She's Leaving Home
| "She's Leaving Home" | ||
|---|---|---|
| File:Pepper's.jpg | ||
| Song by The Beatles | ||
| From the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | ||
| Album released | June 1 1967 | |
| Genre | Rock | |
| Song Length | 3:35 | |
| Record label | Apple Records | |
| Producer | George Martin | |
| Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Album Listing | ||
| Fixing a Hole (Track 5) |
She's Leaving Home (Track 6) |
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! (Track 7) |
"She's Leaving Home" is a song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and performed by the Beatles on the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Some have speculated that it is about an abortion or suicide.
Paul wrote the verses, John the refrain with long sustained notes and the parents answers. Paul and john's vocals were heavily double-tracked for the refrain to create a kind of emotional choir sound. The string section was arranged by Mike Leander, George Martin changed it a little and produced the song. The harp was played by Sheila Bromberg, the first female musician to appear on a Beatles record.
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 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."
- (Quote from "Many Years from now" by Barry Miles)
The story on which the song was based is probably that of Melanie Coe. She commented about the song a few years later, saying: "I was surprised how accurate the song was to my story. The only difference was that I never met a man from 'the motor trade.' I met him at a casino and I never left home while my parents were asleep I left while they were at work." Melanie left as she felt she didn't have any freedom. She married the man she ran off with but the marriage did not last. She now has children with another partner.
The same year, Harry Nilsson covered this song on Pandemonium Shadow Show.
