The Beatles - She's Leaving Home
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Copyright - 1967 EMI Records Ltd.
"She's Leaving Home" is a song, written and sung by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and released in 1967 on The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. McCartney wrote and sung the verse and Lennon the chorus.
Background
Paul McCartney:
" John and I wrote 'She's Leaving Home' together. It was my inspiration. We'd seen a story in the newspaper about a young girl who'd left home and not been found, there were a lot of those at the time, and that was enough to give us a story line. So I started to get the lyrics: she slips out and leaves a note and then the parents wake up . It was rather poignant. I like it as a song, and when I showed it to John, he added the long sustained notes, and one of the nice things about the structure of the song is that it stays on those chords endlessly. Before that period in our song-writing we would have changed chords but it stays on the C chord. It really holds you. It's a really nice little trick and I think it worked very well.
While I was showing that to John, he was doing the Greek chorus, the parents' view: 'We gave her most of our lives, we gave her everything money could buy.' I think that may have been in the runaway story, it might have been a quote from the parents. Then there's the famous little line about a man from the motor trade; people have since said that was Terry Doran, who was a friend who worked in a car showroom, but it was just fiction, like the sea captain in "Yellow Submarine", they weren't real people.
"
The newspaper story McCartney mentioned was from the front page of the Daily Mirror, about a girl named Melanie Coe. Although McCartney made up most of the content, Coe, who was 17 at the time claims that he got most of it right. Her parents wondered why she had left. "She had everything she wanted". In real life, Melanie did not "meet a man from the motor trade", but instead a croupier, and left in the afternoon while her parents were at work. The adventure ended a week later.
Coincidentally, Coe had met McCartney three years earlier when she was a contestant and prize winner on ITV's Ready Steady Go!.
Recording
The day before McCartney wanted to work on the string arrangement, he learned that George Martin was not available to do the score. He contacted Mike Leander, who did it in Martin's place. It was the first time a Beatle song was not arranged by Martin (and the only time it was done with The Beatles' consent - Phil Spector's orchestration of Let It Be was done without The Beatles' knowledge). Martin was hurt by McCartney's actions, but he produced the song and conducted the string section. The harp was played by Sheila Bromberg, the first female musician to appear on a Beatles record.
Recorded Abbey Road Studios
17 March 1967
Lyrics:
Wednesday morning at five o'clock
as the day begins
Silently closing her bedroom door
Leaving the note that she hoped would say more
She goes downstairs to the kitchen
clutching her handkerchief
Quietly turning the back door key
Stepping outside she is free
She (we gave her most of our lives)
is leaving (sacrificed most of our lives)
home (we gave her everything money could buy)
She's leaving home after living alone for
so many years (bye bye)
Father snores as his wife gets into her dressing gown
Picks up the letter that's lying there
Standing alone at the top of the stairs
She breaks down and cries to her husband
Daddy our baby's gone
Why would she treat us so thoughtlessly
How could she do this to me
She (We never thought of ourselves)
is leaving (never a thought for ourselves)
home (we struggled hard all our lives to get by)
She's leaving home after living alone for
so many years (bye bye)
Friday morning at nine o'clock she is far away
Waiting to keep the appointment she made
Meeting a man from the motor trade
She (what did we do that was wrong)
is having (we didn't know it was wrong)
fun (fun is the one thing that money can't buy)
Something inside that was always denied for
so many years (bye bye)
She's leaving home (bye bye)