In My Life

From Wikipedia:

“In My Life” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, released on their 1965 studio album Rubber Soul. Credited to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership, the song is one of only a few in which there is dispute over the primary author; John Lennon wrote the lyrics, but he and Paul McCartney later disagreed over who wrote the melody. George Martin contributed the piano solo bridge.

According to Lennon, “In My Life” was his “first real major piece of work” because it was the first time he wrote about his own life.

In 2000, Mojo named “In My Life” the best song of all time. Rolling Stone ranked it number 23 on its 2004 list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time”, and number 98 on the 2021 revised list, as well as fifth on its list of the Beatles’ “100 Greatest Songs”.

Lyrics

In a 1980 interview, Lennon referred to this song as his “first real major piece of work” because it was the first time he had written about his own life. According to Lennon, the song’s origins can be traced to English journalist Kenneth Allsop’s remark that Lennon should write songs about his childhood. Afterwards, Lennon wrote a song in the form of a long poem reminiscing on those years. The original lyrics were based on a bus route he used to take in Liverpool, naming various sites seen along the way, including Penny Lane and Strawberry Field.

Lennon later thought the original lyrics were “ridiculous”, calling it “the most boring sort of ‘What I Did on My Holidays Bus Trip’ song”. He reworked the words and replaced the specific memories with a generalised meditation on his past. Few lines of the original version remained in the finished song. According to Lennon’s friend and biographer Peter Shotton, the lines “Some [friends] are dead and some are living/In my life I’ve loved them all” referred to himself and Stuart Sutcliffe (who died in 1962).

Music

Lennon’s and McCartney’s recollections differ regarding the music. Lennon said that McCartney’s “contribution melodically was the harmony and the middle-eight.” In 1977, when shown a list of songs Lennon claimed writing on for the magazine Hit Parader, “In My Life” was the only entry McCartney disputed. McCartney said he set Lennon’s lyrics to music from beginning to end, taking inspiration from songs by Smokey Robinson & the Miracles. In 1976, he commented: “I liked ‘In My Life’. Those were words that John wrote, and I wrote the tune to it. That was a great one.”

In a 2018 study, artificial intelligence researchers at Harvard University applied bag-of-words modelling to the notes and chords of the song, and concluded that there was a 18.9% probability of McCartney having written the verse. Lennon was given an 81.1% certainty of writing the verses, while McCartney was given a 43.5% certainty of writing the middle eight. The analysts reported “a large amount of uncertainty” regarding the middle eight.

Recording

The song was recorded on 18 October 1965, and it was complete except for the instrumental bridge. At that time, Lennon had not decided what instrument to use, but he subsequently asked George Martin to play a piano solo, suggesting “something Baroque-sounding”. Martin wrote a Bach-influenced piece that he found he could not play at the song’s tempo. On 22 October, the solo was recorded with the tape running at half speed, so when played back at normal pace the piano was twice as fast and an octave higher, solving the performance challenge and also giving the solo a unique timbre, reminiscent of a harpsichord. […]

‘In My Life’ was, I think, my first real, major piece of work. Up until then it had all been glib and throw-away. I had one mind that wrote books and another mind that churned out things about ‘I love you’ and ‘you love me’, because that’s how Paul and I did it. I’d always tried to make some sense of the words, but I never really cared.

It was the first song that I wrote that was really, consciously, about my life. It was sparked by a remark a journalist and writer in England made after In His Own Write came out. He said to me, ‘Why don’t you put some of the way you write in the book in the songs? Or why don’t you put something about your childhood into the songs?’ So I wrote the lyrics first and then sang it. That was usually the case with things like ‘In My Life’ and ‘Across The Universe’ and some of the ones that stand out a bit. I wrote it in Kenwood, upstairs, where I had about ten tape recorders, all linked up. I’d mastered them over the period of a year or two – I could never make a rock’n’roll record, but I could make some far-out stuff.

I started out as a bus journey from my house on 251 Menlove Avenue to town. I had a complete set of lyrics, naming every sight. It became ‘In My Life’, a remembrance of friends and lovers of the past. Paul helped with the middle eight, musically.

