an essay about the song eleanor rigby by the beatles

“Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles

Introduction.

Eleanor Rigby is a song written by Paul McCartney and released on The Beatles 1966 album “Revolver” and as a single with “Yellow Submarine.” The song was usually performed by The Beatles band and later by McCartney with guest musicians (The Beatles 2016). The style of the song is more experimental compared to previous rock and rock-n-roll compositions of the band. This paper aims to present the song Eleanor Rigby and provide suggestions about why it makes such a strong impression on the audience.

The song was recorded with the participation of string musical instruments – a violin, and a cello. On a video of Paul McCartney’s live performance with orchestra musicians, one can see five violinists and two cellists, as well as Paul McCartney, with a six-string acoustic guitar. Lyrics were written mainly by McCartney, with the participation of the rest of the quartet, McCartney himself describes the contribution of his comrades as 20% and his contribution as 80%.

The text of the song tells about loneliness and about older people who live lonely lives. The mood of the song is mysterious and tragic, but at the same time, cheerful and life-affirming. It is the combination of these seemingly unrelated components that makes this song one of my favorites. The syncopic rhythm creates a unique mood; the use of Dorian mode as a melodic base, the participation of stringed instruments, and a rather fast tempo do not allow listeners to become upset.

Thus, an Eleanor Rigby song by Paul McCartney and The Beatles was described, and the reasons why it has so many devoted listeners were presented. To summarize it, perhaps the fact is that the style of the song is experimental and studio-based. Besides, the participation of string instruments and deep lyrics together make a strong impression. It’s safe to say that this song has millions of fans around the world.

The Beatles. 2016. “Eleanor Rigby.” YouTube video, 2:11. 2020. Web.

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Song Analysis — The Topic of Solitude in The Song “Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles

The Topic of Solitude in The Song "Eleanor Rigby" by The Beatles

• Categories: Song Analysis The Beatles

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Published: May 7, 2019

Words: 1082 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, the theme of loneliness in "eleanor rigby", works cited.

Father McKenzie/ Writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear/ No one comes near" (13-15).

• The Beatles. (1966). Eleanor Rigby [Song]. On Revolver. Capitol Records.
• Benitez, V. (2014). The Beatles: A Cultural Revolution. Rowman & Littlefield.
• Moore, A. (2016). The Essential Beatles: Essays on the Fab Four. McFarland.
• Reising, R., & LeBlanc, J. (2009). "You Won't See Me": Power, Gender, and the Subject in "Eleanor Rigby". In The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles (pp. 74-97). Cambridge University Press.
• Inglis, I. (2010). The Beatles, Popular Music and Society: A Thousand Voices. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Doyle, T. (2004). The Beatles: Yellow Submarine. Cambridge University Press.
• Turner, S. (2016). The Gospel according to the Beatles. Westminster John Knox Press.

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The Meaning Behind “Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles

Alex Hopper

“Eleanor Rigby” was released by The Beatles in 1966 as part of their Revolver album roll-out. A unique offering for the famed group, the song features only a string arrangement and vocal from Paul McCartney across the verses. The full group joins in on the chorus for a few moments of classic Beatles harmony.

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Paul McCartney recounted the song’s origin and meaning in a 2018 interview with GQ, saying “Over the years, I’ve met a couple of others, and maybe their loneliness made me empathize with them. But I thought it was a great character, so I started this song about the lonely old lady who picks up the rice in the church, who never really gets the dreams in her life. Then I added in the priest, the vicar, Father McKenzie. And so, there were just the two characters. It was like writing a short story, and it was basically on these old ladies that I had known as a kid.”

Behind the Lyrics

McCartney, who penned most of this song, got the name from the actress Eleanor Bron, who appeared in the 1965 Beatles film Help! . “Rigby” came to him while in Bristol, England when he spotted a store named Rigby and Evens Ltd. Wine and Spirit Shippers. He liked the way the two names ringed together because it sounded natural and matched the rhythm he wrote.

As the opening chorus makes perfectly clear, the song is a sort of character piece about “all the lonely people.” The song’s intricate string arrangement underscores the narrative Paul McCartney sings about across the track’s three verses. The two characters, Eleanor and Father McKenzie, are both isolated in their own lives before finally “meeting” after Eleanor’s death, with the priest burying her.

Eleanor Rigby Meaning

The first verse follows the titular Eleanor as she tidies up after a wedding send-off and peers through the window at her house.

