Perform the Geir Hongro Challenge on some Beatles songs.

What Paul McCartney's detractors almost never care about is his skill & efficiency as a composer. He is a cornball, yes; his lyrics are usually beyond simple, verging on simpleminded. However, musically (at least with the Beatles), he's in a league with Brian Wilson and G.Gershwin, and I think a sight better than R.Davies, A.Partridge and E.Costello (to name three people I consider among the best pop songwriters of their times).

"Mother Nature's Son" is among the most simple songs McCartney ever wrote, yet because he knows how to place melody within an arrangement (in this case, just acoustic guitar - G.Martin's orchestral backing is largely just chordal accompaniment, though again, Martin certainly realized McCartney had done the vast brunt of the work with this song using just his guitar and voice, and wisely recognized all he needed to do was give him a little tonal "weight" with brass), it seems almost ornately performed. His guitar playing (also almost always underrated) isn't just nice, or accomplished, it provides an amoung of movement and counterpoint to his exceedingly simple vocal melody.

Listen to the way McCartney plays under the lines in the verse: "Born a poor young country boy" - this is the basically the most important line in the song, ultimately about nothing more than being a kind surrounded by a beautiful world, and being happy. McCartney knows this, and supplies only rhythmic strumming to support the line. Furthemore, the chord progression here, from I to IV back to I is probably the simplest possible movement - he only needed to move two fingers less than an inch! Then, as he introduces himself as the "mother nature's son", he briefly also introduces dissonance (via a flatted 7th on guitar, over his own sung 5th), and comes down to a "secondary dominant" - to non-theory people, this typically occurs when you want to modulate to another key (and hence, mood) - in P-Mac's case, he uses it to move to the "punchline" of his song.

And just in case that sounds to technical, he stops down for a very symphonic arpeggio on his guitar, moving upwards from its lowest register. The sequence moves from simple, clear introduction to brief tension, and because McCartney realizes he has lead you on to expect a downward turn, he offers the peace-pipe of the upward moving riff into - oi la! - the V chord and "all day long I'm sitting singing songs, for every--" And at that point, he brings the brief, tense tag back for "one", restating the entire journey of his short song in about 5 seconds. Furthermore, he has gotten through all of this in a vocal range of about 5 notes.

P-Mac: able to do more in one verse than most people do on an album.

haha it took me a second to figure out what you meant by that!

dleone - your macca-son post was great!

is how I read this thread title

Style & Form
Melody & Haromony
Arrangement
Verse
Bridge
Outro
Final Thoughts

of course some songs don't have all of these categories (hello, Revolution #9). But it is a rough structure that Pollack hangs his thoughts on. And he did it all for free!

So if anyone doubts the Beatles compositional skills just point them to Pollack :-)

It's better than some other pastiches he wrote eg. 'Honey Pie', 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da', 'Rocky Racoon', 'Why Don't We Do It In The Road'.