Imagine being a girl living in the 60s and hearing your name called out in a song by The Beatles. It had to be a surreal experience, even if the song in question wasn’t necessarily complimentary to the main character.
The Fab Four recorded and released a handful of songs featuring female names in the titles. With apologies to “Polythene Pam” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” for missing the cut, here are four that we can’t forget.
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“Michelle”
Paul McCartney had the bare bones of “Michelle” lying around for a while. He’d play the song at parties, almost as a parody of a French love song, to attract girls. John Lennon encouraged him to follow through with it and see what he could do. Deciding he wanted to explore the whole French thing as far as it could go, he asked a teacher friend of his to help him translate his English lyrics into French. Hence, “Michelle” has provided many Beatles fans who never took French in school with the only sentence that they fully know and understand in the language. Beyond that, the song features McCartney at his romantic best, which is good enough to make “Michelle” a classic.
“Eleanor Rigby”
“Eleanor Rigby” stands out as one of the few Beatles songs whose provenance is somewhat up for grabs. Both John Lennon, before his death, and Paul McCartney have claimed large portions of the song as their own creation. We’re also not quite sure, because of conflicting reports, of where the name originated or whose idea it was to have the twist ending connecting Eleanor with Father McKenzie, the song’s other principal character. What we do know is that “Eleanor Rigby” unmistakably elevated pop music when it appeared on Revolver in 1966. The lyrics contain only enough detail for the bare bones of the narrative, letting us fill in the blanks. And the music is breathtakingly dramatic and sad.
“Dear Prudence”
The last two songs on this list both originated with The Beatles’ trip to India in 1968, a trip that gave them tons of material for The White Album. In the case of “Dear Prudence”, it came from a song that John Lennon would somewhat comically sing to Prudence Farrow, sister of Mia. Prudence was taking her meditation studies more seriously than the rest and wouldn’t come out to socialize much with the others. Once The Beatles tackled the song in the studio, they were a man down. An upset Ringo Starr had briefly left the sessions, leaving Paul McCartney to handle the drums. It didn’t stop this recording from becoming a master class in the slow build.
“Sexy Sadie”
“Sexy Sadie” was a last-minute title choice for John Lennon. He had originally envisioned “Maharishi” as the title for this accusatory song. At the end of the group’s stay in India, Lennon had become disillusioned with the group’s host, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Lennon felt that the guru was getting a little too preoccupied with some of the younger female attendees. While it’s long been debated whether such events actually took place, something certainly stirred up Lennon’s ire. George Harrison eventually stopped Lennon from directly calling out the Maharishi in the song’s title. But you can hear how the name would have easily fit the meter of “Sexy Sadie” had he gone through with it.
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