Eleanor Rigby, picks up the rice In the church where a wedding has been Lives in a dream Waits at the window, wearing the face That she keeps in a jar by the door Who is it for

When McCartney first introduces us to Eleanor she is living in a “dream” world of her own, picking up rice from a wedding that was thrown over the happy couple. With the opening lines, he quickly lets the listener know that the closest Eleanor comes to getting married herself is tidying up after everyone has left.

Eleanor Rigby, died in the church And was buried along with her name Nobody came Father McKenzie, wiping the dirt From his hands as he walks from the grave No one was saved

Later it’s revealed that Eleanor died, leaving no one to carry on her name. McCartney adds a bit of irony towards the end of the song by having the song’s two characters cross paths a little too late. If the two had met earlier they might have become friends with something in common, but it was too late. Eleanor died leaving Father McKenzie to “meet” her while officiating the funeral. He also implies that McKenzie’s sermon “saved” no one given that nobody attended.

Father McKenzie

The second character featured in the song’s lyrics is Father McKenzie. Without having much of a congregation, McKenzie is forced to write sermons that “no one will hear.” He later talks about darning his socks. Question is, if no one else will see if his socks are darned, why does he care? The second verse’s lines speak to the priest’s isolation and lack of companionship.

Father McKenzie, writing the words Of a sermon that no one will hear No one comes near Look at him working, darning his socks In the night when there’s nobody there What does he care

McCartney spoke about this section of the song in a November 2020 piece for Rolling Stone saying, “Father McKenzie is ‘darning his socks in the night.’ You know, he’s a religious man, so I could’ve said, you know, ‘preparing his Bible,’ which would have been more obvious. But ‘darning his socks’ kind of says more about him. So you get into this lovely fantasy.”

More Popular Than Jesus

“Eleanor Rigby” was released just weeks after John Lennon made the widely controversial claim that “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now.”

With the addition of a priest and the many mentions that “no one was saved,” the song could be seen as a swipe at Christianity and the concept of being saved by Jesus.

Despite the controversy still brewing around the band thanks to Lennon’s comments, the song largely evaded any criticism, possibly because of the lilting string section making the song’s dark lyrics easier to handle.

Eleanor Rigby’s Gravestone

Fans can actually go to Eleanor Rigby’s gravestone in St. Peter’s Churchyard in Woolton, England—the suburb of Liverpool where McCartney and Lennon first met.

The gravestone bearing the name shows that she died in October of 1939 at 44. Elsewhere in the cemetery is a gravestone with the name McKenzie written on it. Despite the two names appearing in such close proximity, McCartney has denied that the gravestones were the source of the names. Although he has agreed that they may have registered subconsciously.

Photo by John Pratt/Keystone/Getty Images

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Writing “Eleanor Rigby”

My mum’s favorite cold cream was Nivea, and I love it to this day. That’s the cold cream I was thinking of in the description of the face Eleanor keeps “in a jar by the door.” I was always a little scared by how often women used cold cream.

Growing up, I knew a lot of old ladies—partly through what was called Bob-a-Job Week, when Scouts did chores for a shilling. You’d get a shilling for cleaning out a shed or mowing a lawn. I wanted to write a song that would sum them up. Eleanor Rigby is based on an old lady that I got on with very well. I don’t even know how I first met “Eleanor Rigby,” but I would go around to her house, and not just once or twice. I found out that she lived on her own, so I would go around there and just chat, which is sort of crazy if you think about me being some young Liverpool guy. Later, I would offer to go and get her shopping. She’d give me a list and I’d bring the stuff back, and we’d sit in her kitchen. I still vividly remember the kitchen, because she had a little crystal-radio set. That’s not a brand name; it actually had a crystal inside it. Crystal radios were quite popular in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. So I would visit, and just hearing her stories enriched my soul and influenced the songs I would later write.

Eleanor Rigby may actually have started with a quite different name. Daisy Hawkins, was it? I can see that “Hawkins” is quite nice, but it wasn’t right. Jack Hawkins had played Quintus Arrius in “Ben-Hur.” Then, there was Jim Hawkins, from one of my favorite books, “Treasure Island.” But it wasn’t right. This is the trouble with history, though. Even if you were there, which I obviously was, it’s sometimes very difficult to pin down.

It’s like the story of the name Eleanor Rigby on a marker in the graveyard at St. Peter’s Church in Woolton, which John and I certainly wandered around, endlessly talking about our future. I don’t remember seeing the grave there, but I suppose I might have registered it subliminally.

