The divisions of songwriting can often be what makes or breaks any great partnership. Some people fight tooth and nail to ensure that their songs are on the record, but over time, Paul McCartney was willing to disown some songs if it meant giving himself a bit more credit.
Listening to any of those early Beatles songs, no one can deny that McCartney had a firm grasp on what the band sounded like whenever he worked with John Lennon. He and his old mate joined at the hip music-wise, even if Lennon was a bit more adventurous with where he wanted to go. Macca may have loved making people happy, but it wasn’t out of the question for Lennon to take people on a journey that they didn’t expect, either.
That tension may have worked well back in the day, but it became more of a problem as the years went on. There were many instances when McCartney’s whimsy was a bit too much for Lennon, and even if he had nothing to do with the song, he would begrudgingly soldier his way through songs like ‘Ob La Di Ob La Da’ until his partner thought they had the perfect take.
When looking back on his music, though, McCartney did have a few reservations about some songs being credited to both of them when they weren’t. Both of them carried equal weight for a while, but even though they argued about how much each of them contributed to a song like ‘In My Life’, there was no doubt that Lennon wrote every piece of a song like ‘Because’ and that McCartney’s fingerprints were all over the jaunty ‘Your Mother Should Know’.
Since everyone loves a good brand in the business, though, ‘Lennon–McCartney’ was what stuck around for too long. McCartney did eventually talk with Yoko Ono in an attempt to get some of the credit for his own compositions for The Beatles, but even if he was denied every time, he was happy to take his name off of some of Lennon’s best songs if he were to get his way.
After all, Lennon only attributed ‘Give Peace A Chance’ to McCartney as a gift, so Macca felt justified in giving up that song if he could claim ownership of ‘Blackbird’, saying, “John had nothing to do with those words, especially once they’ve been extracted from the music and put into a poetry book. I think it’s fair enough to put ‘Blackbird’ in a poetry book by Paul McCartney. ‘Give Peace A Chance’… take my name off it. It was a great, great anthem of John’s.”
Despite it seeming a little bit petty, McCartney doesn’t exactly have a bad argument for wanting to take back his song. ‘Blackbird’ is a piece of well-crafted beauty, and even in other cases, Lennon said that he never wished to write a song as beautiful as Macca’s ‘Yesterday’, so a subtle change didn’t seem to matter that much to him in the long run.
A lot of the subtle nitpicking over songwriting credits can often feel like watching a musical couple trying to gain custody over their children, but it’s not like it matters that much to the people enjoying them. Everyone mildly interested in The Beatles knows Lennon wrote ‘Give Peace A Chance’ and McCartney wrote ‘Blackbird’, and even if those tensions aren’t resolved, most of us are simply glad to have this music out in the world.