"She's Leaving Home" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, and released on their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Paul McCartney wrote and sang the verse and John Lennon wrote the chorus, which they sang together. Neither George Harrison nor Ringo Starr was involved in the recording. The song's instrumental background was performed entirely by a small string orchestra arranged by Mike Leander, and is one of only a handful of Beatles recordings in which none of the members played a musical instrument. Background Paul McCartney said of the song in his Playboy magazine interview in December 1984: McCartney was inspired by a story on the front page of the Daily Mirror, about a girl named Melanie Coe. Although McCartney invented most of the content in the song, Coe, who was 17 at the time, has said that most of it was accurate. In actuality, Coe left with her boyfriend, a croupier. She did not "meet a man from the motor trade", although her boyfriend previously had been in that trade. She left in the afternoon while her parents were at work, while the girl in the song leaves early in the morning as her parents sleep. Coe was found ten days later because she had let slip where her boyfriend worked. When she returned home, she was pregnant and had an abortion. Coincidentally, Coe had actually met McCartney three years earlier, in 1963 when he chose her as the prize winner in a dancing contest on ITV's Ready Steady Go!. An update on Coe appeared in The Guardian in December 2008, and she was interviewed about the song on the BBC programme The One Show on 24 November 2010. In May 2017, Rolling Stone magazine carried an interview with Coe to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the album's release. Recording "She's Leaving Home" was recorded during the sessions for the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The day before McCartney wanted to work on the song's score, he learned that George Martin, who usually handled the Beatles' string arrangements, was not available. McCartney contacted Mike Leander, who did it in Martin's place. This was the first time a Beatles song was not arranged by Martin. Martin, though hurt by this, produced the song and conducted the string section in a session on 17 March 1967