How Lennon and McCartney Wrote Together

Woolton, 6 July 1957

John Lennon and Paul McCartney met on 6 July 1957 at the St Peter's Church garden fête in Woolton, Liverpool, where John's group the Quarrymen were playing. Their mutual friend Ivan Vaughan introduced them. Paul, just turned 15, impressed John by playing Eddie Cochran's 'Twenty Flight Rock' and knowing the full words, and soon joined the group.

The songwriting partnership grew out of that friendship. Within a year or two they were writing together at Paul's family home, 20 Forthlin Road, and at John's Aunt Mimi's house on Menlove Avenue, often while Paul's father was at work. Paul kept the songs in a school exercise book, heading pages with the phrase 'Another Lennon-McCartney Original'. Many of those early songs were never recorded, but the habit of sitting down together with two guitars and finishing a song in an afternoon became the foundation for everything that followed.

From the start they agreed that anything either of them wrote for the group would be credited to both. That agreement, made as teenagers, is why every Beatles song by either man carries the Lennon-McCartney name.

1962 to 1964: Writing Face to Face

In the early Beatles years, John and Paul wrote many songs together in the same room, facing each other, each playing guitar, each able to see the other's chord shapes. Paul has described this method many times, and the results include some of the defining singles of the era.

The stories are specific. 'From Me to You' was written on 28 February 1963 on the tour coach during the Beatles' tour with Helen Shapiro. 'She Loves You' was begun in a hotel room in Newcastle upon Tyne on 26 June 1963, after a show, and finished the next day at Forthlin Road, where Jim McCartney famously suggested they sing 'yes, yes, yes' instead of the American-sounding 'yeah'. The boys ignored him. 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' was written on a piano in the basement of 57 Wimpole Street in London, the home of Paul's girlfriend Jane Asher's family, in October 1963.

These joint songs share a working method as much as a sound. One of them would arrive with an opening line or a chord change, the other would push back or add the next section, and they kept going until the song was done. Paul has said they rarely left a session without a finished song. The results are short, fast and built around hooks and close harmony, and the finishing was genuinely shared even when one of them brought the starting idea.

The credit order took a moment to settle. On the original Please Please Me album of March 1963, the songwriting credit read McCartney-Lennon. It settled as Lennon-McCartney later that year, and it stayed that way for the rest of the Beatles' career.

1965 to 1967: Separate Songs, Shared Finishing

From 1965 the way they worked changed. John had moved to Kenwood in Weybridge in July 1964, and Paul settled at 7 Cavendish Avenue in St John's Wood in 1966, so the easy afternoons at Forthlin Road were over. Each increasingly wrote alone and brought songs in finished or nearly finished, and the other would add a middle eight, fix a line or suggest a title. The partnership did not end, it changed shape.

The best examples show the two personalities side by side. On 'We Can Work It Out' (1965), Paul wrote the optimistic verses and John the more impatient middle section. 'Michelle' was Paul's song, and John contributed the middle eight. In 'A Day in the Life' (1967), John's song is interrupted by Paul's separate middle section about getting up and going to work, and the two pieces are joined by the orchestral crescendo. 'Baby You're a Rich Man' was formed by joining two unfinished songs, one from each of them.

Competition was just as important as collaboration. When John brought in 'Strawberry Fields Forever' in late 1966, Paul answered with 'Penny Lane', and the two were released together as a double A-side in February 1967. Each pushed the other to go further, and both said so in later interviews.

1968 to 1970 and the Years After

By the White Album in 1968, most songs were essentially solo compositions, and many were recorded with only some of the band present. Yet small collaborations continued. 'I've Got a Feeling' (1969) welds Paul's song to a separate John song, and the two sing their parts at the same time in the final section. On 'Hey Jude', Paul played John a line he intended to replace as a placeholder, and John told him to leave it in. Paul has said that line is the moment he thinks of John when he sings the song on stage.

After the split the partnership turned into public rivalry for a while. On Ram (1971), Paul's 'Too Many People' was widely heard as a dig at John. John responded with 'How Do You Sleep?' on Imagine later that year, a far harsher attack. By the mid-1970s the two were on better terms, and they met several times before John's death on 8 December 1980.

Paul's 1982 song 'Here Today', from Tug of War, is written as an imagined conversation with John, and he still performs it in concert. In 2023 the partnership got one final chapter: 'Now and Then', built from a John demo of the late 1970s and completed by Paul and Ringo with a guitar part George had recorded in 1995, was released as the last Beatles song in November 2023 and went to No.1 in the UK.

Why the Partnership Worked

The usual shorthand is that Paul brought the melody and optimism and John brought the edge and the realism. There is some truth in it, but it sells both men short. John wrote tender ballads such as 'Julia' and 'Across the Universe', and Paul wrote 'Helter Skelter' and 'I'm Down'. The truer picture is two writers with different instincts who each knew exactly what the other was good at and were not afraid to say when a song was not finished.

Two things stand out. First, the speed. In 1963 alone the Beatles released two albums, Please Please Me and With the Beatles, plus three UK number one singles, 'From Me to You', 'She Loves You' and 'I Want to Hold Your Hand', none of which appeared on a UK album. The joint method made that pace possible while they toured almost without a break. Second, the editing. Even in the later years, when they were writing separately, each man was the other's first and toughest audience, and Paul has spoken about bringing songs to John knowing they would be challenged.

They also wrote more than the Beatles could use. Songs were handed to other Brian Epstein acts and friends: 'Bad to Me' went to No.1 in the UK for Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas in 1963, 'I Wanna Be Your Man' gave the Rolling Stones an early hit before the Beatles recorded it themselves, and Paul's 'A World Without Love' topped the UK and US charts for Peter and Gordon in 1964. All carried the Lennon-McCartney credit, whoever wrote them.

The Business Side: Northern Songs and the Credit

In February 1963 music publisher Dick James set up Northern Songs to publish Lennon-McCartney songs, with John, Paul and Brian Epstein's NEMS as shareholders alongside James and his business partner. The company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1965, and in 1969 control passed to ATV, leaving John and Paul without ownership of their Beatles-era catalogue. In 1985 Michael Jackson bought ATV's music publishing, including the Beatles songs, for a reported $47.5 million, and the catalogue later became part of Sony/ATV. In January 2017 Paul filed a claim in the US to reclaim his share of the copyrights under US termination rules, and the dispute was settled privately later that year.

The credit itself has occasionally caused friction. On the 1976 live album Wings Over America, the Beatles songs Paul performed were credited with his name first, and when he did the same on the 2002 live album Back in the US, Yoko Ono objected publicly. Paul's argument was that for songs like 'Yesterday', which he wrote alone and on which no other Beatle plays, putting his name first was fair. The Beatles' own releases still use Lennon-McCartney.

If you want the full story in the two men's own words, Paul's commentary in The Lyrics (2021) is the best starting point. Our review of The Lyrics covers what it adds, and our list of the best Beatles books includes the major histories of the partnership.