John Lennon Believed He Could Perform This Classic Beatles Track Better Than Paul
John Lennon and Paul McCartney built their songwriting partnership on a mutual understanding that whoever wrote the song would have the final say-so in how that track turns out, but that doesn’t mean they always agreed with one another. One such example came from their penultimate album, Abbey Road. Years after its release, Lennon would lament over the fact that McCartney insisted on singing the lead vocal.
Speaking to David Geff during one of his final interviews before his death in 1980, Lennon discussed “Oh! Darling” and what he liked (and didn’t like) about the blues rocker. He described the song as “a great one of Paul’s that he didn’t sing too well. I always thought that I could’ve done it better. It was more my style than his. He wrote it, so what the hell, he’s going to sing it. If he’d had any sense, he should have let me sing it.”
To some degree, I’d be inclined to agree with Lennon. Of the two musicians, he was certainly the grittier of the two. “Oh! Darling” sounds more akin to Lennon’s composition, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”, than, say, McCartney’s “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, elsewhere on the album. Hearing how Lennon interpreted those blues lines would have undoubtedly been an interesting example of how the men differed in their vocal approach. But alas, the songwriter got the final say. And in this case, that was McCartney.
Source: Melanie Davis/americansongwriter.com
