FEATURE: McCartney elevates the every day in Lady Madonna

By Caitlin Ward

Lady Madonna
The Beatles

Lady Madonna, children at your feet
Wonder how you manage to make ends meet.
Who finds the money when you pay the rent?
Did you think that money was heaven sent?
Friday night arrives without a suitcase
Sunday morning creeping like a nun
Monday’s Child has learned to tie his bootlace.
See how they run.

Lady Madonna baby at your breast
Wonders how you manage to feed the rest.

(See how they run)

Lady Madonna lying on the bed
Listen to the music playing in your head.
Tuesday afternoon is never-ending
Wednesday morning papers didn’t come
Thursday night your stockings needed mending.
See how they run.

Lady Madonna children at your feet
Wonder how you manage to make ends meet.

It must be said that when a masterful songwriting partnership goes terribly awry, you have to choose a side. You can’t be neutral. Even if you like both writers well enough, or you think they’re both a bit infuriating, you have to like one of them more. Or, at least, hate one of them less. And if the pair eventually have some sort of reconciliation, you must harbour deep resentment against one for destroying the hopes and dreams of the other. Even if it didn’t quite happen like that.

Hey, I didn’t make the rules.

Now, if you make this decision when there’s the luxury of years passed and tempers cooled, you can be more circumspect about the whole affair. However, when it’s a fairly recent and very public breakup, you must be vehement about it. You must cling to your side as if you were fighting the Cold War single-handedly. Which is why, I suppose, people my parents’ age are still having the Lennon versus McCartney fight.

I’m not one to talk a lot of smack about people (songwriters or otherwise), so I’ll simply say I was raised in a Paul household. While discipline was light and freethinking was generally encouraged, there’s some thought lurking in the back of my head that if I’d ever tried to defend John Lennon to my mother, she would have thrown me out of the house. Bodily.

Of course, I never did. I knew better. But when one gets older, one must choose one’s own side: throw off the shackles of parental influence and forge ahead on one’s own.

As it turns out, I liked Paul best all along. And this week in particular, I’ve been privately celebrating the sheer loveliness of his writing. Privately, because while one must really take a side if one is going to be a gentleman about it, occasionally one will instead choose to despise the single most influential musical group of the 20th century like the blackguard he is. I live with one such person. So I spent a lot of time listening to Lady Madonna in the car.

McCartney’s writing might be considered the more superficial or shallow of the pair by some. And it’s true that on the face of it, McCartney’s songs are sweet and happy. And some of them are just sweet and happy songs. Some songs, though, have a deeper sentiment that’s easy to miss for all the honky-tonk piano. There’s a subtlety to his writing that is often overlooked.

There was a moment, seeming to bridge 1967 and 1968, when McCartney concerned himself with real life in songs such as Penny Lane, Your Mother Should Know, and Lady Madonna. Lady Madonna, released as a single in 1968, recounts the sometimes harsh realities of a working class woman with many children: “Lady Madonna, children at your feet / Wonder how you manage to make ends meet. / Who finds the money when you pay the rent?” The song addresses the vagaries of a busy life: this mother’s stockings need mending, the papers don’t come, a suitcase is inexplicably missing. She’s run off her feet, and neither the narrator nor the mother seem to know where the money’s coming from. And yet, she holds it all together — the way mothers always seem to be able to do. The song finds moments of joy, as well: “Monday’s Child has learned to tie his bootlace.”

Writing a song about a busy mom might not seem to be a particular stroke of insight, but it’s necessary to think about the context in which McCartney is writing. The late 1960s was full of songs about overblown protest and free love in the counterculture. In the mainstream culture, the songs were (as they always are) about falling in and out of love. And when you look at the history of pop lyrics, as you might sometimes be wont to do, you’ll see that the subjects people choose to write about do not vary a lot. Elvis Costello once said that 90 per cent of pop songs could be broken down into four basic categories: “I love you,” “I hate you,” “I believe in something,” and “we’re having a good time.”

For McCartney to write about something else entirely in light of that fact is something of a feat in itself, but this song goes a step further. Not content to write about the everyday, he elevates the everyday. He gives this exhausted mother the title “Lady Madonna.” She’s not just a mother. She’s the mother. McCartney takes a very normal thing — a hardworking mom — and he makes that connection so many of us don’t: every mother, in some sense, is doing the work of Mary. And every mother, in some sense, is enabling her children to do Christ’s work.

Ward is a freelance writer and aspiring documentary filmmaker based in Saskatoon. You can find her short bursts of insight and frustration at http://www.twitter.com/newsetofstrings.