Beatles books numbering in the hundreds have chronicled what John, Paul, George, and Ringo did; relatively few books have focused on why, in the psychological sense, they did it. Ian Leslie turns the "Why?" on the band's two principal songwriters in John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, a biography of a friendship and a wholly original way to get at the enduringly fascinating Beatles story.
Leslie, a British author of books on human behavior, walks readers chronologically through John and Paul's relationship, titling chapters for songs (not all of them Beatles compositions) with some significance to the pair. For example, in "Yesterday," Leslie looks at how the monumental success of that McCartney song threatened Lennon's sense of his dominant role in the songwriting partnership. Leslie gets granular with John and Paul's collaborations, even identifying "a subgenre of Lennon-McCartney songs" in which they switch off on the vocals "so that the song feels as if it emanates from a double consciousness."
Readers shouldn't expect nonstop psychologizing: John & Paul finds the pair on the road and in the recording studio as often as on Leslie's (figurative) couch. He's persuasive with his contention that one reason people have a hard time getting their heads around the Lennon-McCartney dynamic is because "we have trouble thinking about intimate male friendships." Leslie goes on to quote Paul on John in 1981, the year after Lennon's death: "I realise now we never got to the bottom of each other's souls." This book comes awfully close. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer