3 Beatles Songs That Lennon-McCartney Wrote as Beginner Songwriters

Hey, everybody has to start somewhere. Here are some Lennon-McCartney songs that these Beatles wrote when they were first starting out.

“I Saw Her Standing There”

The opening track of Please Please Me, “I Saw Her Standing There” is easily one of the standout songs from The Beatles‘ early catalog. McCartney and Lennon collaborated on this one when they were still in school. Of course, they weren’t about to waste an afternoon in the classroom when they could be writing a song instead.

“We sagged off school and wrote it on guitars and a little bit on the piano that I had there,” McCartney told Mark Lewisohn of the day they wrote it.

At the time, the two Beatles were still learning how to write together. McCartney even admitted this in The Beatles Anthology. “We were learning our skill. John would like some of my lines and not others. He liked most of what I did, but there would sometimes be a cringe line, such as, ‘She was just seventeen, she’d never been a beauty queen.’ John thought, ‘Beauty queen? Ugh.’ We were thinking of Butlin’s so we asked ourselves, what should it be? We came up with, ‘You know what I mean.’ Which was good, because you don’t know what I mean.”

“And I Love Her”

“And I Love Her” was one of Paul McCartney’s solo contributions to the Beatles’ third studio album. To Barry Miles, he admitted that it was one of his earlier songs that he was truly proud of.

“It was the first ballad I impressed myself with,” McCartney said of “And I Love Her”. “It’s got nice chords in it, ‘Bright are the stars that shine, dark is the sky…’ I like the imagery of the stars and the sky. It was a love song, really. The ‘And’ in the title was an important thing. ‘And I Love Her,’ it came right out of left field, you were right up to speed the minute you heard it.”

“Hello Little Girl”

In January of 1962, The Beatles (which at the time consisted of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Pete Best) auditioned for Decca Records, for whom they played this Lennon original. The group also played two other Lennon-McCartney songs, “Like Dreamers Do” and “Love Of The Loved”.

“That was me. That was actually my first song,” Lennon admitted to David Sheff. “[Singing] ‘When I see you every day I say mmm hmm, hello little girl.’ I remember some Thirties or Forties song which was [singing] ‘You’re delightful, you’re delicious and da da da. Isn’t it a pity that you are such a scatterbrain.’ That always fascinated me for some reason or another. It’s also connected to my mother. It’s all very Freudian. She used to sing that one. So I made ‘Hello Little Girl’ out of it.”

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