Everyone always wants to give John Lennon his flowers, but let’s not forget about Paul. Here are four great Beatles songs that Paul McCartney, for the most part, penned himself.
“Yesterday”
One of The Beatles’ biggest songs ever, “Yesterday”, was a track that John Lennon had a love-hate relationship with. However, he was still able to give McCartney credit where credit is due.
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“Well, we all know about ‘Yesterday’,” Lennon told David Sheff. “I have had so much accolade for ‘Yesterday’. That’s Paul’s song and Paul’s baby. Well done. Beautiful – and I never wished I’d written it.”
“Blackbird”
A song that nods to the civil rights movement at the time, “Blackbird” has to be one of the most beautiful McCartney songs ever.
As he revealed to Barry Miles, the way the song plays out musically was actually inspired by the works of the composer Bach.
“Part of [the song’s] structure is a particular harmonic thing between the melody and the bass line which intrigued me,” he admitted. “Bach was always one of our favorite composers; we felt we had a lot in common with him… I developed the melody on guitar based on the Bach piece and took it somewhere else, took it to another level, then I just fitted the words to it.”
“Eleanor Rigby”
While all four Beatles contributed ideas to this song, it was primarily written by McCartney. As Macca revealed in The Lyrics, the real “Eleanor Rigby” was inspired by an older woman he “got along very well” with.
“Growing up I knew a lot of old ladies – partly through what was called Bob-a-Job Week, when Scouts did chores for a shilling,” he shared. “You’d get a shilling for cleaning out a shed or mowing a lawn. I wanted to write a song that would sum them up.”
“Let It Be”
McCartney wrote this song after having a dream in which his mother appeared to him.
As Lennon theorized to David Sheff, “Let It Be” might have been inspired by Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters”.
“That’s Paul. What can you say? Nothing to do with The Beatles. It could’ve been Wings,” Lennon shared. “I don’t know what he’s thinking when he writes ‘Let It Be’. I think it was inspired by ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’. That’s my feeling, although I have nothing to go on. I know he wanted to write a ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’.”
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