Part of the beauty of the Beatles’ songwriting is that a listener can relate the band’s music to the specificities of their own life, psychedelic or otherwise, even if the subject matter is fictional. This is especially true of the heartstring-tugging Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ballad, “She’s Leaving Home.” The song details a young girl leaving home for the first time, much to the chagrin and confusion of her parents. Young listeners related to the girl’s independence. Parents related to the grief of losing their children to time.
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Ironically, this is one rare case where the Beatles actually had a specific person in mind when writing their song: a 17-year-old girl named Melanie Coe who, you guessed it, left home, stunning her parents in her wake.
The Muse Behind The Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home”
Sometimes, the Beatles found inspiration for their songs in basic human emotions. Other times, LSD lent a helping hand. In some fascinating instances, the Fab Four looked to the newspaper for lyrical inspiration. “A Day in the Life” is one such example. “She’s Leaving Home” is another. Per Paul McCartney in Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now, he came up with the idea for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ballad after reading a headline in the Daily Mail that read: “A-Level Girl Dumps Car and Vanishes.”
The newspaper continued, “Seventeen-year-old Melanie Coe, studying for her A-level examinations at Skinner’s Grammar School in Stamford Hill, London, ran away from home leaving behind a mink coat, diamond rings, and her own car. ‘I cannot imagine why she would run away. She has everything here,’ her father was quoted as saying.” McCartney elaborated on the storyline, adding just vague enough touches here and there to make the song sound like it could be about any number of teenage runaways, not just Coe.
John Lennon contributed the scolding Greek chorus meant to imitate the parents’ response. “Paul had the basic theme,” Lennon explained to Hit Parader in 1972. “But all those lines like, We sacrificed most of our lives. We gave her everything money could buy, never a thought for ourselves…those were the things [my Aunt] Mimi used to say. It was easy to write.”
Musically, the combination of McCartney’s verses and Lennon’s responses created a captivating effect. “It stays on those chords endlessly,” McCartney told Miles. “Before that period in our songwriting, we would have changed chords. But it stays on the C chord. It really holds you. It’s a really nice little trick, and I think it worked very well.” It was spot-on lyrically, too.
Melanie Coe Found Out She Was Their Inspiration Years Later
Although Melanie Coe didn’t know that she was the inspiration behind the Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home,” she told Rolling Stone that the song tugged on her heartstrings quite a bit. “I found the song to be extremely sad,” she said. “It obviously struck a chord somewhere. It wasn’t until later, when I was in my twenties, that my mother said, ‘You know, that song was about you!’ She had seen an interview with Paul on television, and he said he’d based the song on this newspaper article. She put two and two together.”
“The most interesting thing in the song is what the father said, We gave her everything, everything money could buy,” Coe continued. “In the newspaper article, my father actually says almost those words. He doesn’t understand why I would have left home when they bought me or gave me everything. Which is true: they had bought me a car, and they always bought me expensive clothes and things like that. But as we know, that doesn’t mean that you get on well with your parents or even love them just because they buy you material things.”
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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