St. Peter’s Church also plays quite a big part in how I come to be talking about many of these memories today. Back in the summer of 1957, Ivan Vaughan (a friend from school) and I went to the Woolton Village Fête at the church together, and he introduced me to his friend John, who was playing there with his band, the Quarry Men.

I’d just turned fifteen at this point and John was sixteen, and Ivan knew we were both obsessed with rock and roll, so he took me over to introduce us. One thing led to another—typical teen-age boys posturing and the like—and I ended up showing off a little by playing Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” on the guitar. I think I played Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-a-Lula” and a few Little Richard songs, too.

A week or so later, I was out on my bike and bumped into Pete Shotton, who was the Quarry Men’s washboard player—a very important instrument in a skiffle band. He and I got talking, and he told me that John thought I should join them. That was a very John thing to do—have someone else ask me so he wouldn’t lose face if I said no. John often had his guard up, but that was one of the great balances between us. He could be quite caustic and witty, but once you got to know him he had this lovely warm character. I was more the opposite: pretty easygoing and friendly, but I could be tough when needed.

I said I would think about it, and a week later said yes. And after that John and I started hanging out quite a bit. I was on school holidays and John was about to start art college, usefully next door to my school. I showed him how to tune his guitar; he was using banjo tuning—I think his neighbor had done that for him before—and we taught ourselves how to play songs by people like Chuck Berry. I would have played him “I Lost My Little Girl” a while later, when I’d got my courage up to share it, and he started showing me his songs. And that’s where it all began.

I do this “tour” when I’m back in Liverpool with friends and family. I drive around the old sites, pointing out places like our old house in Forthlin Road, and I sometimes drive by St. Peter’s, too. It’s only a short drive by car from the old house. And I do often stop and wonder about the chances of the Beatles getting together. We were four guys who lived in this city in the North of England, but we didn’t know one another. Then, by chance, we did get to know one another. And then we sounded pretty good when we played together, and we all had that youthful drive to get good at this music thing.

To this very day, it still is a complete mystery to me that it happened at all. Would John and I have met some other way, if Ivan and I hadn’t gone to that fête? I’d actually gone along to try and pick up a girl. I’d seen John around—in the chip shop, on the bus, that sort of thing—and thought he looked quite cool, but would we have ever talked? I don’t know. As it happened, though, I had a school friend who knew John. And then I also happened to share a bus journey with George to school. All these small coincidences had to happen to make the Beatles happen, and it does feel like some kind of magic. It’s one of the wonderful lessons about saying yes when life presents these opportunities to you. You never know where they might lead.

And, as if all these coincidences weren’t enough, it turns out that someone else who was at the fête had a portable tape machine—one of those old Grundigs. So there’s this recording (admittedly of pretty bad quality) of the Quarry Men’s performance that day. You can listen to it online. And there are also a few photos around of the band on the back of a truck. So this day that proved to be pretty pivotal in my life still has this presence and exists in these ghosts of the past.

I always think of things like these as being happy accidents. Like when someone played the tape machine backward in Abbey Road and the four of us stopped in our tracks and went, “Oh! What’s that?” So then we’d use that effect in a song, like on the backward guitar solo for “I’m Only Sleeping.” It happened more recently, too, on the song “Caesar Rock,” from my album “Egypt Station.” Somehow this drum part got dragged accidentally to the start of the song on the computer, and we played it back and it’s just there in those first few seconds and it doesn’t fit. But at the same time it does.

So my life is full of these happy accidents, and, coming back to where the name Eleanor Rigby comes from, my memory has me visiting Bristol, where Jane Asher was playing at the Old Vic. I was wandering around, waiting for the play to finish, and saw a shop sign that read “Rigby,” and I thought, That’s it! It really was as happenstance as that. When I got back to London, I wrote the song in Mrs. Asher’s music room in the basement of 57 Wimpole Street, where I was living at the time.

Around that same time, I’d started taking piano lessons again. I took lessons as a kid, but it was mostly just practicing scales, and it seemed more like homework. I loved music, but I hated the homework that came along with learning it. I think, in total, I gave piano lessons three attempts—the first time when I was a kid and my parents sent me to someone they knew locally. Then, when I was sixteen, I thought, Maybe it’s time to try and learn to play properly. I was writing my own songs by that point and getting more serious about music, but it was still the same scales. “Argh! Get outta here!” And, when I was in my early twenties, Jane’s mum, Margaret, organized lessons for me with someone from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she worked. I even played “Eleanor Rigby” on piano for the teacher, but this was before I had the words. At the time, I was just blocking out the lyrics and singing “Ola Na Tungee” over vamped E-minor chords. I don’t remember the teacher being all that impressed. The teacher just wanted to hear me play even more scales, so that put an end to the lessons.

