John Lennon and Paul McCartney were two of the most prolific songwriters in history, and their partnership was responsible for some of the most iconic songs ever written. One of their most famous collaborations was “Eleanor Rigby,” a haunting ballad about loneliness and isolation.
In a interview, John shared his memories of writing the song with McCartney. John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote together all the time, they gave each other their opinions and helped finish pieces. McCartney asked Lennon for help completing “Eleanor Rigby.”
John agreed that “Eleanor Rigby” was one of Paul’s more complex songs, but he said this was partly thanks to him.
“Ah, the first verse was his and the rest are basically mine,” John said in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono. “But the way he did it … Well, he knew he had a song. But by that time he didn’t want to ask for my help, and we were sitting around with Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall, so he said to us, ‘Hey, you guys, finish up the lyrics.’”
John understood that Paul was really only asking him for help, so they began working on the song together.
“We came up with Father McCartney for a bit, but Paul said his dad would be upset, so we made it into McKenzie, even though McCartney sounded better,” he explained. “And then we went on to new characters … It’s hard to describe, even with the clarity of memory, the moment the apple falls. The thing will start moving along at a speed of its own, then you wake up at the end of it and have this whole thing on paper, you know? Who said what to whom as we were writing, I don’t know.”
He added that George Harrison helped contribute the “All the lonely people” line. Beyond the first verse, one of the only elements Lennon gave McCartney full credit for was the orchestral backing.
“The violins backing was Paul’s idea,” he said. “Jane Asher had turned him on to Vivaldi, and it was very good, the violins, straight out of Vivaldi. I can’t take any credit for that, a-tall.”
According to audio engineer Geoff Emerick, though, the strings were producer George Martin’s idea. McCartney initially balked at the thought of adding them.
“We sometimes wrote together. All our best work – apart from the early days, like ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ we wrote together and things like that – we wrote apart always. The ‘One After 909,’ on the Let It Be LP, I wrote when I was 17 or 18. We always wrote separately, but we wrote together because we enjoyed it a lot sometimes, and also because they would say well, you’re going to make an album get together and knock off a few songs, just like a job.”
“I wrote ‘Eleanor Rigby’ when I was living in London and had a piano in the basement,” Paul said in The Beatles Anthology. “I used to disappear there and have a fiddle around, and while I was fiddling on a chord some words came out: ‘Dazzie-de-da-zu picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been…’ This idea of someone picking up rice after a wedding took it in that poignant direction, into a ‘lonely people’ direction.”
While he thought he invented the name “Eleanor Rigby,” he believes he likely saw it on a gravestone. He used to spend time in a cemetery with John and, years later, realized there was a gravestone with the name “Eleanor Rigby” on it.
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