13 Beatles Songs Based on Real People
There are many Beatles songs that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison based on real people. Around the mid-1960s, when their songwriting became more complex, they started incorporating characters and stories into their songs. Real people helped develop those characters and stories. Here are the top 13 Beatles songs based on real people.
13. ‘And I Love Her’
Paul McCartney wrote “And I Love Her” after he realized he wanted to tell his then-girlfriend, Jane Asher, he loved her. Paul and Asher dated for most of The Beatles’ lifetime. However, their romance fizzled out toward the end of the 1960s, and Asher broke up with the singer-songwriter on live TV. Paul based many Beatles songs on Asher.
12. ‘I Need You’
George Harrison wrote “I Need You” for his future wife, Pattie Boyd. It’s a simple love song that appears in The Beatles’ Help! George also wrote “If I Needed Someone” for his then-wife. The pair married in 1966 but were together for less than 10 years.
11. ‘She Said She Said’
John Lennon based “She Said She Said” on something he overheard actor Peter Fonda say at an LSD party. Fonda consoled George, who was having a bad trip and told him about a near-fatal surgery he had as a kid. He said, “I know what it’s like to be dead.” It freaked John out, and he wrote a song about it.
10. ‘Eleanor Rigby’
Paul based “Eleanor Rigby” on an old woman he frequently visited as a kid. They were friends, and he used to go to the store for her. Paul said the stories she told him “enriched” his soul. In his book, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, he wrote, “So I would visit, and just hearing her stories enriched my soul and influenced the songs I would later write.”
9. ‘Lovely Rita’
In The Lyrics, Paul said he based “Lovely Rita” on a meter maid he once saw in Portland Place. “Nobody liked parking attendants, or meter maids, as they were known in that benighted era,” he wrote. “So, to write a song about being in love with a meter maid – someone nobody else liked – was amusing in itself.
“There was one particular meter maid in Portland Place on whom I based Rita. She was slightly military-looking. I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but those meter maids were never good-looking. You never heard anybody say, ‘God, that’s one stunning parking attendant.'”
8. ‘The Fool on the Hill’
Paul based “The Fool on the Hill” on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, The Beatles’ spiritual guru. He said Maharishi Mahesh Yogi helped recenter The Beatles during a time when fame was getting to be too much following the death of their manager Brian Epstein. Paul said the guru made a mark on them.
His description of Maharishi as a “fool” isn’t disparaging. He used “fool” because Maharishi was often called the “giggling guru.” Paul thinks it’s a complimentary portrait and represents the guru’s ability to keep perfectly still amid chaos.
7. ‘Savoy Truffle’
George wrote “Savoy Truffle” for his friend Eric Clapton, who had a real sweet tooth. Clapton had work done on his teeth when George wrote the song. The dentist told the Cream guitarist he was through with eating any more candy.
6. ‘Long, Long, Long’
George’s “Long, Long, Long” isn’t about how a person has lost their love. It’s about losing touch with God. In his 1980 memoir, I Me Mine, George wrote, “The ‘you’ in ‘Long, Long, Long’ is God. I can’t recall much about it except the chords, which I think were coming from ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ – D to E minor, A, and D – those three chords and the way they moved.”
5. ‘Sexy Sadie’
John also based a song on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; only “Sexy Sadie” is angrier than Paul’s “Fool on the Hill.” He originally called it “Maharishi,” but George talked him out of it. John wrote it shortly after The Beatles heard a rumor that the guru had been inappropriate toward some of his female students. This angered John; he felt like Maharishi had fooled them all. He was the “fool on the hill,” after all.
4. ‘Julia’
“Julia” is one of the more complex Beatles songs based on real people because it’s based on two people. John said he based the song on his mother, Julia, and his then-secret girlfriend, Yoko Ono. In David Sheff’s All We Are Saying, John said, “Julia was my mother. But it was sort of a combination of Yoko and my mother blended into one.”
3. ‘Dear Prudence’
Along with “Sexy Sadie” and “Julia,” John wrote “Dear Prudence” during The Beatles’ stay at Maharishi’s ashram in India. He based it on actor Mia Farrow’s sister, Prudence, who seemed to go “slightly barmy, meditating too long, and couldn’t come out of the little hut that we were livin’ in,” John said in Sheff’s book.
John and George eventually got her to come out after she had stayed inside for three weeks. “That was the competition in Maharishi’s camp: who was going to get cosmic first. What I didn’t know was I was already cosmic,” John added.
2. ‘Her Majesty’
In The Lyrics, Paul wrote that “Her Majesty” was a “cheeky” “irreverent” look at Queen Elizabeth II, who they thought was “quite a babe.” He called it a “little fragment” that was “tongue-in-cheek.” Paul was treating the queen as if she were “just a nice girl and not bothering with the fact that she would become the longest-reigning monarch ever in the U.K., or that she was queen of the nation.”
1. ‘Something’
When George wrote “Something,” he told his then-wife, Pattie Boyd, that he’d written for her, but according to Joshua M. Greene’s Here Comes The Sun: The Spiritual And Musical Journey Of George Harrison, he wrote for Krishna. He explained, “Actually, it’s about Krishna. But I couldn’t say he, could I? I had to say she or they’d think I’m a poof.”
Some of The Beatles’ best songs were based on real people. One of the most incredible things about The Beatles was their ability to catch something interesting, whether it was a person or something someone said, and turn it into a hit.