When I started working on the words in earnest, “Eleanor” was always part of the equation, I think, because we had worked with Eleanor Bron on the film “Help!” and we knew her from the Establishment, Peter Cook’s club, on Greek Street. I think John might have dated her for a short while, too, and I liked the name very much. Initially, the priest was “Father McCartney,” because it had the right number of syllables. I took the song to John at around that point, and I remember playing it to him, and he said, “That’s great, Father McCartney.” He loved it. But I wasn’t really comfortable with it, because it’s my dad—my father McCartney—so I literally got out the phone book and went on from “McCartney” to “McKenzie.”

The song itself was consciously written to evoke the subject of loneliness, with the hope that we could get listeners to empathize. Those opening lines—“Eleanor Rigby / Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been / Lives in a dream.” It’s a little strange to be picking up rice after a wedding. Does that mean she was a cleaner, someone not invited to the wedding, and only viewing the celebrations from afar? Why would she be doing that? I wanted to make it more poignant than her just cleaning up afterward, so it became more about someone who was lonely. Someone not likely to have her own wedding, but only the dream of one.

Allen Ginsberg told me it was a great poem, so I’m going to go with Allen. He was no slouch. Another early admirer of the song was William S. Burroughs, who, of course, also ended up on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper.” He and I had met through the author Barry Miles and the Indica Bookshop, and he actually got to see the song take shape when I sometimes used the spoken-word studio that we had set up in the basement of Ringo’s flat in Montagu Square. The plan for the studio was to record poets—something we did more formally a few years later with the experimental Zapple label, a subsidiary of Apple. I’d been experimenting with tape loops a lot around this time, using a Brenell reel-to-reel—which I still own—and we were starting to put more experimental elements into our songs. “Eleanor Rigby” ended up on the “Revolver” album, and for the first time we were recording songs that couldn’t be replicated onstage—songs like this and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” So Burroughs and I had hung out, and he’d borrowed my reel-to-reel a few times to work on his cut-ups. When he got to hear the final version of “Eleanor Rigby,” he said he was impressed by how much narrative I’d got into three verses. And it did feel like a breakthrough for me lyrically—more of a serious song.

George Martin had introduced me to the string-quartet idea through “Yesterday.” I’d resisted the idea at first, but when it worked I fell in love with it. So I ended up writing “Eleanor Rigby” with a string component in mind. When I took the song to George, I said that, for accompaniment, I wanted a series of E-minor chord stabs. In fact, the whole song is really only two chords: C major and E minor. In George’s version of things, he conflates my idea of the stabs and his own inspiration by Bernard Herrmann, who had written the music for the movie “Psycho.” George wanted to bring some of that drama into the arrangement. And, of course, there’s some kind of madcap connection between Eleanor Rigby, an elderly woman left high and dry, and the mummified mother in “Psycho.” ♦

Eleanor Rigby: the Echoes of Loneliness in the Beatles’ Artistry

How it works

When discussing The Beatles' extensive discography, it is easy to get lost in the upbeat rhythms of "Twist and Shout" or the psychedelic melodies of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". However, hidden amidst these rock anthems and experimental sounds lies "Eleanor Rigby", a poignant reflection on loneliness and the human condition. This track, though seemingly simple in its composition, provides a deep dive into the realms of alienation and societal indifference, themes that are just as relevant today as they were when the song was first released. Need a custom essay on the same topic? Give us your paper requirements, choose a writer and we’ll deliver the highest-quality essay! Order now

The opening lines of "Eleanor Rigby" introduce us to the titular character, a woman who "picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been." Immediately, this paints a picture of solitude; Eleanor is on the fringes, observing a celebration of love and union, yet she remains disconnected from it. The narrative follows her mundane life, capturing the essence of her loneliness until her eventual demise, where she is buried along with her name. This idea that one's identity and existence can fade away without acknowledgment or remembrance is deeply unsettling. The song's chorus, with its haunting inquiry "Ah, look at all the lonely people. Where do they all come from?" emphasizes the ubiquitous nature of this solitude, suggesting that Eleanor's story is but one of many.

