How one of the Beatles’ greatest songs came to be.
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.
I do believe this, I do. Our minds work in quirky ways, picking up on nuances as we go about our daily routine, and information gets stored for further processing so we can come back to something later on.
That said, our memories are often faulty, and so is perception. It's common knowledge by now that there is a grave with the name in St. Peter's Church, he and John hung out there, and on some occasion passed by the name in question. Even if the grave didn't inspire in that moment, our brains are these wickedly beautiful masses that do callbacks when we see something that strikes familiarity, issues forth a memory. Often when writing, we don't even recognize we're doing it. I know because I can read it in my own so-called "brilliant" penning that will be the death of me. In the end, it's being creative; that's just how it goes.
I chose to also believe that his mind had that callback moment when he saw that Rigby because elsewhere, he admitted Eleanor may have been attached to Eleanor Bron who was someone John may have dated, so another John connection. Funny again how the mind works.
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.”
This article is definitely a must-read. It's charming, and oh, that ending. Wow, thank you, Geo Martin. Anyway, Paul alludes to Eleanor Rigby being about loneliness, something with which people can identify, and I find myself again wondering if he was pulling from an old hat, emotionally, because, well, when you need material lyrically, you do that.
Maybe it's just me and John, but noticably, some of his best work comes from an emotional high/low, but that's not unusual, by any means. Eleanor Rigby is A+ quality, of course.
It's those same old questions. He was with Jane. Yes, he'd understand loneliness but not necessarily then. What factored into wanting to write a song about loneliness then? And to do it so well?
Questions, questions.
At least Here Today is acknowledged as a love song.
