In My Life

• 1. Introduction

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  "In My Life" arrived on Rubber Soul in 1965, and it arrived unlike anything the Beatles had released before. John Lennon called it his "first real major piece of work" in a 1980 interview, and that phrase carries weight when you consider what came before it. The Beatles had built their early career on straightforward love songs. Then came a track that looked backward, not at romance, but at the people and places of a life already lived.

  Who actually wrote the melody? Why does a piano solo sound like a harpsichord? And how does a song that began as a list of bus stops become one of the most celebrated recordings in pop history? Those questions run through the making of "In My Life" and they still do not have clean answers.

• 2. A Journalist's Suggestion

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  English journalist Kenneth Allsop planted the seed. Allsop told Lennon he ought to write songs about his own childhood, and Lennon took the advice seriously. He sat down and produced a long poem built around a bus route he used to travel in Liverpool, naming the stops and landmarks along the way. Penny Lane was in there. Strawberry Field was in there too.

  Lennon later dismissed that first draft harshly. He called it "the most boring sort of 'What I Did on My Holidays Bus Trip' song". He reworked the words entirely, stripping out the specific addresses and replacing them with something more inward, a generalised meditation on the friends and places of his past. Very few lines of the original version survived into the finished recording.

  Peter Shotton, who was both a friend and biographer to Lennon, identified what he believed those surviving lines were really about. The couplet about friends who are dead and friends who are still living was, according to Shotton, a reference to Lennon himself and to Stuart Sutcliffe, who had died in 1962.

• 3. The Melody Dispute

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  Lennon and McCartney spent decades not quite agreeing on who wrote the tune. Lennon's account was that McCartney contributed the harmony and the middle-eight, and not much more. McCartney's account was more expansive. In 1976, he said plainly that he set Lennon's lyrics to music from beginning to end, drawing inspiration from songs by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.

  The disagreement sharpened in 1977 when a magazine called Hit Parader showed McCartney a list of songs Lennon had claimed as primarily his own. "In My Life" was the only entry on that list that McCartney disputed. The songwriting credit runs to Lennon-McCartney, as it does for nearly all Beatles compositions, so the official record offers no resolution. What is not disputed is that the words were Lennon's. McCartney said so himself: "Those were words that John wrote, and I wrote the tune to it. That was a great one."

• 4. The Half-Speed Piano

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  The main recording session took place on the 18th of October 1965. By the time it wrapped, the track was finished except for one gap: the instrumental bridge. Lennon had not settled on what instrument should fill it. He went to George Martin and asked for something "Baroque-sounding" on piano.

  Martin composed a Bach-influenced piece to fit the request. Then he ran into a practical problem: the passage was too fast for him to play at the actual tempo of the song. The solution was technical rather than musical. On the 22nd of October, Martin recorded the piano solo with the tape running at half speed. When that tape was played back at normal speed, the piano sounded an octave higher and twice as fast, clearing the tempo problem at a stroke. The slowing of the tape also changed the tonal quality of the instrument, producing a timbre that listeners would later compare to a harpsichord. That comparison would have consequences far beyond this one track.

• 5. Lasting Reach

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  The harpsichord-like quality of Martin's piano solo did not just define the sound of "In My Life." It moved through the wider world of pop production. Music producers began reaching for actual harpsichords in their arrangements after "In My Life" appeared, treating Martin's accident of tape speed as a template.

  Mojo magazine named "In My Life" the best song of all time in 2000. Rolling Stone placed it at number 23 on its 2004 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, then at number 98 on a revised version of that list in 2021, and fifth on its separate ranking of the Beatles' 100 Greatest Songs. The song placed second on CBC's 50 Tracks. Bette Midler recorded a cover in 1991 for the film For the Boys, and that version reached number 20 on the U.S. Adult Contemporary chart in 1992. The personnel on the original recording included John Lennon on double-tracked vocal and rhythm guitar, Paul McCartney on harmony vocal and bass, George Harrison on harmony vocal and lead guitar, Ringo Starr on drums, and George Martin on piano and tambourine.