Parallel to Eleanor's story runs the tale of Father McKenzie, another emblematic figure of isolation. A priest who writes sermons that "no one will hear", he becomes the sole mourner at Eleanor's funeral, emphasizing the circular nature of loneliness. While Eleanor lived in seclusion, so too did Father McKenzie, and their paths cross only in the most melancholic of circumstances. This poignant intersection of their lives serves as a reminder that even in a world filled with people, genuine connections are rare.

Musically, "Eleanor Rigby" stands out in The Beatles' catalogue. Eschewing their usual rock instruments, the band instead opted for a string octet, giving the song its unique baroque-pop sound. The classical influence, combined with the song's somber lyrics, creates an atmosphere of timeless melancholy. It's as if the narrative could belong to any era, emphasizing the universal and enduring nature of its themes. Moreover, Paul McCartney's vocals, clear and filled with a quiet despair, further underline the song's emotional weight.

But what truly makes "Eleanor Rigby" a masterpiece is its relevance. The issues of loneliness and societal indifference it touches upon are not confined to a particular time period. In today's digital age, where connections are often limited to online interactions, many find themselves feeling more isolated than ever. Eleanor's and Father McKenzie's stories serve as cautionary tales, reminding listeners of the importance of real-world connections and the dangers of letting individuals become mere faces in the crowd.

The Beatles have often been lauded for their innovative approach to music and their ability to capture the zeitgeist of their times. However, with "Eleanor Rigby", they achieved something truly remarkable: they crafted a song that speaks to every generation. It's a reflection on the human experience, on the moments of solitude we all feel, and on the societal structures that often exacerbate this isolation.

In conclusion, "Eleanor Rigby" is not just a song; it's a mirror held up to society. It prompts introspection, urging listeners to look beyond the surface and recognize the Eleanor Rigbys and Father McKenzies around them. In doing so, it serves as a timeless reminder of the need for compassion, understanding, and genuine human connection in a world that often seems cold and indifferent.

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The Culture Club

Analysis: eleanor rigby by the beatles.

Eleanor Rigby is perhaps the Beatles’ most shocking song. Not simply because of the sound of it, which was an abrupt departure for its time, but because of its theme. It is hard to think of a more desolate statement in any work of art, let alone popular music.

This song marked a sudden break with the optimism that was a hallmark of The Beatles’ earlier work, and in its place presented an almost unbearably dark cynicism. Two lonely people, living in a church community, cannot find a way to connect and end up living their entire lives alone and apart. Their destiny is not that they will end up together, but that one buries the other, a grim irony that would be humorous if it weren’t tragic (the poet Ezra Pound is said to have ‘smiled lightly’ when he first heard the song).

But the song suggests even greater despair. We learn that Eleanor dies in church, which ought to be a comfort, and ‘was buried along with her name.’ Even Hodge, in Thomas Hardy’s war poem Drummer Hodge , leaves his name behind. In Eleanor Rigby’s death we see the death of hope itself. As Ian MacDonald says in Revolution in the Head :

MacKenzie’s sermon won’t be heard – not that he cares very much about his parishioners – because religious faith has perished along with communal spirit (‘No one was saved’).

The novelist AS Byatt remarked that it has ‘the minimalist perfection of a Beckett story’, pointing out that had Eleanor Rigby’s face been kept in a jar by the mirror, it would suggest the less disturbing idea of make-up, but behind the door, inside her house, it suggests she ‘is faceless, is nothing’ (from a talk on BBC Radio 3, 1993, quoted by Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head ).

The song avoids sentimentality by keeping a distance from its subject throughout. The action is presented like a film script –  ‘Look at him working…’ – and uses various tenses to imply shifts in perspective: Eleanor Rigby ‘ died in the church’ (past tense) while in the same scene Father MacKenzie is ‘ wiping the dirt from his hands’ (present tense).

Positioned as the second song on Revolver , Eleanor Rigby casts a shadow over the whole album. We already have a hint of death in the opening track Taxman (‘my advice for those who die…’), but here we have an all-encompassing despair. As Jonathan Gould says in his book Can’t Buy Me Love :

The questions the song poses aren’t rhetorical; they’re unanswerable. They’re the sort of questions people ask when they don’t know what else to say, and by raising them as he does, Paul calls attention to the inadequacy of his own response.

