How Paul McCartney Wrote “Yesterday”
Abbey Road Studios/FacebookPaul McCartney at the piano.
Paul McCartney wrote plenty of memorable songs while with The Beatles. But one of his most famous tunes, “Yesterday,” came from a remarkable place — his dreams.
As McCartney tells it, he was spending the night at his girlfriend Jane Asher’s when he woke up with a tune in his head. “I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, ‘That’s great, I wonder what that is?'” McCartney remembered.
He sat down and began to puzzle it out on a piano. “I couldn’t believe I’d written it,” he later admitted. “I thought, ‘No, I’ve never written like this before.’ But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing.
“It’s like an egg being laid – not a crack or flaw in it.”
Still, McCartney wasn’t sure that he’d come up with the melody on his own. “For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before,” he said.
But even once McCartney was satisfied that the tune was his own, it still lacked something — lyrics.
For a while, McCartney and The Beatles kicked around a couple of different ideas. Before “Yesterday” became a tale of heartbreak, McCartney sang: “Scrambled eggs / Oh my baby, how I love your legs.”
“We called it ‘Scrambled Eggs’ and it became a joke between us,” Lennon recalled. Once McCartney came up with “Yesterday,” Lennon added, “I was sorry in a way, we’d had so many laughs about it.”
From there, the song practically wrote itself. “It’s easy to rhyme those a’s: say, nay, today, away, play, stay, there’s a lot of rhymes and those fall in quite easily,” McCartney explained.
But although most take “Yesterday” to be a love song, McCartney has mused that it might be about his mother Mary, who died when McCartney was 14.
“I think without realizing it I was singing about my mum,” McCartney said in 2013.
