Editing Penny Lane (section)

==Background and inspiration==
[[Penny Lane, Liverpool|Penny Lane]] is a road in the south Liverpool suburb of [[Mossley Hill]]. The name also applies to the area surrounding its junction with [[Smithdown Road, Liverpool|Smithdown Road]] and Allerton Road, and to the roundabout at Smithdown Place that was the location for a major bus terminus, originally an important tram junction of [[Liverpool Corporation Tramways]].{{sfn|Davies|2016|loc="Beatles Places" > "Penny Lane"}} The roundabout was a frequent stopping place for [[John Lennon]], [[Paul McCartney]] and [[George Harrison]] during their years as schoolchildren and students.{{sfn|Davies|2016|loc="Beatles Places" > "Penny Lane"}} Bus journeys via Penny Lane and the area itself subsequently became familiar elements in the early years of the [[Lennon–McCartney]] songwriting partnership.{{sfn|Womack|2014|pp=724–25}} In 2009, McCartney reflected:
<blockquote>"Penny Lane" was kind of nostalgic, but it was really [about] a place that John and I knew ... I'd get a bus to his house and I'd have to change at Penny Lane, or the same with him to me, so we often hung out at that terminus, like a roundabout. It was a place that we both knew, and so we both knew the things that turned up in the story.<ref name="clash interview">{{cite web|last1=Harper|first1=Simon|title=Paul McCartney Interview: The story behind the classics|url=https://www.clashmusic.com/feature/paul-mccartney-interview|publisher=[[Clash (magazine)|clashmusic.com]]|date=9 September 2009|access-date=8 July 2015}}</ref></blockquote>

Lennon's original lyrics for "[[In My Life]]" had included a reference to Penny Lane.{{sfn|Turner|2012|p=106}} Soon after the Beatles recorded "In My Life" in October 1965, McCartney mentioned to an interviewer that he wanted to write a song about Penny Lane. A year later, he was spurred to write the song once presented with Lennon's "[[Strawberry Fields Forever]]".{{sfn|Everett|1999|p=84}}{{sfn|Hertsgaard|1996|pp=111–12, 391}} McCartney also cited [[Dylan Thomas]]'s nostalgic poem "[[Fern Hill]]" as an inspiration for "Penny Lane".{{sfn|Womack|2014|pp=722, 724–25}} Lennon co-wrote the lyrics with McCartney.{{sfn|MacDonald|2005|p=222}}{{sfn|Hertsgaard|1996|p=391}} He recalled in a 1970 interview: "The bank was ''there'', and ''that'' was where the tram sheds were and people waiting and the inspector stood ''there'', the fire engines were down ''there''. It was reliving childhood."{{sfn|MacDonald|2005|p=222}}

Writing for the song took place early in the sessions for what became the ''[[Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]]'' album,{{sfn|Sounes|2010|pp=160–61}} which commenced following a three-month period when the Beatles had pursued individual interests.{{sfn|Gould|2007|pp=367, 371}} Beatles biographer [[Ian MacDonald]] suggested an [[Lysergic acid diethylamide|LSD]] influence, saying that the lyrical imagery points to McCartney first taking LSD in late 1966. MacDonald concluded that the lyric "And though she feels as if she's in a play / She is anyway" was one of the more "LSD-redolent phrases" in the Beatles' catalogue.{{sfn|MacDonald|2005|p=223}} Music critics [[Roy Carr]] and [[Tony Tyler]] similarly described the subject matter as "essentially 'Liverpool-on-a-sunny-hallucinogenic-afternoon'".{{sfn|Carr|Tyler|1978|p=62}}