Nevertheless, we can see the rest of the Revolver album as an attempt to present an answer to the issues raised in the song Eleanor Rigby. Whether it’s a turning away from old age and a return to childhood, in Yellow Submarine and the ‘When I was a boy, everything was right,’ section of She Said She Said; or the escape into the unconscious of ‘I’m Only Sleeping’; or the drugs pedalled by ‘Doctor Robert’; or the urgent embrace of sexual love in Love You To (‘Love me while you can, before I’m a dead old man’); or the attempt to reach a more spiritual, omnipotent love in ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, which starts with the line ‘To lead a better life…’.

Meanwhile other songs on the album serve to remind us of Eleanor Rigby’s bleak message: the desperate emptiness presented by the death of love in For No One, and the difficulty of communication that prevents attachment in I Want To Tell You. It is not until the album’s extraordinary climax, Tomorrow Never Knows, that we finally get an answer, one that transcends the failure of the Christian Church in Eleanor Rigby by re-asserting a progressive belief in universal love.

More posts on the Beatles at Culture Club:

• Analysis: Here, There and Everywhere by The Beatles
• The Beatles’ Revolver and the Universal
• The Beatles’ Yesterday and the Nature of Belief
• Happy Birthday Sgt. Pepper

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcIZdG4xsGg

7 responses to “Analysis: Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles”

Culture Clubber Ian Smith asked me to post this comment:

Tim, I like the post a lot, but I don’t subscribe to the view that ER is an entirely bleak and hopeless song. I think it’s an imprecation against isolation and withdrawal – doing things that “nobody cares” about, “wiping your hands” and keeping your face “in a jar by the door” are things that create barriers and loneliness. Relying on the church (“lives by the church”), which is dead, brings comfort to no-one as “no-one is saved”. The song is one of pity, but more one of warning and a call, more fully enunciated in the later songs on the album, to live a different way or risk ending up like Eleanor Rigby and Father McKenzie.

A ‘warning and a call’ indeed, but alas, few are heeding the warning.

Excellent commentary. I love your reference to Eliot – the imagery of ER definitely brings “The Waste Land” to mind. Before I had actually seen the lyrics, I always thought Paul was singing, “died ALONE with her name”. Which is really bleak stuff. I do agree with the other commentator though that the song serves more as a warning and a call to action than as a sad resignation to fate.

I know the post is a really old, but I wanted to say that this is my favourite song by The Beatles. I just thought that it was about how lonely people get lost in their own routines. It doesn’t seem to be a place for them in the world. I’d say it’s about those secondary characters whose name we never hear, those people who are just there to witness and clean up after the leads of the story. That’s why the name of the song is a person’s name, to acknowlege her. I know I’ve felt that way. It’s certainly a sad song, but I like to think that it means someone notices us even when we’re not at our brightest.

I only wish John Lennon was around today, so we could ask him about the song now. In old interviews I have seen, I seem to have gotten the notion that their lyrics (and I mean collectively lead & influenced by Lennon in the case of most songs) were not to be taken so absolutely literally on any level. Call me crazy, but I feel strongly (based on hearing comments from the Beatles themselves) that even their seemingly deep metaphors were originally intended to be interpreted as much, much lighter than most people seem to interpret (if you we’re “in on” his little jokes). I know that John Lennon was a very deeply intellectual individual, but you might call it a “schtick” of his, that he seemed to like to lead his listeners on a “wild goose chase” of deep thought and emotions while all the time maintaining a personal attitude & perspective of a joker pulling your leg! To put it in “layman’s terms” (for lack of a better description) I think they were just four young (REALLY SMART) boys writing whatever the hell came to mind, because they knew the could, we’re themselves SHOCKED to all the high heavens, buy their STAGGERING success, yet remaining sort of humble and respectful at the same time JUST HAVING A WHOLE LOT OF FUN!

I refuse to leave a comment (lol).

To me the lyric of a song is secondary, but the song in question is a welcome departure from the usual, overworked theme of love, but also it has a good melody.

At the same time, it should be noted that there are many, especially music critics and singers, who see love lyrics as meaningless or worse, so are hard-hearted, insensitive, dour and sour, and uppety, and are afraid of anything romantic or sentimental or fun, and are unable to appreciate or enjoy the good things in life. They are truly pathetic.

I’ve been a Beatles fan since I saw them on Ed Sullivan. I liked all of their songs, but when Eleanor Rigby came out I was too young to understand it and just really liked the music. As I grew older and delved into the lyrics, I truly saw the darkness of it all and how much of a departure it was from the Beatles’ other works. I, like so many others now appreciate how genius Paul and John were, and at such a young age. I can only imagine what other works they would have accomplished had the band stayed together just a little bit longer.

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