A “great” song featured on Abbey Road has been ruined by Paul McCartney‘s singing, according to John Lennon.
Though the duo would write dozens of all-time great songs together, they pulled no punches when speaking of one another’s work after The Beatles’ breakup. Lennon would give a track-by-track breakdown of Abbey Road across several interviews. While Abbey Road is often considered one of the band’s best works, Lennon was relatively flippant about McCartney’s contributions. Lennon would call McCartney’s contributions in a separate interview “granny music” and it seemed he was still unimpressed with the work when he gave his honest thoughts on each song. It’s far from the high praise George Harrison received for his additions, Something and Here Comes the Sun. While he would call Maxwell’s Silver Hammer a “typical” song by McCartney, Lennon reserved his harshest words for Oh! Darling.
Speaking of the song in an interview given in 1980, Lennon would suggest the problem with Oh! Darling is not the instrumental work, but McCartney’s voice. He said: “Oh! Darling’ was a great one of Paul’s that he didn’t sing too well. I always thought I could have done it better – it was more my style than his. He wrote it, so what the hell, he’s going to sing it.”
Whether Lennon felt McCartney should have given him the song to sing is unclear, but it seems the Imagine hitmaker feels he would have been a better vocal fit for the track. The boo-wop adaptation left Harrison feeling a little cold too, with the songwriter sharing he was no fan of the song.
The so-called quiet one of The Beatles would dismiss Oh! Darling as nothing more than “Paul shouting” in a track-by-track analysis of Abbey Road for Rolling Stone Magazine. He writes of the song: “Oh! Darling is another of Paul’s songs, which is a typical 1950-1960 sort of period in its chord structure.
“It’s a typical 1955 song which thousands of groups used to make – The Moonglows, the Paragons, The Shells, and so on. We do a few ooh-oohs in the background, very quietly, but mainly, it’s Paul shouting.” It left fans wondering if Harrison had meant to sound so dismissive of the song, with a screenshot of the interview posted to the r/beatles subreddit confusing some.
One fan wondered: “George seems a bit dismissive of Oh! Darling. He doesn’t seem to think much of it, which I think is interesting because John was a bit jealous of it and thought he should have been the one to sing it.”
Another added: “This Oh! Darling. thing is a more recent thing, back in the day we didn’t care much about this song. It was more about Something or Because. The 1950s were too recent to bring nostalgia and it sounded a bit outdated. But I agree the song is fantastic and it is good people started to recognize it.”
