She’s Leaving Home

My kids are totally obsessed with the Beatles right now, much to my ongoing delight, so I’m learning how to play more of their songs. Brad Mehldau motivated me to take a look at “She’s Leaving Home”, which I learned about a thousand years ago on guitar and haven’t thought about in a while. It’s a good one! Apparently, when Paul McCartney was ready to record the song, George Martin was busy. Paul was eager to get moving on it, so he asked a guy named Mike Leander to do the harp and string arrangement. Presumably Leander transcribed Paul’s piano part and embellished from there. Harpist Sheila Bromberg was the first woman to play on a Beatles record.

The production is pretty tame by Sgt Pepper’s standards, but there are still some intriguing choices. There’s a single-tap tape echo on the harp, which is most plainly audible on the intro. Paul and John double-track their voices on the choruses, too. Those touches are just enough to keep the track in the world of psychedelia, rather than the world of fake classical like “Eleanor Rigby.” Hear the harp without the tape echo on this early take:

The lyrics are forgettable, but the music is gorgeous. (This is why I like hearing Brad Mehldau play Beatles songs on the piano.) Here’s my transcription.

“She’s Leaving Home” is mainly in E major, but it takes a couple of interesting side trips into B Dorian (a mode of A major, one step counterclockwise on the circle of fifths from E) and C# Dorian (a mode of B major, one step clockwise on the circle of fifths from E). These little dashes of harmonic spiciness are what keep the song from being pure cornball.

The first chord in the verse is the tonic E, but the second is Bm, from B Dorian mode. The following F#m chord could be the ii chord in E, or the v chord in B, it’s ambiguous. The C#m persists for so long that it starts feeling like the actual tonic. The cello part begins with a remarkable walk up and down C# Dorian, with its conspicuous A-sharp. That would have been a bold arrangement choice on Mike Leander’s part; I wonder if it was something that Leander dutifully transcribed from Paul’s piano playing. The next phrase in the verse (“Silently closing her bedroom door…”) floats over a B pedal. The whole thing is like one long B7sus4 chord.

The chorus begins with ten entire bars of E. Starting in the second chorus, Mike Leander’s string part includes lots of D naturals, implying E7 and E Mixolydian. This is another departure from light-classical convention, and yet again, I’m wondering if it’s something that came from Paul originally. Rock musicians are way more likely to stick a flat seventh into a tonic major chord than classically trained arrangers. From there, the progression walks down to C#m via a mysterious chord that I hear as Bm6, a richly dark Dorian sound. The end of the chorus (“She’s leaving home after living alone…”) alternates between C#m and F#7, a bluesy i-IV in C# Dorian. The chorus ends on the F#7 for three staccato quarter notes before going straight back to the E at the beginning of the next verse, without bothering to stop by B7 on the way. Hip!

I adore Brad Mehldau’s arrangement, especially towards the end when the chords get really far out.

Syreeta Wright’s cover features Stevie Wonder playing clavinet, and both Syreeta and Stevie sing through a talk box. Retrofuturistic!

Common’s song “Forever Begins” uses a sample of Syreeta’s cover.

In case you didn’t think there was enough robot voice on the Syreeta cover, the Bee Gees do it with tons of vocoder. It’s not terrific, but I guess I appreciate their spirit of sonic adventure.

Al Jarreau does the tune a bit more reverently, with a nice slow tempo.

Joomanji flips the Al Jarreau cover creatively:

McCoy Tyner plays the tune mostly straight, but there’s enough spicy reharmonization to keep things interesting.

Most people’s covers are too precious for my tastes, but if you push precious hard enough, sometimes you find something intriguing on the other side. That’s the approach that Tori Amos takes, and her sense of melodrama suits the tune well.

Let’s talk for a second about the reception history of this song and the album of which it’s a part. Here’s Jonathan Gould in the New Yorker:

“Sgt. Pepper,” more than any other single work, was responsible for generating the aura of artistic legitimacy that would institutionalize the presence of rock music in the mainstream of modern culture. The album inspired an unprecedented outpouring of reviews, cover stories, and sober cultural commentaries in newspapers, mass-circulation magazines, and highbrow literary journals, many of which had never covered rock as an artistic phenomenon before. “The Beatles are good even though everyone already knows that they’re good,” the composer Ned Rorem declared in The New York Review of Books, at the end of 1967, slyly acknowledging the way the group had transcended the limits of both condescension and connoisseurship.

Gould is referring to this article. Ned Rorem resisted comparisons to “Eleanor Rigby” that other critics were making at the time. He thought that “Eleanor Rigby” is “a poem of touchingly original and quasi-surrealist winsomeness” but that the tune is “predictable and banal as the average Kentucky carol.” By contrast, Rorem didn’t think the lyrics to “She’s Leaving Home” were that special, but musically, he said that it’s “a mazurka equal in melancholy and melodic distinction to those of Chopin.” Rorem also told Time Magazine that the tune is “equal to any song that Schubert ever wrote.” That’s a lot of praise! Is it deserved?

I grew up with a copy of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in heavy rotation. I experienced it as a weird and disjointed listen, without a lot of obvious connection between one song and the next. I can barely imagine how weird it must have sounded in its own time. The songs are uneven compared to the wall-to-wall bangers on Revolver, but the soundscape of the album is bonkers, especially by 1967 standards. Does it deserve all the hype? Who even knows at this point. All I know is that there is a lot to enjoy in there.