She's Leaving Home

It’s almost like a little opera, and it’s one of the best-constructed songs they ever did. The lyrics are particularly telling. I am amazed that they could do this at their age because they could see the conflict between the young and the old.

George Martin – From “The Beatles: Off the Record” by Keith Badman, 2008

From Wikipedia:

“She’s Leaving Home” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, and released on their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Paul McCartney wrote and sang the verse and John Lennon wrote the chorus, which they sang together. Neither George Harrison nor Ringo Starr were involved in the recording. The song’s instrumental background was performed entirely by a small string orchestra arranged by Mike Leander, and is one of only a handful of Beatles recordings in which none of the members played a musical instrument.

Background

Paul McCartney said of the song in his Playboy magazine interview in December 1984:

I wrote that. My kind of ballad from that period. My daughter likes that one. One of my daughters likes that. Still works. The other thing I remember is that George Martin was offended that I used another arranger. He was busy and I was itching to get on with it; I was inspired. I think George had a lot of difficulty forgiving me for that. It hurt him; I didn’t mean to.

McCartney was inspired by a story on the front page of the Daily Mirror, about a girl named Melanie Coe. Although McCartney invented most of the content in the song, Coe, who was 17 at the time, has said that most of it was accurate. In actuality, Coe left with her boyfriend, a croupier. She did not “meet a man from the motor trade”, although her boyfriend previously had been in that trade. She left in the afternoon while her parents were at work, while the girl in the song leaves early in the morning as her parents sleep. Coe was found ten days later because she had let slip where her boyfriend worked. When she returned home, she was pregnant and had an abortion.

Coincidentally, Coe had actually met McCartney three years earlier, 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, and she was interviewed about the song on the BBC programme The One Show on 24 November 2010. In May 2017, Rolling Stone magazine carried an interview with Coe to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the album’s release.

Recording

“She’s Leaving Home” was recorded during the sessions for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The day before McCartney wanted to work on the song’s score, he learned that George Martin, who usually handled the Beatles’ string arrangements, was not available. McCartney contacted Mike Leander, who did it in Martin’s place. This was the first time a Beatles song was not arranged by Martin. Martin, though hurt by this, produced the song and conducted the string section in a session on 17 March 1967 that generated six takes. The melody is composed in a modal scale, typical of English traditional music. The harp was played by Sheila Bromberg, the first female musician to appear on a Beatles record. Three days later, McCartney’s lead vocal and Lennon’s backing vocal were recorded, with the two singing together on each of two vocal tracks, their voices overlapping to match the narrative.

The stereo version of the song, finalised on 17 April 1967, runs at a slower speed than the mono mix, completed on 20 March 1967, and consequently is a semitone lower in pitch. 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.” As the credited composers of “She’s Leaving Home”, Lennon and McCartney received the 1967 Ivor Novello award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically.

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. […]

‘She’s Leaving Home’ the Beatles weren’t even on it, instrumentally. There was just an orchestra and two voices, mine and John’s. At least ‘Yesterday’ I played guitar, so there was a Beatle playing on it. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is the same: the Beatles don’t play on it. So there’s plenty of precedent for this. ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’ was just me and Ringo.

Paul McCartney – Interview for Club Sandwich, November 1995

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 and then… It was rather poignant. I like it as a song, and when I showed it to John, he added the Greek chorus, 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 songwriting 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.

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

In addition to the newspaper report, I’m pretty sure another influence was The Wednesday Play. It was a weekly television play that often addressed ‘big’ social issues. It’s the kind of thing people would be discussing at the bus stop on Thursday morning. It was a very important part of the week. One of the most famous of these plays was Cathy Come Home, directed by Ken Loach. It’s a play about homelessness that a quarter of the UK population watched the night it was broadcast in November 1966.

When we recorded ‘She’s Leaving Home’ it was almost like a shooting script for The Wednesday Play. ‘Clutching her handkerchief / Quietly turning the backdoor key’. On one hand we have the narrator who’s describing the action (‘She’s leaving home’), and then there are a couple of people in the spotlight, a mini Greek chorus, who fade in and out (‘We gave her most of our lives’). There was a line in that style – ‘Is this all the thanks that we get?’ – which somehow didn’t make the final cut.

Paul McCartney – From “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present“, 2021

It was John’s idea for the words of the old couple, ‘What did we do that was wrong?’ in the background. He was looking at the misused old people and also the conflict between them and the young girl. Originally, it was undoubtedly Paul’s song, but John contributed quite a bit in a way with the answering chorus. Mike Leander did the score for the song, because Paul wanted it done at a drop of the hat and I was recording Cilla Black on the day he wanted to go through it. So, it was the song that got away. It was the song I wanted to do.

George Martin – From “The Beatles: Off the Record” by Keith Badman, 2008

‘She’s Leaving Home’ is one more example of Paul working away at home, coming up with another beautiful ballad that tells its own little story. (Like ‘Getting Better’, Paul says the song first came to him as he was walking Martha on Primrose Hill.) John added some telling lines in the chorus — against Paul’s sustained… “She is leaving…” he was to sing the beautiful contrapuntal lines “We gave her most of our lives”. But there were to be no other Beatles on it. Paul wanted the backing to be strings alone.

