"She's Leaving Home" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, released on their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It tells the story of a teenager running away from home due to feeling stifled by the well-meaning but overprotective care of her parents, who are confused and devastated upon learning of her departure.

Paul McCartney wrote and sang the verse and John Lennon wrote the chorus, which they sang together. Neither George Harrison nor Ringo Starr was involved in the track's recording. The song's backing track was performed by a string orchestra under the arrangement of Mike Leander, making it one of the few Beatles recordings in which none of the band members played an instrument.

Background

McCartney was inspired to write the song after reading a Daily Mail article about Melanie Coe, a 17-year-old runaway from Stamford Hill. While McCartney fictionalized much of the song's narrative, Coe has stated that it was largely accurate to her own experience. The only inaccuracies were that Coe's boyfriend was a croupier instead of a car dealer, and she left in the afternoon instead of in the morning. Coe was found ten days after leaving because she had inadvertently revealed her boyfriend's workplace. Upon returning home, she was found to be pregnant and had an abortion.

Coincidentally, Coe had met McCartney in 1963, when he chose her as the prize winner in a dancing contest on ITV's Ready Steady Go!. An update on Coe appeared in The Guardian in December 2008, In May 2017, Rolling Stone magazine carried an interview with Coe to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the album's release. A 2007 Mojo magazine article revealed that the final mono mix was sped up to make McCartney sound younger. The subsequent stereo mix was not sped up, remaining in the original tempo and key. In 2017, for the 50th anniversary edition of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Giles Martin and Sam Okell remixed the stereo version of the song to match the adjusted speed of the mono version. The six-disc version of the anniversary edition also included the previously unreleased first mono mix of "She's Leaving Home", which contains a brief cello phrase at the end of the first two choruses that was removed from the released mixes of the song.

Critical reception

In April 1967, McCartney visited Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys in Los Angeles, where McCartney played "She's Leaving Home" on the piano for Wilson and his wife. Wilson recalled: "We both just cried. It was beautiful."

Composer Ned Rorem once described "She's Leaving Home" as "equal to any song that Schubert ever wrote". In one of the few non-laudatory contemporary reviews of Sgt. Pepper, Richard Goldstein, writing in The New York Times, cited the song as an example of the album's reliance on production over quality songwriting. Goldstein said: She's Leaving Home' preserves all the orchestrated grandeur of 'Eleanor Rigby', but its framework is emaciated ... Where 'Eleanor Rigby' compressed tragedy into poignant detail, 'She's Leaving Home' is uninspired narrative, and nothing more." Author Ian MacDonald considered "She's Leaving Home" to be one of the two best songs on the album, along with "A Day in the Life". In his comments on Sgt. Pepper and its legacy, musicologist Allan Moore highlights these contrasting views as two music critics judging the work from "opposing criteria", with Goldstein opining during the dawn of the counterculture of the 1960s, whereas MacDonald, writing in the 1990s, is "intensely aware of [the movement's] failings".

In 2018, the music staff of Time Out London ranked "She's Leaving Home" at number 10 on their list of the best Beatles songs.

Personnel

According to Ian MacDonald:

  • Paul McCartney – double-tracked vocal, backing vocal
  • John Lennon – double-tracked vocal, backing vocal
  • Mike Leander – string arrangement
  • George Martin – conductor, producer
  • Erich Gruenberg – violin
  • Derek Jacobs – violin
  • Trevor Williams – violin
  • José Luis García – violin
  • John Underwood – viola
  • Stephen Shingles – viola
  • Dennis Vigay – cello
  • Alan Dalziel – cello
  • Gordon Pearce – double bass
  • Sheila Bromberg – harp

Billy Bragg version

A version of the song by Billy Bragg with Cara Tivey reached number one on the UK Singles Chart in 1988, as part of a double-A side with "With a Little Help from My Friends" by Wet Wet Wet. Both tracks were taken from the charity fundraising album Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father.

Notes

References

  • Interview with harpist and Ringo Starr