon managed the words. But as their roles switched during their seamless ebb and flow, Lennon proved his own abilities.
Even though Lennon and McCartney’s relationship eventually broke down as the band collapsed, their collaborative relationship is easily one of, if not the most, powerful musical history ever seen. As they met as teenagers, they taught themselves how to write music together, meaning that their songwriting style and process were a shared one that was born out of the trust and joy of long-term friendship. Or maybe even more than friendship, they were more akin to brothers, seemingly able to grow and change and develop alongside one another. As the band’s sound evolved, so did their collaborations, morphing to suit whatever the other wanted to try out or whatever direction they wanted to go in.
So when they first began to move away from the clear-cut rock and roll of their first albums, their roles in the songwriting process moved, too. While McCartney began to stretch out his lyric writing muscles, Lennon expanded his melodic experimentation, leading to some of his favourite works.
“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,” he said of their first releases. That’s reflected in the writing credits. While everything was always shared under the ‘Lennon and McCartney’ credit label, Lennon was the penman of a majority of their early tracks. On A Hard Day‘s Night especially, Lennon wrote ten songs to McCartney’s three, as the bassist was more often found crafting the music while his friend dealt with the words.
But that’s not because Lennon didn’t have melodies in him. The roles weren’t cut and dry, which is exactly why the songs were always credited to both of them. It just seemed to be the way things fell when they sat down to write.
However, when Lennon reflected on the Beatles’ discography later on, it was his own melodic abilities that stuck out. With hindsight, he seemed to see the worth of his own work, giving himself a pat on the back for two songs especially. “When I think of some of my own songs – ‘In My Life’, or some of the early stuff, ‘This Boy’ – I was writing melody with the best of them,” he said.
It’s interesting that the two songs Lennon picked out seem to reflect two different streams of influence in his life. The 1963 track ‘This Boy’, released as a b-side to ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, feels like an old-school crooner number. With elements of doo-wop, it’s a twee style of rock and roll that feels borrowed more from the ‘50s than the countercultural sounds of the ‘60s. With its rich harmonies, it’s a boy band song through and through, reflecting Lennon’s earliest interests back at the start of rock and roll.
On the other hand, ‘In My Life’ reflects the more modern and experimental streak. Through modern ears, the sweet ditty wouldn’t be considered boundary-pushing at all, but at the time and with its position on Rubber Soul, it saw the Beatles merging strains of folk and rock into something new and different. The traditional rock and roll melody is twisted into something looser as Lennon begins to cast off the melodic styles he’d started out with.
With one being an ode to where he began and the other being a sign pointing to where he’d go, those two melodic bests in Lennon’s eyes serve as an artistic blueprint. When he reflected on their worth, the celebration of his own talent felt like a nod of approval as the musician seemed rightfully proud of how he grew as an artist.