By this time, Paul had developed quite a taste for orchestras and classical twirly bits generally, which may be why even he does not play an instrument on this track. “She’s Leaving Home” is not, strictly speaking, a Beatles song at all. It is pure McCartney, from start to finish, with a little help from his friend John. And apart from their two voices, all we hear is a harp, a string nonet (four violins, two violas, two cellos and a double bass).

George Martin – From “With A Little Help From My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper“, 1995

I rang George Martin and said, “I’m really on to this song, George. I want to record it next week.” I’m really hot to record it, I’ve got one of those “I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go!” feelings and when you get them, you don’t want anything to stop you, you feel like if you lose this impetus, you’ll lose something valuable. So I rang him and I said, “I need you to arrange it.” He said, “I’m sorry, Paul, I’ve got a Cilla session.” And I thought, Fucking hell! After all this time working together, he ought to put himself out. It was probably unreasonable to expect him to. Anyway, I said, “Well, fine, thanks George,” but I was so hot to trot that I called Mike Leander, another arranger. I got him to come over to Cavendish Avenue and I showed him what I wanted, strings, and he said, “Leave it with me.” It is one of the first times I actually let anyone arrange something and then reviewed it later, which I don’t like as a practice. It’s much easier if I just stay with them. Anyway he took it away, did it, and George Martin was very hurt, apparently. Extremely hurt, but of course I was hurt that he didn’t have time for me but he had time for Cilla.

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

Because Paul wanted to have a string section playing on the song, he rang up to ask if I could come round, take notes from him and then write up a score.

It so happened that I couldn’t. I was already immersed in a recording session, with Cilla Black. Even though the Beatles were the number one thing in my life, I still had a huge roster of other artists to record. These artists understood very well that the Beatles took priority, but there were moments, and this was one of them, when I just couldn’t drop everything and come running.

I was very surprised and rather hurt that Paul picked up the telephone and got hold of a fellow called Mike Leander, after I’d said I couldn’t go round on the spot. Mike was a good arranger, and Paul engaged him to do the score.

Until that moment I had done everything that either Paul or the Beatles had wanted in the way of orchestration. I couldn’t understand why he was so impatient all of a sudden. It obviously hadn’t occurred to him that I would be upset. Years later, in fact, he said, ‘I couldn’t understand why it was so important to you. It was in my mind, and I wanted to get it out, get it down. That’s all.’

It was just Paul being Paul.

George Martin – From “With A Little Help From My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper“, 1995

‘She’s leaving Home’ is a great song, very simple, similar to ‘Eleanor Rigby’.

It’s a much younger girl, but the same sort of loneliness. That was a Daily Mirror story again: This girl left home and her father said: ‘We gave her everything, I don’t know why she left home.’ But he didn’t give her that much, not what she wanted when she left home.

Paul McCartney – Interview with The Observer, November 1967

This record will alter everybody’s approach to record making. I have new thoughts myself now every time I go into the studio. Apart from my contribution, this is a work of art, but I am terrified of the next one.

Mike Leander – Arranger – From “The Beatles: Off the Record” by Keith Badman, 2008

From The Usenet Guide to Beatles Recording Variations:

[a] mono 20 Mar 1967. edited.
UK: Parlophone PMC 7026 Sgt Pepper 1967.
US: Capitol MAS 2653 Sgt Pepper 1967.

[b] stereo 17 Apr 1967. edited.
UK: Parlophone PCS 7026 Sgt Pepper 1967.
US: Capitol SMAS 2653 Sgt Pepper 1967.
CD: EMI CDP 7 46442 2 Sgt Pepper 1987.

A short amount of instrumental work between the verses was removed after the mixing was done, so both mixes are edited. Reverb had been added during mixing, and the edits are a little more obvious in stereo [b], just before Paul starts singing the second and third verses. The two mixes are at different speeds, and we believe stereo [b] was slowed down when mixed (rather than the mono being sped up), partly because the orchestra sounds better in mono [a]. Possibly the tape was made at an off-speed, like many Sgt Pepper songs, and was played for stereo mixing at normal speed?

Lyrics

Variations

• A Mono version • From "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Mono)"
• A2009 2009 mono remaster • From "The Beatles in Mono (2009)"
• A2014 2014 remaster • From "The Beatles In Mono (Vinyl boxset - 2014)"
• B Stereo version • From "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Stereo)"
• B2009 2009 stereo remaster • From "The Beatles • The Original Studio Recordings (2009)"
• C 2017 stereo mix • From "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (50th anniversary boxset)"
• D First mono mix. "RM1" announcement from Emerick, Paul and John can be heard at the beginning ready to sing and then Paul’s count in. The harp at the intro has the ADT effect not featured on the final version and also the extra cello part is present here.
• E Take 1 - Instrumental • From "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (50th anniversary boxset)"
• F Take 6 - Instrumental • From "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (50th anniversary boxset)"
• G 2017 Dolby Atmos mix
• H 2022 Dolby Atmos mix
• L1 Live version • Mexico City • Palacio de los Deportes • Mexico • Nov 03, 2002

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Bootlegs

Live performances

“She's Leaving Home” has been played in 41 concerts.

Latest concerts where “She's Leaving Home” has been played

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