She's Leaving Home
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| "She's Leaving Home" | ||
|---|---|---|
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| Song by The Beatles | ||
| Songwriter(s): John Lennon / Paul McCartney | ||
| From the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | ||
| Album released | June 1, 1967 | |
| Genre | Rock | |
| Song Length | 3:35 | |
| Record label | Apple Records | |
| Producer | George Martin | |
| Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Album Listing | ||
| Fixing a Hole (Track 5) |
She's Leaving Home (Track 6) |
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! (Track 7) |
"She's Leaving Home" is a song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and performed by the Beatles on the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Some have speculated that it is about an abortion or suicide.
Paul wrote the verses, John the refrain with long sustained notes and the parents' answers. Paul and John's vocals were heavily double-tracked for the refrain to create a kind of emotional choir sound. The string section was arranged by Mike Leander, a last-minute decision by McCartney when George Martin was away and could not do it. George Martin changed it a little and produced the song. The harp was played by Sheila Bromberg, the first female musician to appear on a Beatles record.
Paul McCartney:
- "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 and then ... It was rather poignant. I like it as a song, and when I showed it to John, he added the Greek chorus, 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 songwriting 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."
- (Quote from "Many Years from now" by Barry Miles)
A song again out of the Daily Mirror front page, this time it was about a girl called Melanie Coe. Although Paul had to make up most of the data, the truth is that he got it quite right according to Melanie, a 17 year old at the time (Steve Turner "A Hard Days Write"). Her parents wondered why she had left... 'she had everything she wanted'. In the real life, Melanie didn't meet a man from the motor trade, but instead a croupier, and left in the afternoon while her parents were at work. The adventure ended a week later. Melanie had met Paul 3 years earlier as a prize winner on ITVs "Ready-Steady-Go" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6OJn3eYAOE).
The stereo version of this song was mixed at a lower pitch and plays very slowly, while the mono mix (now out-of-print) has a quicker tempo.
The same year, Harry Nilsson covered this song on Pandemonium Shadow Show. In 1976, Bryan Ferry covered the song for the evanescent musical documentary All This and World War II. In 1988, Billy Bragg's version of the song - a double A-side with Wet Wet Wet's "With A Little Help From My Friends" - reached #1 in the UK.
