The 1963 Beatles song that changed how Paul McCartney wrote music
What should come first: music or lyrics? That question, arguably the popular song’s equivalent of the chicken-and-egg conundrum, has long been debated by songwriters.
It might seem inconsequential, but writing a melody with no lyrics can make the songwriting process incredibly difficult. Ideally, melodies and lyrics should come simultaneously, allowing for total cohesion between mood and content, but that’s not always possible.
Here, Paul McCartney explains how writing one of The Beatles‘ earliest tracks reshaped his approach, laying the foundation for some of his finest compositions.
In the spring of 1963, The Beatles embarked on a tour with Roy Orbison, where they were joined by Jerry and the Pacemakers, David Macbeth, Louise Cordet, Tony Marsh, Terry Young Six, Erkey Grant and Ian Crawford. They’d sold a fair few records, but McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were still a way from being top of the bill.
“We had to come on after Roy,” Harrison recalls in Anthology. “I can’t remember where his backing group was, but Roy would be out there every night and at the end he’d be singing, ‘She’s walking back to me, do do do do da do do-do…’ And the audience would go wild. We’d be waiting there and he’d do another big encore and we’d be thinking, ‘How are we going to follow this?’”
The outing meant travelling all over the country, which gave Paul McCartney time to work on songs. According to the musician, one of those tracks, ‘All My Loving’, was “the first song I’d ever written the words first. I never wrote words first, it was always some kind of accompaniment”.
Usually, Paul would come up with a musical idea and then find suitable lines and phrases to fit the melody. This time, Paul reversed the timeline, writing a set of lyrics first, which were then sown patched into a jaunty piece of Americana-infused pop.
The shift proved surprisingly effective. By beginning with the words, McCartney found himself shaping the melody around a fully formed emotional idea rather than retrofitting lyrics to an existing tune. The result was a song that felt immediate and cohesive, with its rhythmic phrasing and melodic structure naturally complementing the sentiment of the lyrics.
That experience subtly broadened his creative outlook. While he would still typically favour starting with music, ‘All My Loving’ demonstrated that stepping outside habitual methods could unlock new possibilities. It became an early example of how flexibility in songwriting could lead to some of the most memorable material in The Beatles’ catalogue.
“We were on a tour bus going to a gig and so I started with the words,” Paul told Barry Miles. “I had in mind a little country and western song. We played the Moss Empire circuit a lot, and there were always these nice big empty backstage areas. The places have all become bingo halls now. We arrived at the gig, and I remember being in one of these big backstage areas, and there was a piano there, so I’d got my instrument. I didn’t have a guitar, it was probably with our road manager, and I remember working the tune out to it on the piano. It was a good show song, it worked well live.”
Though McCartney would only use the technique a few times in his entire career, it seems to have taught him an important lesson: that modifying one’s typical approach to songwriting generally leads to exciting and innovative material. Throughout his career, Paul has experimented with a range of creative techniques, from quoting newspapers in ‘A Day In The Life’ to stitching three unfinished songs together in Wings’ ‘Band On The Run’. Despite all that, it was ‘All My Loving’ that clarified the importance of switching things up.
You can revisit the 1963 track below.
