In both music theory and music tech classes, I ask the students to pick songs and analyze their structure. This semester, one student chose “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles. She had a hard time with it–understandably! It’s not a complicated song, but it is an unconventional one. In this post, I’ll talk through the tune’s many points of structural, music-theoretic and sonic interest.
Fun fact: “Eleanor Rigby” was issued as the B-side to the “Yellow Submarine” single in 1966. That’s a pretty brutal come-down in mood.
The hardest part of the song’s structure to explain is its opening section: “Ahhh, look at all the lonely people.” I consider this to be the chorus. Not everyone agrees.
Harmonically, this thing that I call the chorus is straightforward: C to Em, repeated. The Em is the tonic chord in the key of E minor, the chord you make by starting on the root of the E natural minor scale and moving up the scale in thirds. The C is the chord you get when you start on the sixth degree of E natural minor and move up the scale in thirds. I’ve diagrammed both chords below; notice that they contain almost the same pitches.
A more conventional songwriter would have had an intro on Em, rather than starting straight in with C. The feeling is that you’ve stumbled into the song already in progress.
Next, we come to verse one: “Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been.”
The meter feels weird here, and my student had trouble counting through it. The phrases are five bars long, which is odd. There’s also a shift in harmonic rhythm. In the first twelve measures of the song, all of the chord changes happen on downbeats. However, in measure 13, the chord change falls in the middle of the bar, and the same thing happens again in measure 18. This shift in chord change placement combines with the odd phrase length to create the sense of metrical instability.
There’s another new harmonic wrinkle in the verse as well. Measures 9 through 11 are all on the same Em chord, but they don’t all use the same underlying scale. In measure 9, it’s E natural minor, but in measures 10 and 11, it’s E Dorian mode. Compare the two scales below; they’re almost identical, but that E natural minor has C for its sixth scale degree, while E Dorian mode has C-sharp.
You can hear the scale shift in the melody, on the line “picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been.” Paul McCartney sings the words “in” and “church” on C-sharp. If we were still in E natural minor, those words would be on C natural. It’s a small change, but it gives this section a different flavor from what we’ve heard so far. There’s another nice harmonic touch in here too: Paul starts the melody (the first two syllables of “Eleanor”) on A, the fourth degree of E natural minor. That’s more like something you’d hear in a jazz melody than a pop song.
Next, we have another section that defies easy categorization: “All the lonely people, where do they all come from.”
I call this the prechorus, even though I fully recognize that it comes after the chorus and is immediately followed by another verse. I justify my label by pointing out that the second time the section happens, it does lead into the chorus, like a good prechorus should. On the other hand, my student hears this part as the chorus, and the section that begins the song as the “bridge.” That feels wrong to me, because songs don’t usually start on the bridge. But ultimately, my opinion is arbitrary; there is no conventional label that unambiguously applies here.
The melody of what I call the prechorus starts in the same hip way as it does in the verse: on A, scale degree four. There’s a descending chromatic bassline under the static Em chord: D to C-sharp to C to B. If you want to make people sad, a descending chromatic bassline is a reliable way to do it. There’s another harmonic twist as well, on the words “Where do they all come from.” On the word “they,” Paul sings an unexpected B-flat, a tritone below the E on the previous word “do.” That B-flat takes us out of Western E minor and into the E blues scale. Extremely hip!
“Eleanor Rigby” makes obvious gestures toward classical music, with its George Martin string arrangement and contrapuntal vocal parts. But it subverts classical music norms too, especially in its production. To understand why, first you have to know the conventional way to record a classical ensemble, which is to place mics at a distance from the performers. You mainly want to capture reflections off the walls and ceiling of the room, rather than the direct sound of the instruments. If you’re recording in a concert hall, the usual thing is to place the mics at the conductor position or out in the audience. The goal is to recreate the feeling of being in a concert, hearing the performers as if they’re occupying a real-world physical environment.
This is not how the Beatles recorded “Eleanor Rigby.” Engineer Geoff Emerick placed the microphones right up close to the instruments, capturing only direct sound and minimal natural reverb. The effect is like having your ears two inches from the performers. It’s intense and harsh, and was considered bad technique before the Beatles. Close-miking has become a common technique in rock and pop since the 1960s, but it’s worth considering how surreal it is. In real life, you could be positioned right next to one instrument, but not to eight of them simultaneously. Listeners at the time must have found the track to be a weird and unnatural experience. The funny thing is that if you’re anything like me, you’re more likely to hear rock-style close-miking as “natural,” and you find the reverb-soaked distant sound of Deutsche Grammophon to be “weird.”
We’re all very jaded listeners now, but it’s still possible to disturb us. Someone had the idea to use polyphonic Melodyne to change all the pitches in the track to E or F. It’s quite nightmarish: