Is there a good list out there that indicates which Lennon and McCartney songs were primarily written by Lennon and which were written by McCartney? Are there Beatles songs that list either Lennon or McCartney as the sole writer?
All songs written by either Paul or John while they were with the Beatles are credited to “Lennon-McCartney,” no matter who actually wrote it (Paul wanted to have his songs credited to “McCartney-Lennon” a few years back, but it raised so much furor that he dropped the idea). Songs after they broke up, of course, were credited to them individually.
Definitive? No. Even John and Paul didn’t always agree. (They both claimed to have written “In My Life.”)
I thought John & Paul joked that when they’d get together to record, whoever knew most of the lines would sing lead. Yeah, that was a joke, but it’s a pretty good indicator of who wrote the song, and RealityChuck’s wikipedia reference bears that out. The majority writer in most cases is the lead singer.
The Playboy interview with John Lennon indicated that John wrote a lot of songs that everyone assumed were Paul’s, and vise versa.
True… but years later, Paul told a different interviewer that Lennon was “a maneuvering swine” who claimed credit for songs he didn’t really write.
We can’t always take EITHER man at his word.
I didn’t feel that Lennon and McCartney contradicted each other over “In My Life”; both agreed John wrote the lyric and Paul claimed to have composed the music himself (on mellotron? I’d check the spelling myself but my connection is too tenuous) while John said something like “Paul may have helped with the music but the lyrics were all mine” (I am going by memory there of the 1980 Playboy interview with John; I no longer have the book).
I strongly recommend Revolution in the Head. It details every Beatles track in chronological order of recording, and who wrote and played what parts of that track. It also ties them in to what was happening in the 60s at the time. Absolutely fascinating.
It’s probably more precise to phrase it as "which songs were John’s inspiration, and which were Paul’s, because in a lot of cases (as noted, In My Life, also, A Day in the Life, etc.) their work was intertwined.
ISTR a few years ago, some writer sifted through all Lennon and McCartney’s various claims and changing stories and deduced that there were really only a handful (maybe 5-10) of songs whose provenance couldn’t really be established.