Paul McCartney Said John Lennon’s Last-Minute Addition to ‘All My Loving’ Made It Magical

Paul McCartney and John Lennon possessed an otherworldly connection when it came to songwriting for The Beatles. Few would hesitate to call the duo “magic” for the way they crafted some of the most popular and influential songs of all time. In fact, Paul McCartney himself said “All My Loving” had some “magic” additions from John Lennon.

Paul explained how his personal lyrics became elevated thanks to John’s transformative guitar playing, illustrating how the partnership of Lennon/McCartney was truly greater than the sum of its parts.

Paul McCartney said John Lennon’s last-minute addition to ‘All My Loving’ made it magical

One of the things Paul said he loves about “All My Loving” is John’s guitar part. It made it “magical.”

“He’s playing the chords as triplets,” Paul said. “That was a last-minute idea, and it transforms the whole thing, giving it momentum. The song is obviously about someone leaving to go on a trip, and that driving rhythm of John’s echoes the feeling of travel and motion. It sounds like a car’s wheels on the motorway, which, if you can believe it, had only really become a thing in the U.K. at the end of the fifties.

“But, it was often like that when we were recording. One of us would come up with that little magic thing. It allowed the song to become what it needed to be.”

The meaning of ‘All My Loving’ isn’t exactly about Jane Asher, says Paul McCartney

In his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul wrote about writing “All My Loving.” He said he wrote it while traveling on a tour bus and doesn’t think he wrote it about his girlfriend, Jane Asher.

Paul wrote, “So I was on a tour bus somewhere in the U.K., with nothing to do, and I started to think of these words: ‘Close your eyes . . ‘ Although we’d met at this point, I don’t know that I was thinking specifically of Jane Asher when I wrote this, though we were courting.

“It’s probably more of a reflection on what our lives were like then – leaving behind family and friends to go on tour and experience all these new adventures.

“It’s one of the few songs I’ve written where the words came first. That almost never happens, I usually have an instrument with me. So, I’d started work on the lyrics on the bus, and back then we were playing what was known as the Moss Empires circuit.”

When The Beatles arrived at the venue, “with all the hustle and bustle around me,” Paul found a piano and discovered the chords. “At that point, it was a straight country-and-western love song,” Paul wrote.

“With songwriting, you conceive of it in one genre (because you can’t conceive of things in thousands of genres), and you have one way of hearing it. If you get it right, however, you realise it has a certain elasticity; songs can be flexible. And when other members of The Beatles would get into the studio, often that’s when that elasticity would kick in.”

Paul said the song has a ‘lineage’

According to Paul, “All My Loving” has a lineage as a “letter song.” It’s similar to their song “P.S. I Love You” and other older love songs from various artists.

He wrote, “It’s part of a tradition of letter songs like Fats Waller’s “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down” and ‘Write Myself a Letter’ or Pat Boone’s 1956 hit ‘I’II Be Home.’ So, ‘All My Loving’ is a song that has a lineage.”

Paul also said “All My Loving” has somewhat of a lineage within the story of The Beatles too. The group recorded it in the summer of 1963. They put it on their second album, With The Beatles, released later that year. “At least, it was on With The Beatles in the U.K. In the U.S. the song came out on Meet The Beatles! in early 1964,” Paul wrote.

“At the beginning of our career, up until around the time of Help!, the U.S. albums were different to the ones in the U.K. Capitol used to take a few songs from here, a few from there, and add in a single or two, and that would be the U.S. album.”

Paul thought it was bizarre that he wrote “All My Loving” while on a tour circuit in 1963, and it became the first song The Beatles played on The Ed Sullivan Show in the U.S. the following year. Things changed very fast for the band.