TATAR #14 She's Leaving Home

by Paul McCartney and John Lennon (1967)

It always seemed a pity to me that one of the greatest pop writers never had a pop at musical theatre. Paul McCartney branched out into classical works and painting and poetry but never, as far as I know, even attempted a musical. That's a shame and not just for us.

Trying your hand at an oratorio or two will stretch you as a composer. A musical, on the other hand, gives you the opportunity to write songs, duets, trios, choral numbers, songs in character, songs with specificity, songs in a dramatic context. Musicals allow songwriters to develop as songwriters. 

And, if this song is anything to go by, McCartney would have been a great musical theatre writer. You only have to look at the time signature to know that this is a different kind of a Beatles number. They didn't write much in 3/4, which is more for waltzing than rock 'n' rolling. So there's no heavy backbeat. It's really a story song but it's the brief character portraits that make it so interesting. 

There are three characters involved. Firstly, the young girl who's leaving home:

"She goes downstairs to the kitchen 

Clutching her handkerchief"

Nice visual detail that. The kind that says a lot without having to say much. I also love the way that the final phrase of the first verse ends with "leaving the note that she hoped would say more". Then, in the second verse, the same phrase gets shortened to "stepping outside she is free". That shortening puts the emphasis on the word "free" and leaves more of a gap after it, before the chorus kicks in. It feels like she's opened the door and paused as the cold air hits her face.  

Secondly, there are the parents.

"We gave her everything money could buy"

Finally, there's the narrator who plays the neutral observer and only hints at his point of view towards the end when he sympathises with the young girl:

"Something inside that was always denied

For so many years"

Then again, the parents have their sympathetic moments too:

"We struggled hard all our lives to get by"

And, frankly, the girl's decision is hardly looking like a bed of roses:

"Waiting to keep the appointment she made

Greeting a man from the motor trade"

Running off with a car dealer is what you might call a sub-optimal solution. And that's the image that we're left with: the young girl waiting. We're not sure the fella ever turns up.

So we have three distinct character voices. But here's the trick with this song: in th chorus, we get to hear all three at the same time. So the chorus' words are the narrator's matter-of-fact description:

"She is leaving home"

But that long high note on "home" speaks to the young girl's bid for freedom as she tries to release herself from her domestic prison. Then underneath, we get the the voices of the parents, lower and more dirge-like and full of overdone self-pity:

"We gave her most of our lives

Sacrificed most of our lives"

We can actually hear something of all three characters simultaneously. And, even though we're only getting small hints about the characters, it's enough to tell us that they're more ambiguous than mere caricatures. That's quite an achievement for a three-and-a-half-minute song. 

And, frankly, it's very musical theatre.