The best songs on ‘The White Album’, according to Paul McCartney
The making of the White Album was a strange and tense period for The Beatles. John Lennon once said, “The break-up of The Beatles can be heard on that album,” and it’s clear that during the 1968 sessions, the splinters within the band deepened into irreparable cracks. For the band members and their scholars, this marked the beginning of the end. Yet, despite the turmoil, the album still holds moments of greatness—including some of Paul McCartney’s favourite songs from their entire catalogue.
“It was great, it sold. It’s the bloody Beatles’ White Album, shut up!” he once said, making it clear that he sits firmly in the camp of being a fan of the album. However, that feels somewhat surprising. If any record represents the breakdown of the friendship between Lennon and McCartney, the two old friends and powerful songwriting duo, it’s this one.
They were no longer writing together. Their prior process of collaboration had utterly disintegrated as the friends became somewhat estranged. Lennon’s drug use was ramping up, and his relationship with Ono seemed to be isolating him from the group. As the musicians grew in different directions, they even started taking it out on the songs, being quick to critique one another’s compositions in petty comments and little fights.
The album was plagued by that, hence the huge tracklist, as neither would compromise or agree to their songs being left off. So, really, out of any of the group’s albums, it feels like this should be one that McCartney feels most conflicted about. However, with time, he sees the greatness of it, not just with his own songs but with the work of others, too.
Of his own songs, ‘Blackbird’ is obviously his favourite, just as it is the favourite of millions of people around the world. As Macca sat down to write this track, he thought about racial injustice and the civil rights struggles raging in America. To him, the ‘Blackbird’ in the song represented black women. He said, “I just thought it would be really good if I could write something that if it ever reached any of the people going through those problems, it might give them a little bit of hope. So, I wrote ‘Blackbird’.”
While the relationship between himself and Lennon was rocky at best, he still has love for some of Lennon’s tracks on the album. ‘Julia’ was one of them. Despite the tensions between them, McCartney was more than aware of the importance and vulnerability of this song as he said, “‘Julia’…is about the mum he couldn’t live with. So I loved the poignancy of that because I’d been with him round to Julia’s house to visit her. And I knew how deeply he loved her.” So, on lists of his favourite songs by the band, ‘Julia’ is always mentioned to honour Lennon’s writing and his mother’s.
Another favourite from the album is ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’, another Lennon composition. It was a moment of togetherness during the tense sessions as the whole band came together to help finish off this song and get it right. “It’s just good poetry,” McCartney said of the track, standing out as a top pick from the record.
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