John Lennon – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

I wrote ‘In My Life’ at Kenwood. I used to write upstairs where I had about ten recorders all linked up. I could never make a rock’n’roll record but I could make some far-out ones, where I wrote the lyrics first and then sang it. This was usually the case with things like ‘In My Life’. ‘In My Life’ started off as a bus journey from my house at 250 Menlove Avenue to the town, mentioning every place that I could remember. This is even before ‘Penny Lane’ was written and I had Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, tram sheds, it was the most boring sort of ‘What I Did On My Holidays’ bus trip song, and it wasn’t working at all. But then, I lay back, and these lyrics started coming to me about the places I remember. Paul helped me write the middle-eight melody. The whole lyrics were already written before Paul had even heard it.

John Lennon – From “The Beatles: Off the Record” by Keith Badman, 2008

Funnily enough, this is one of the only songs John and I disagree on. I remember writing the melody on a mellotron that was parked on his half-landing.

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

I arrived at John’s house for a writing session and he had the very nice opening stanzas of the song. As many of our songs were, it was the first pangs of nostalgia for Liverpool…

As I recall, he didn’t have a tune to it, and my recollection, I think, is at variance with John’s. I said, ‘Well, you haven’t got a tune, let me just go and work on it.’ And I went down to the half-landing, where John had a Mellotron, and I sat there and put together a tune based in my mind on Smokey Robinson and the Miracles…

I recall writing the whole melody. And it actually does sound very like me, if you analyse it. I was obviously working to lyrics. The melody’s structure is very me. So my recollection is saying to John, ‘Just go and have a cup of tea or something. Let me be with this for ten minutes on my own and I’ll do it’…

I tried to keep it melodic but a bit bluesy, with the minors and little harmonies, and then my recollection is going back up into the room and saying, ‘Got it, great! Good tune, I think. What d’you think?’ John said, ‘Nice,’ and we continued working with it from then, using that melody and filling out the rest of the verses…

So it was John’s original inspiration, I think my melody, I think my guitar riff. I don’t want to be categorical about this, but that’s my recollection… I find it very gratifying that out of everything we wrote, we only appear to disagree over two songs.

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

“In My Life” is a Lennon masterpiece, though Paul did tell me that he came up with the beautiful little guitar and bass intro, which is also used as a turnaround between the two verses. He was apparently inspired by the guitar and bass intro to the Miracles’ “The Tracks of My Tears,” a brilliant Smokey Robinson song. I find these kinds of revelations so interesting in that one would never make that connection spontaneously—the two intros sound very different—but when the source of inspiration is identified, one can hear a progression from one musical work to the other.

Peter Asher – From “The Beatles from A to Zed: An Alphabetical Mystery Tour“, 2019

Despite what Paul said, in July 2018, a research based on statistic science concluded that it’s very unlikely that he contributed to the song:

[…] Mark Glickman, senior lecturer in statistics at Harvard University, and Jason Brown, Professor of Mathematics at Dalhousie University, created a computer model which broke down Lennon and McCartney songs into 149 different components to determine the musical fingerprints of each songwriter.

And they discovered that, stylistically, there is less than one in 50 chance of Sir Paul having written the music to ‘In My Life.’

“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. The probability that ‘In My Life’ was written by McCartney is .018. Which basically means it’s pretty convincingly a Lennon song. McCartney misremembers.” […]

From The Usenet Guide to Beatles Recording Variations:

• [a] mono 25 Oct 1965.
  UK: Parlophone PMC 1267 Rubber Soul 1965.
  US: Capitol T 2442 Rubber Soul 1965.
• [b] stereo 26 Oct 1965.
  UK: Parlophone PCS 3075 Rubber Soul 1965, Apple PCSP 717 The Beatles 1962-1966 1973.
  US: Capitol ST 2442 Rubber Soul 1965, Apple SKBO-3403 The Beatles 1962-1966 1973.
• [c] stereo 1987.
  CD: EMI CDP 7 46440 2 Rubber Soul 1987, EMI CDP 7 97036 2 The Beatles 1962-1966 1993.

The new CD mix [c] differs from [b] several ways. Both have the lead vocal mixed far right, but a heavy reverb added to [c] is mixed center, sounding almost like a double track vocal. A breath is heard before the vocal starts in [b], the drum is louder in the verses in [b], and a plink in the decay of the guitar, left, at the end of the song is not heard in [c]. The end of the piano solo is faded away slightly better in [c].

Lyrics

Variations

Officially appears on

Bootlegs