John Lennon

English musician, singer, and songwriter (1940–1980); co-founder of the Beatles and, with Paul McCartney, one half of the most productive songwriting partnership in popular music. After the band’s break-up in 1970 he pursued a solo career (Plastic Ono Band, Imagine) and public political activism with Yoko Ono, until his murder in New York in December 1980.

Within the Lennon–McCartney partnership Lennon is conventionally cast as the acerbic, confessional, avant-garde pole against McCartney’s melodic craftsmanship — the writer of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘A Day in the Life’, and ‘Norwegian Wood’. The journalist Ian Leslie argues that the caricature (hard Lennon, soft McCartney) obscures how thoroughly the two men wrote through and into each other, so that authorship of the songs is often genuinely joint even where only one name is usually attached.

In the wiki

• Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time — Ian Leslie, author of John and Paul - A Love Story in Songs, reads the relationship as a love story: two motherless teenagers who found in each other a completeness neither could reach alone. He traces Lennon’s edge and insecurity to the loss of his mother Julia, argues that his most tender songwriting (the late ‘Dear Yoko’, or ‘Julia’ itself) belies the tough-guy reputation, and dates the real rupture not to Yoko Ono but to the slow withdrawal of the two men’s attention from one another. Leslie’s central claim is that the partnership’s genius lay in a rivalry that was also intimacy — each writing to impress and to reach the other.

See also

• Paul McCartney — his songwriting partner and the other subject of the episode
• Ian Leslie — the author who discussed the partnership with Tyler Cowen
• John and Paul - A Love Story in Songs — Leslie’s book on the relationship