A day in the studio with The Beatles, 1962 – 1966: “I remember loving it”
Is there a method behind genius songwriting? Well, let’s just ask one of the greatest writers of all time, Paul McCartney.
One of the first pieces of advice he would give wannabe songwriters is that they need to lean into their individuality as much as possible. Don’t worry about fitting into a box, and instead work in a way that exposes all of your strange quirks.
“I used to think that anyone doing anything weird was weird,” he said. “I suddenly realised that anyone doing anything weird wasn’t weird at all and it was the people saying they were weird that were weird.”
While a lot of what the Beatles did might not necessarily be deemed as “weird”, Paul McCartney certainly wrote a lot of music which was pushing the boundaries of pop. Take an album like Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, for instance, as this was a piece of music which helped to define what a concept album was, and was an incredibly strange direction for a band as big as The Beatles to go in.
But while McCartney encourages writers to be unpredictable in their ideas, he wouldn’t advise them to do the same thing when it came to putting together a routine. He recalled writing with the Beatles for large portions of their time together as a band, and made a note of how regimented the process was. The band didn’t come and go as inspiration hit – instead, they treated the recording process like a nine-to-five job and created some of their best-ever music in the process.
“The early recording sessions with the Beatles happened a particular way, and a very specific way,” he recalled. “What happened is, you’re supposed to get at the studio for 10:00am, then you’re supposed to be ready, with your guitar in tune or your bass, set up your amp, and have everything ready to go by 10:30. Then at 10:30, the grown ups would kind of arrive, then they’d say ‘What are we doing?’ You’d tell ‘em, and in the next three hours you were expected to do two songs.”
He continued, taking us through what is quite literally a day in the life, “Then at 1:30pm, you had 1:30 to 2:30 hours lunch, then 2:30 to 5:30 you did another three hours, another two songs. That was the way we worked for quite a while.”
Creative minds often work best when they’re in free flow, which means that the idea of imposing any kind of strict structure is counterintuitive. You would think that Paul McCartney was of a similar ilk, and that these strict timings with The Beatles in the 1960s would have stunted the group’s creative efforts; however, it was the opposite. McCartney said that he loved these days in the studio and felt that they led to the development of some of his best music.
“I remember loving it,” he concluded, “because it’s so fast, there’s no time for anything but music. There was no indulging, you didn’t have time.”
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