Lennon/McCartney
From Beatles Wiki - Interviews, Music, Beatles Quotes
| “ | We knew we were good. People used to say to us, 'Do you think John and you are good songwriters?' and I'd say— "Yeah it may sound conceited but it would be stupid of me to say 'No, I don't,' or 'Well, we're not bad' because we are good." Let's face it. If you were in my position, which was working with John Lennon, who was a great, great man — It's like that film 'Little Big Man.' He says, 'We wasn't just playing Indians, we was LIVIN' Indians.' And that's what it was. I wasn't just talking about it, I was living it. I was actually working with the great John Lennon, and he with me. It was very exciting. | „ |
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—Paul McCartney, 1988 |
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| “ | When did your songwriting partnership with Paul end? That ended... I don't know, around 1962, or something, I don't know. If you give me the albums I can tell you exactly who wrote what, and which line. We sometimes wrote together. All our best work — apart from the early days, like "I Want to Hold Your Hand" we wrote together and things like that — we wrote apart always. The "One After 909," on the "Let It Be" LP, I wrote when I was 17 or 18. We always wrote separately, but we wrote together because we enjoyed it a lot sometimes, and also because they would say well, you're going to make an album get together and knock off a few songs, just like a job. |
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—John Lennon, "The Rolling Stone Interview", 1971 |
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| “ | I said that [playing down how much he and McCartney collaborated], but I was lying.... We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball.... In those days we absolutely used to write like that — both playing into each other's noses. | „ |
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—John Lennon, Playboy Interview |
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| “ | It's too easy to put it off if we just meet without any plan and say, 'Shall we write something today?' If you do that then you feel as though you're losing a free day. What we're going to do is make dates beforehand and sort of say, 'Right, Wednesday and Friday of this week are for songwriting. And Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of next week.' Then we'll know it's something we've to keep to. | „ |
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—John Lennon, 1966 |
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| “ | We would normally be rung a couple of weeks before the recording session and they'd say, 'We're recording in a month's time and you've got a week off before the recordings to write some stuff.' ... So I'd go out to John's every day for the week, and the rest of the time was just time off. We always wrote a song a day, whatever happened we always wrote a song a day... Mostly it was me getting out of London, to John's rather nice, comfortable Weybridge house near the golf course... So John and I would sit down, and by then it might be one or two o'clock, and by four or five o'clock we'd be done. | „ |
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—Paul McCartney, 1994 |
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| “ | Songs, these days, are no problem for The Beatles. It just seems to get easier every month. Of course, they have more time now. Back in '63 and '64, they had to write numbers late at night in hotel rooms. They would work into the early hours of the morning and, in the dead of night, you would hear Paul yell across the room, something like, 'Hey, John. What rhymes with girl?' Nowadays, they get together at John's house and there are no interruptions, no guitars tuning in their ears and no bangs on the door for autographs. They have complete peace and quiet and this has been one big reason why they got half of the songs for [Rubber Soul] written in one week, which is very good going! | „ |
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—Neil Aspinall, 1965 |
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| “ | Sometimes they say, 'Now you must write,' and now we write. But it doesn't come some days. We sit there for days just talking to each other, messing 'round not doing anything. | „ |
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—John Lennon, 1966 |
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| “ | John and Paul's standard of writing has bettered over the years, so it's very hard for me to come straight to the top, on par with them. They gave me an awful lot of encouragement. Their reaction has been very good. If it hadn't, I think I would have just crawled away. | „ |
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—George Harrison, 1966 |
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| “ | You can't say that Paul and I are writing separately these days. We do both. When it comes to nweeding 500 songs for Friday, you've gotta get together. I definitely find I work better when I've got a deadline to meet. It really frightens you, and you've got to churn them out. All the time, I'm sort of arranging things in my mind. | „ |
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—John Lennon, 1969 |
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"Two of Us" from Let It Be:
And a loose, fun version:
