I've been meaning to start a semi-regular series celebrating the greatest songwriters of the rock era. I figured I'd start with Steely Dan's Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, who I honestly believe have crafted some of the greatest words and music ever written. I intended to say kind things about professional songwriters like Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller and Dan Penn, celebrate oddball geniuses like Ron Mael of Sparks, praise thoughtful, novelistic singer-songwriters like Warren Zevon, Richard Thompson and Randy Newman.
Honestly, it didn't occur to me at first to say anything about these guys:
After all, the absolutely pure pop bliss of John Lennon and Paul McCartney is such a given, there's not a whole lot left to say about it. Still, the more I plow through The Beatles songbook, the more I wonder about their status as songwriters.
It's pretty much understood that, once past the initial phase of Beatlemania, Lennon and McCartney seldom wrote together. Sure, John might toss out a few lyrical idea to Paul, just as Paul might provide some melodic assistance for John. But even as early as Help, they essentially wrote separately.
Yet just having the other around seemed somehow inspirational. Consider this:
This is, by all accounts, pure Paul, and one of his finest moments. I could geek out all day about what a great song this is, but what I want to note here is its lyrical tone. "Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight...The only difference is you're down there...I'm looking through you, and you're nowhere." Seems kinda bitter for The Cute One, doesn't it? Kind of acerbic, kind of...Lennon-esque.
Not that I'm saying Lennon helped out. There's no indication he had anything to do with this. But his spirit was there; McCartney likely wanted to please him.
It worked the other way, too. This is all Lennon, no doubt:
Angst-filled and sort of depressing, typical John. But that chorus ("Let me take you down") is so airy, so light, so effortlessly melodic--again, not that McCartney wrote it...but it sure sounds like he did.
Another thing about that song--it's so dependent on George Martin's production, it's become difficult to think of the song independent of its sound. Demos exist, of course, and they're gorgeous, proof that yes, this is a great song.
Elsewhere, though, the great song line blurs. This is one of my all-time favorites:
...but is it a great song? It's a great recording, for sure. But it is, fairly transparently, more a collection of snippets jammed together. Brilliant snippets, and the thing as a whole is some sort of crazy masterpiece, but that's only because Lennon, assisted again by George Martin's awesome production skills, makes it work through sheer conviction. As songwriting, it's lazy and unfinished. As record-making, it's great.
And that's the biggest problem with analyzing Lennon and McCartney as songwriters. Their recordings are so well-known, so iconic, that it becomes nearly impossible to discover the craft beneath the familiar trappings, to separate the singer from the song. True, The Beatles rank among the most frequently-covered bands of all time. But most of those covers are lousy, or hew closely to the originals. Even a really great version of a Beatles tune--like Fiona Apple's lovely version of this site's theme song
--seems more like a reaction to the original recording than something wholly original. In Apple's case, she takes Lennon's vision of transcendence and transforms it into something dark and despairing. (More pools of sorrow than waves of joy, you might say.) But she doesn't--can't--truly make it her own, because we know Lennon's version, and whatever Apple does, however well she does it, she nevertheless seems like a pretender.
Which isn't fair to her, or any other artists who've done fine takes on The Beatles songbook. But it's not fair to Lennon and McCartney, either. A song's greatness may best be measured by how malleable it is, how different performers can take it as raw material and discover their own truth inside it. Lennon and McCartney created some of the greatest music ever recorded, but the genius of their own performances limited their songs to be seen forever through a glass onion, impossible to penetrate.
