Ian Leslie: belief

Transcript context

…I have so many questions. How is it that John got to be such a great songwriter so quickly? If you look at the early songs, like “If I Fell,” “Not a Second Time,” “Please Please Me,” “It Won’t Be Long,” “All I’ve Got To Do,” they seem to come from nowhere. Paul builds up and eventually is doing “Hey Jude,” “Golden Slumbers.” But John, who supposedly is lazy, just starts with incredible creations. How does that happen? It’s a good question, and I don’t have a definitive answer, but perhaps it’s connected to what you were saying. John was less methodical than Paul, perhaps a little less analytical in the way he thought about songs and song structures, and more prepared to just blunder his way into things and see what happened. Of course, he had wonderful intuitions. He had some kind of innate talent. He’d been raised on different forms of music, as had Paul, both rock and roll and blues and skiffle, but also, he was introduced to the Great American Songbook by Julia, by watching movies and so on. He had this incredible, I guess what we’d call today, sense of agency, this sense that, “Well, I’m just going to do it this way.” The very first time Paul saw John playing was at Woolton village fete. They met properly for the first time afterwards. Paul was thrilled by how John got the words wrong to a song that they both knew, that Paul knew. It took me a while to work out why Paul was so thrilled by John getting the words wrong. I think he was taking from John this sense that, “Yes, this is American music, but we don’t just have to imitate it. We can actually do it in our own way. We could do it wrong, and it’ll come out right. ” I think John was the first to get onto that in a really strong way, and that’s probably what pushed him furthest ahead in those early years. What’s your model of how lazy John was? Because in the Get Back movie, he seems detached. In the middle years, it seems it’s always Paul driving them into the studio. How is he so agentic and possibly so lazy at the same time?…

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