She's Leaving Home

"She's Leaving Home" is a Lennon–McCartney song, released in 1967 on the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Paul McCartney wrote and sang the verse and John Lennon wrote the chorus, which they sang together. Neither George Harrison nor Ringo Starr was involved in the recording. The song's instrumental background was performed entirely by a small string orchestra arranged by Mike Leander, and was one of only a handful of Beatles songs in which the members did not play any instruments on the recording.

Background

Paul McCartney said of the song:

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 ... It was rather poignant. I like it as a song, and when I showed it to John, he added the 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 song-writing 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.^[3]

The newspaper story McCartney mentioned was from the front page of the Daily Mirror, about a girl named Melanie Coe. Although McCartney invented most of the content in the song, Coe, who was 17 at the time, claims that most of it was accurate. In actuality, Coe left with her boyfriend, a croupier. She did not "meet a man from the motor trade", although her boyfriend previously had been in that trade.^[4] She left in the afternoon while her parents were at work, while the girl in the song leaves early in the morning as her parents sleep. Coe was found ten days later because she had let slip where her boyfriend worked.^[5] When she returned home, she was pregnant and had an abortion.^[6]

By coincidence, Coe had actually met McCartney three years earlier, in 1963 when he chose her as the prize winner in a dancing contest on ITV's Ready Steady Go!.^[7] An update on Coe appeared in the Daily Mail in May 2008,^[8] in The Guardian in December 2008,^[4] and she was interviewed about the song on the BBC programme The One Show on 24 November 2010.

Recording

"She's Leaving Home" was recorded during the sessions for the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The day before McCartney wanted to work on the song's score, he learned that George Martin, who usually handled the Beatles' string arrangements, was not available. McCartney contacted Mike Leander, who did it in Martin's place. This was the first time a Beatles song was not arranged by Martin. Martin was hurt by McCartney's actions, but he produced the song and conducted the string section, in a session on 17 March 1967 that generated six takes.^[9] The harp was played by Sheila Bromberg, the first female musician to appear on a Beatles record.^[10][11] Three days later, McCartney's lead vocal and Lennon's backing vocal were recorded, with the two singing together on each of two vocal tracks, their voices overlapping to match the narrative.^[9]

The stereo version of the song, finalized on 17 April 1967, runs at a slower speed than the mono mix, completed on 20 March 1967, and consequently is a semitone lower in pitch.^[12][13] A 2007 Mojo magazine article revealed that the final mono mix was sped up to make McCartney sound younger.^[14] The subsequent stereo mix was not sped up, remaining in the original tempo and key. In 2017, for the 50th anniversary edition of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Giles Martin and Sam Okell remixed the stereo version of the song to match the adjusted speed of the mono version.^[15] The six-disc version of the anniversary edition also included the previously unreleased first mono mix of "She's Leaving Home", which contains a brief cello phrase at the end of the first two choruses that was removed from the released mixes of the song.^[12]

Critical reception

In April 1967, McCartney visited Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys in Los Angeles, where he played "She's Leaving Home" on the piano for him and his wife. Wilson recalled: "We both just cried. It was beautiful."^[6] As the credited composers of "She's Leaving Home", Lennon and McCartney received the 1967 Ivor Novello award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically.^[16]

Composer Ned Rorem once described "She's Leaving Home" as "equal to any song that Schubert ever wrote".^[17] In one of the few non-laudatory contemporary reviews of Sgt. Pepper,^[18] Richard Goldstein, writing in The New York Times, cited the song as an example of the album's reliance on production over quality songwriting. Goldstein said: "'She's Leaving Home' preserves all the orchestrated grandeur of 'Eleanor Rigby', but its framework is emaciated ... Where 'Eleanor Rigby' compressed tragedy into poignant detail, 'She's Leaving Home' is uninspired narrative, and nothing more."^[19] Author Ian MacDonald considered "She's Leaving Home" to be one of the two best songs on the album, along with "A Day in the Life".^[20] In his comments on Sgt. Pepper and its legacy, musicologist Allan Moore highlights these contrasting views as two music critics judging the work from "opposing criteria", with Goldstein opining during the dawn of the counterculture of the 1960s, whereas MacDonald, writing in the 1990s, is "intensely aware of [the movement's] failings".^[21]

Personnel

According to Ian MacDonald:^[20]

• Paul McCartney – double-tracked lead vocals
• John Lennon – double-tracked lead vocals
• Mike Leander – string arrangement
• George Martin – conductor, producer
• Erich Gruenberg – violin
• Derek Jacobs – violin
• Trevor Williams – violin
• José Luis García – violin
• John Underwood – viola
• Stephen Shingles – viola
• Dennis Vigay – cello
• Alan Dalziel – cello
• Peter Halling – cello
• Gordon Pearce – double bass
• Sheila Bromberg – harp

Live performances

Paul McCartney performed the song live for the first time by any Beatle on the (North America) second leg of his 2002 Driving World Tour. He later reprised the song on his 2003 Back in the World Tour.

Cover versions

• Harry Nilsson on his album Pandemonium Shadow Show (1967).^[22]
• Lana Cantrell one her album Another Shade of Lana (1967)
• Esther and Abi Ofarim on their album Up to Date (1968).
• Richie Havens on his album Richard P. Havens 1983 (1969).
• Kathy McCord on her album Kathy McCord (1970).
• Euson on his album Both Sides Now (1971).
• Syreeta Wright on her album Syreeta (1972).
• Debbie Byrne on her album She's a Rebel (1974).
• Bryan Ferry on the soundtrack album to All This and World War II (1976).
• Bee Gees, from the film Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978). Only the first two verses were sung, with the sound of an actress, playing the mother, saying: "Daddy, our baby's gone!".
• Al Jarreau on his albums All Fly Home (1978) and on Tenderness (1994).
• Steven Tyler, The Bee Gees, Jay MacIntosh and John Wheeler in the film Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)
• Mina on her album Kyrie (1980).
• Billy Bragg with Cara Tivey on the tribute album Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father (1988).^[23]
• McCoy Tyner on the tribute album (I Got No Kick Against) Modern Jazz (1995).^[24]
• Carl Doy on his album Together (2002).
• Brad Mehldau on his album Day is Done (2005).
• Carrie Underwood on the season 6 finale of American Idol (2007).
• Cheap Trick on their album Sgt. Pepper Live (2009).^[25]
• Andy Timmons on the album Andy Timmons Band Plays Sgt. Pepper (2011).
• Al Di Meola on his album All Your Life (2013).
• The Flaming Lips on their album With a Little Help from My Fwends (2014).
• Young Voices Brandenburg on their album Sound of Home (2016).

Notes

References