The fascinating lyrical trick that connects two of The Beatles’ greatest songs
Nostalgia is one of the most pervasive aspects of The Beatles‘ songcraft. Whether it’s John Lennon’s LSD-laced recollections of childhood in ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, Paul McCartney’s humorous depiction of Liverpool locals in ‘Penny Lane’ or the duo’s remembrance of past loves in ‘In My Life’, The Beatles’ discography is teeming with songs that explore the relationship between memory, people and place.
The most fascinating and intelligent of these – ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Things We Said Today’ – are united by what Paul McCartney once referred to as “future nostalgia”, a fascinating lyrical trick that rarely receives the attention it deserves and, arguably, defines McCartney’s songwriting style most succinctly of all.
Let’s begin with ‘Things We Said Today’, which appeared on The Beatles’ 1964 album A Hard Days Night. The track was written at a particularly blissful moment in Paul’s young life. In May 1964, he was sailing around the Virgin Islands with his girlfriend Jane Asher, Ringo Starr and Starr’s future wife Maureen. “I remember writing ‘Things We Said Today’ in one of the cabins below deck one afternoon on my acoustic guitar,” Paul later recalled in Many Years From Now. “I got away from the main party, but it was a bit queasy downstairs; you could smell the oil, and the boat was rocking a bit, and I’m not the best sailor in the world, so I wrote a little bit of it downstairs and then the rest of it on the back deck where you couldn’t smell the engine. I don’t know why the engine was on, I suppose we were moving.”
Maybe Paul was just seasick, but there’s a definite sense of uneasiness throughout ‘Things We Said Today’. Take, for example, the strange juxtaposition between Paul’s apparently rosy lyrics and the complex minor chords beneath, which seem to suggest that all was not as perfect as it seemed. Already, Paul was beginning to understand that his lifestyle would drive a wedge between him and Jane. In response, he used ‘Things We Said Today’ to immortalise the present. “It was a slightly nostalgic thing already, a future nostalgia,” he would later observe, “we’ll remember the things we said today, sometime in the future, so the song projects itself into the future and then is nostalgic about the moment we’re living in now, which is quite a good trick.”
A year later, McCartney would utilise this same technique while writing ‘Yesterday’. The track came to the songwriter fully formed while he was staying at the Asher family home on London’s Wimpole street. “I was living in a little flat at the top of a house, and I had a piano by my bed. I woke up one morning with a tune in my head, and I thought, ‘Hey, I don’t know this tune – or do I?’ It was like a jazz melody. My dad used to know a lot of old jazz tunes; I thought maybe I’d just remembered it from the past.”
Like ‘Things We Said Today’, ‘Yesterday’ plays around with time as a linear concept – projecting a nostalgia for the past into the future. The concept of “yesterday” is significant because it marks a time before the speaker “said something wrong.” Again, the past is something pure and innocent that the speaker longs to return to. Of course, when Paul sings ‘”Now I long for yesterday,” he isn’t just saying that he wants to return to the past, he’s saying that he wants that purity, that love, that tenderness to be a part of his future.
It is just another expression found in McCartney’s songwriting that would not only endear him to millions of fans but define him as one of pop music’s greatest writers.
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