The 1971 Paul McCartney song that serves as an accidental prequel to ‘Eleanor Rigby’
“Every day, she takes a morning bath, she wets her hair/ Wraps a towel around her as she’s heading for the bedroom chair”. Does that not sound oddly like the woman who “picks up the rice where a wedding has been”? However, it speaks of the extent to which Paul McCartney draws inspiration from the characters in his life, both past and present.
‘Eleanor Rigby’, although a fictional entity, was deeply rooted in one of his elderly neighbours as well as the name on a gravestone that he and John Lennon used to walk past as teenagers.
While the 1966 song represented a key masterpiece in his entire songwriting canon, it was clear to see how the reverberations of that one lonely woman took hold throughout the rest of his career. Indeed, you could say it was rather poetic that the same themes of isolation once again reared their head in his very first steps towards flying solo.
Indeed, as much as the observational style of everyday life was not an uncommon appearance in the work of The Beatles, it was easy to see how his first official song after the break-up of the band, ‘Another Day’, fittingly served as a prequel to ‘Eleanor Rigby’. She was a woman downtrodden by the mundanity of her work and her life, and Eleanor Rigby died from the depths of that loneliness.
It was also notable that ‘Another Day’ existed somewhere in the unnamed liminality between the end of The Beatles and McCartney’s next solo steps with Ram, with it having been written during the sessions for that album but premiered during the band’s time for Let It Be. It was almost as though, much like the woman herself, McCartney was a little adrift.
Significantly, the role of his wife Linda was paramount in this sense in defining “our sound”, as he put it, with other songs like ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’ also rumbling around at the time while Wings was still a pipe dream. Although Linda’s inclusion on the track as a backing vocalist prompted a bit of a legal mess as Northern Songs claimed it violated a rights agreement, Macca was steadfast that she was central to his new vision.
To this end, there is a case to be heard about ‘Another Day’ being the direct mouthpiece of the musician’s own feeling of helplessness at the time. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was almost him yearning for a sense of solitude at the height of manic Beatles fame, while this song wondered what he would do without having the crutches of his bandmates to lean on.
In fact, as much as the exploits of McCartney’s life were anything but ordinary, ‘Another Day’ especially represented a moment in which his life was the furthest possible thing from predictable. He needed the presence of Linda to guide him, the guise of the unnamed lonely woman to mask his feelings.
‘Another Day’ was very much the prequel to ‘Eleanor Rigby’, but it was also deeply a portrait of Macca in the moment, unsure where his life was meant to take him next and feeling emotionally rudderless despite his newfound freedom. The words “All the lonely people/ Where do they all belong?” had never rung so true.
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