National Post (National Edition)
Beatles study tackles old question: In whose life?
OTTAWA • Does Mccartney misremember? It’s an interesting possibility — that the great Sir Paul, one of the finest songwriters of all time, mistakenly remembers writing a hit that wasn’t his at all.
That’s one way to interpret a new statistical analysis from Canadian and American researchers, who claim a study of 70 Beatles songs and song fragments reveals that John Lennon was behind a Beatles hit for which both he and Mccartney have taken credit.
For all that the songwriting duo credited their dozens of hits to Lennonmccartney — a long-standing agreement that applied even to songs written exclusively by one or the other — the true authorship of each Beatles song has long fascinated fans, especially in the rare cases where the two have publicly disagreed.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is In My Life, a sentimental ballad on the Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul, to which both Mccartney and Lennon have laid claim.
Lennon wrote the lyrics, a nostalgic reminiscence on his life to that point, and also claimed to have written the bulk of the melody.
In 1971, he told Rolling Stone he “wrote the lyrics first and then sang it,” though he conceded that “Paul helped with the middle eight, to give credit where it’s due.”
Mccartney remembers it differently. In his 1997 biography, Many Years From Now, Mccartney claims he wrote the whole melody after telling Lennon to “Just go and have a cup of tea or something,” because he hadn’t yet worked out a tune.
“And it actually does sound very like me, if you analyze it,” he said. “I was obviously working to lyrics. The melody’s structure is very me.”
Except it isn’t, according to a new analysis from researchers at Harvard and Dalhousie universities. Actually, it’s very Lennon.
“You have to rely on memory for those kinds of things,” said Jason Brown, a professor of mathematics at Dalhousie University in Halifax who says he taught himself the guitar as a teenager after hearing a Beatles album. “I was looking for a more scientific way to go about doing it.” So Brown teamed up with Mark Glickman, a senior lecturer in statistics at Harvard, to put the Beatles’ claims to the test.
In a three-month endeavour that only a devoted fan would willingly undertake, Brown worked his way through every Beatles song from the band’s inception through to their seventh studio album, Revolver, released in 1966. He collected data from each song, including chords and chord progressions, intervals between notes, and the shape of phrases — for instance, whether sequences of notes go up or down, or stay the same. He had to do it by hand, he explained, to sort out intentional repetition (think of that line at the end of Hey Jude) from the recurring musical quirks that distinguish the two writers.
Brown and his colleagues then built a model, using the known authorship of most Beatles songs, that could gauge whether a given song was a Lennon or Mccartney creation. Called a “bag-ofwords model,” Brown said, the technique has been used with text to compare different writers based on their tendency to use certain words.
Brown said the model correctly identified either Lennon or Mccartney as the main author of each Beatles song about 80 per cent of the time. When it comes to In My Life, the researchers say there’s a less than two per cent chance that Mccartney wrote the ballad. “I think we were surprised with the level of accuracy,” Brown said. The research has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal but will be presented at a conference in Vancouver this week.
Despite the results, Brown is unwilling to state categorically that Mccartney had nothing to do with the song. “There could be a bunch of things going on,” he said. “It could be that Lennon did indeed write the whole thing. It could be that… perhaps Paul wrote some of it, but some significant part of it is written by John and that sort of overrides all.” He said it’s also possible Mccartney played a larger role in writing the song, but it was later edited by Lennon. “It’s kind of hard to tell.”
Brown said this type of analysis can be used to help create music in the style of different artists, or to look for the influence of certain musicians in the work of others. “It’s a question of what makes authorship of a creative work. What are the characteristics that someone adds in to a poem or to a song that makes it uniquely them?” he said. “People think of music as entirely emotional, but it’s not. There’s a huge part of it that’s analytical.”
As for the Beatles, the fascination with John and Paul’s rivalry and the debate over which was the better songwriter will likely persist, nourished every time McCartney talks wistfully about a Mccartney-lennon credit. But Brown isn’t trying to put all those old arguments to bed. “I think I’m giving life to this question,” he said. “It’s a fascinating question and people should talk more about it.”