Portrait: Lennon-McCartney

And here we have the most successful songwriting partnership of the twentieth century, looking rather adorably rumpled, and--amazingly--ignoring the camera. (One thing I've noticed is that in nearly all photos of these guys, they're mugging for the camera.) Here's the original.

It seems like a lot of people like to divide up the Lennon-McCartney corpus, trying to work out whose song is whose, or how much either one of them contributed. I'm not sure if that's entirely fair. 'Cause yeah, most of their songs seem to have "belonged" to one or the other, but it seems to me that the big thing, the most important part, is that every song had to be approved. It wasn't finished until they both said so. 'Cause McCartney wrote the whole of "Hey Jude": lyrics, melody, chords, everything, but he wasn't sure of some of the lyrics. But when Lennon heard it, his response was, essentially, "Don't change anything."

Imagine "Hey Jude" with different words.

Speaking of which, "Hey Jude" is one of the four songs I used in the backdrop. The photo's backdrop was just so bland that I had to do something. So I scrounged around for pictures of original manuscripts. The other three songs are "A Day in the Life" (Lennon's part: I wanted to find McCartney's to match, but couldn't), "Here, There, and Everywhere" (one of McCartney's that Lennon especially liked), and "I Am the Walrus" (one of Lennon's that McCartney especially liked).

So now I've learned a thing or two about their handwriting. Lennon wrote with a hard downstroke, so he got a lot of varying widths, while McCartney attacks each letter individually, interrupting the flow - something I do myself.

I've come across more than one interview where Paul McCartney says that even to this day, when he writes songs, sometimes ("not always") he can hear Lennon's critique in his head: "and he'll either gripe or approve."

Created in ArtRage 4, using markers.