Throughout The Beatles’ nine-year existence, the chief songwriting team of John Lennon and Paul McCartney penned quite a few songs, with roughly half of the band’s songs attributed to either member. However, a new study has claimed that there’s one song in the band’s back catalogue that Paul McCartney shouldn’t be receiving credit for.
Back in 1965, The Beatles released their sixth album, Rubber Soul. Halfway through side two lies the song ‘In My Life’, a song whose authorship has long been debated. While the track is officially a Lennon-McCartney composition, the tune features lyrics about John Lennon’s childhood, leading to long-standing debate in regards to who it was that wrote the melody of the tune.
While Lennon claimed that McCartney only contributed the “harmony and the middle-eight itself”, McCartney claimed that “those were words that John wrote, and I wrote the tune to it.” So who is correct? Who actually wrote the tune? Well, apparently this is just one of those questions which we can turn to science for the answer.
As The Telegraph reports, Mark Glickman, a senior lecturer in statistics at Harvard University, has teamed up with Jason Brown, a Professor of Mathematics at Dalhousie University, to answer the burning question over who wrote the melody to ‘In My Life’.
Using a computer model which broke down the group’s songs from 1962-1966 into 149 different components, the pair analysed each of these tracks, creating a unique profile for each one, and effectively generated a rather interesting insight in regards to the songwriting habits of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
“We wondered whether you could use data analysis techniques to try to figure out what was going on in the song to distinguish whether it was by one or the other,” said Dr Glickman.
“The basic idea is to convert a song into a set of different data structures that are amenable for establishing a signature of a song using a quantitative approach. Think of decomposing a colour into its constituent components of red, green and blue with different weights attached.
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“The probability that ‘In My Life’ was written by McCartney is .018. Which basically means it’s pretty convincingly a Lennon song. McCartney misremembers.”
As the pair note, the deciding factor in regards to their conclusion came from the fact that the majority of Paul McCartney’s contributions to The Beatles’ catalogue are rather complex, while John Lennon’s are rather simple in comparison.
“Consider the Lennon song, ‘Help!’” Glickman explained. “It basically goes, ‘When I was younger, so much younger than today,’ where the pitch doesn’t change very much.
“It stays at the same note repeatedly, and only changes in short steps. Whereas with Paul McCartney, you take a song like ‘Michelle’. In terms of pitch, it’s all over the place.”
Strangely, while there’s only a 1 in 50 chance of McCartney having written ‘In My Life’, the study did happen to work out that ‘The Word’ – also from Rubber Soul – should no longer be credited to John Lennon, and that McCartney should be credited as having written that one.
A spokesman for Paul McCartney has reportedly said that the musician will not be commenting on these new findings.
Check out The Beatles’ ‘In My Life’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En4fyOf-X1E
