Paul McCartney Thinks John Lennon’s Harmonica Riff Helped Give ‘Love Me Do’ a ‘Terrific Sense of Longing’ That ‘Touches the Soul’
Paul McCartney thinks John Lennon‘s harmonica riff helped give The Beatles‘ “Love Me Do” a “terrific sense of longing” that “touches the soul.” It’s simple yet powerful. That wasn’t the only time one of them added something magical to the other’s songs.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote ‘Love Me Do’ at Paul’s childhood home
In his book, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul wrote that he and John wrote “Love Me Do” at his childhood home, 20 Forthlin Road. They went up a little garden path, past Paul’s father’s lavender hedge, up by the front door where he had planted a mountain ash, his favorite tree.
Paul explained that you’d come to the front door and then into a small parlor to the left of the door, and then you could go through the parlor to the dining room behind that. That’s where Paul and John wrote many of their early songs.
The “Yesterday” singer can visualize the moment they wrote “Love Me Do” “again and again.”
Paul thinks John’s riff brought something special to ‘Love Me Do’
Decades later, Paul can still imagine the moment he and John wrote “Love Me Do.”
Paul said that John came up with a simple harmonica riff randomly. “There’s nothing to it; it’s a will-o’-the-wisp song,” Paul wrote. “But there’s a terrific sense of longing in the bridge which, combined with that harmonica, touches the soul in some way.”
The singer-songwriter added that “Love Me Do” wasn’t a major hit; it crept into the charts. However, it was a great start for The Beatles. They had a “fresh sound,” and that’s the sort of thing that got a band noticed back then. Plus, they had a “very fresh image.”
“Nobody looked like us,” Paul wrote. “Before not too long, of course, everybody looked like us.”
The singer-songwriter also said John added something magical to ‘All My Loving’
In the early days of The Beatles, Paul and John knew exactly how to make the other’s songs better. They’d come together and write for about three hours. The songwriting partners never had a dry session, although they came close once.
“A lot of what we had going for us was that we were both good at noticing the stuff that just pops up, and grabbing it,” Paul wrote. “And the other thing is that John and I had each other. If he was sort of stuck for a line, I could finish it. If I was stuck for somewhere to go, he could make a suggestion.
“We could suggest the way out of the maze to each other, which was a very handy thing to have. We inspired each other.”
Paul said John added something to make “Love Me Do” better, but the older musician also knew how to make “All My Loving” “magical.”
“He’s playing the chords as triplets,” Paul said. “That was a last-minute idea, and it transforms the whole thing, giving it momentum. The song is obviously about someone leaving to go on a trip, and that driving rhythm of John’s echoes the feeling of travel and motion. It sounds like a car’s wheels on the motorway, which, if you can believe it, had only really become a thing in the U.K. at the end of the fifties.”
Paul said it was often like that when The Beatles recorded. One of them would come up with that “little magic thing” that allowed the song to “become what it needed to be.”
