The Songwriting Process

This page has a long list of Beatles songwriting quotes, mostly from John Lennon. Here are a few of my favorites:

I like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, [Paul McCartney and I] wrote that together and it’s a beautiful melody. We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball. Like in ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, I remember when we got the chord that made the song. We were in Jane Asher’s house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the same time. And we had, ‘Oh you-u-u / got that something…’ And Paul hits this chord, and I turn to him and say, ‘That’s it!’ I said, ‘Do that again!’ In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that – both playing into each other’s noses.

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Paul had a lot of training, could play a lot of instruments. He’d say, “Well, why don’t you change that there? You’ve done that note 50 times in the song.” You know, I’ll grab a note and ram it home. Then again, I’d be the one to figure out where to go with a song, a story that Paul would start. In a lot of the songs, my stuff is the “middle eight,” the bridge.

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‘Rain’. That’s me again, with the first backwards tape on record anywhere. I got home from the studio and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana… and, as I usually do, I listened to what I’d recorded that day. Somehow it got on backwards and I sat there, transfixed, with the earphones on. I ran in the next day and said, ‘I know what to do with it, I know… listen to this!’ So I made them all play it backwards. The fade is me actually singing backwards with the guitars going backwards. (sings) ‘Sharethsmnowthsmeanss!’ That one was the gift of God, of Ja actually, the god of marijuana, right? So Ja gave me that one.

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I was lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play Beethoven’s – Moonlight Sonata, on the piano. Suddenly I said, ‘can you play those chords backwards’. She did, and I wrote ‘ Because ‘, around them. The lyrics are clear, no bullshit, no imagery, no obscure references.

Source: John Lennon: In My Life