Paul McCartney and his five favourite songwriters of all time
Alongside John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in The Beatles, Paul McCartney changed the face of popular music almost single-handedly throughout the 1960s.
Together, they began their mission as the four mop-top lads from Liverpool, writing primarily of love and money but ended it looking like the cast of Scooby-Doo singing about yellow submarines, meter maids, walruses, egg men, tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
The early Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership injected the swinging ’60s with some much-needed energy in a post-war climate, but it was the latter lyrical and compositional developments that made their work truly timeless. While Lennon and McCartney gelled so well on the drawing board, each brought something unique to the table to make The Beatles greater than the sum of its parts.
Throughout the ’60s, Lennon and McCartney were out in front but felt a generation of creative geniuses hot on their heels. At the time, McCartney may have been careful not to pile too much praise onto his rivals, but over the decades since, with a legacy set in stone, he has frequently namechecked some of the peers he admires the most.
Below, we have listed the five songwriters that McCartney has praised the most, be that through words of admiration or those of envy.
Paul McCartney’s five favourite songwriters:
Bob Dylan
While The Beatles led the way for pop music in the UK in the 1960s, Bob Dylan established himself as the most important songwriter in history over in the US. While Lennon and McCartney’s style was different to Dylan’s, they openly took a lot of inspiration from the folk rocking troubadour.
In 1965, The Beatles were met with Dylan’s wrath after the release of Rubber Soul. Dylan felt that the album, and ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ in particular, was copying his style. “What is this? It’s me, Bob,” Dylan said of the Rubber Soul track. “[Lennon’s] doing me! Even Sonny & Cher are doing me, but, fucking hell, I invented it.”
In a conversation with NME in 2020, McCartney expressed his admiration for Dylan’s work. “I always like what he does,” he said. “Sometimes I wish I was a bit more like Bob. He’s legendary… and doesn’t give a shit! But I’m not like that. His new album [Rough And Rowdy Ways] I thought it was really good. He writes really well. I love his singing. He came through the standards albums like a total crooner. But, yeah, I like his new stuff.”
Brian Wilson
One of The Beatles’ most fierce yet friendly rivals across the Atlantic in the 1960s was The Beach Boys. Fronted by the songwriting dynamo Brian Wilson, the band mainly played second fiddle to the British invaders, but there was always a palpable degree of envy and appreciation from McCartney.
“Beach Boys, ‘God Only Knows,’ I think that’s a great classic,” he told B&N’s James Daunt. “In a way, I could say I wish I’d written them, but I’ve written enough. I’ve got enough to go on with. But yeah, there are some great writers and artists out there. I love to feel that when I’m writing something here, they’re writing something there. You get a little bit of rivalry going.”
“We had a big rivalry with The Beach Boys,” he continued. “I suppose I had a little one with Paul Simon, that is good. I had one a rivalry with John. If he’d write a good one, I’d go, ‘Oh god, I better write something better!’ So that’s good, a little bit of competition’s a good thing. But yeah, I would think there are lots of classic songs that you need to give me three hours and I’d write you a very long list.”
McCartney praised the Surf Rock hero once again in a 2013 interview with The Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood. “You know, Brian Wilson sort of proved himself to be like a really amazing composer,” he opined. “I was into chords, harmonies and stuff at that time and we ended up with this kind of rivalry. We put a song out, Brian would hear it and he’d do one. Which is nice, like me and John, you know, we kind of try to top each other all the time. But he eventually came out with ‘God Only Knows’ that was a sound stomper on Pet Sounds. I just think it’s a great song… melody, harmonies, words.”
“I got to sing it with Brian once, when we did a benifit [show] together,” McCartney continued. “I was okay at the actual performance, I held it together. But at the rehearsal, at the soundcheck I lost it, because it’s very emotional, this song, I find it… ‘Oh my god, I’m singing with Brian’, it just got me, I couldn’t. So all it is, it’s little vibrations reaching your music, it’s only little vibrations, little words and little things. There is this powerful effect, you know.”
Neil Young
Like so many of his generation, Neil Young was inspired to become a musician thanks to the songwriting and musicianship of The Beatles. Since Young’s rise to global acclaim, he has become close friends with McCartney through mutual appreciation.
Young was put in charge of inducting the Beatle into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his solo achievements in 1999. In his speech, Young remembered: “When I first heard The Beatles back in 60 somewhere, the first thing that I noticed was that ‘I might be able to this kind of thing myself’.
“So the first song that I ever sang was a Beatles song saying ‘Give money, that’s what I want’. Saying that at school cafeteria didn’t go over that good. So we tried ‘It won’t be long, yeah’, that was better. The Beatles meant a lot to me. Paul’s music, particularly his bass playing at that time was something that a lot of the bands were very impressed with. He is just one of the greatest songwriters, perhaps ever. So I think he will be remembered hundreds of years from now for the work that he did.”
McCartney has a lot of time for the Canadian songwriter and has invited him to share the stage on several occasions. Most memorably, Young was joined by the former Beatle for a performance of ‘A Day in the Life’ during his 2009 Hyde Park concert. To return the favour, McCartney invited Young to the stage during his 2016 performance at Desert Trip festival in California.
Paul Simon
Paul McCartney shared the 1960s with some of the all-time greats of the folk-rock movement. Simon and Garfunkel’s gentle harmonising style didn’t wildly overlap with The Beatles’ rock sound, but they didn’t let that come in the way of a little friendly rivalry. These two great Pauls of the music world undoubtedly had a bucket load of appreciation for each other’s work.
“I think Paul Simon has written some amazing songs,” Paul McCartney told B&N’s James Daunt. “I wouldn’t want to just say one of them, but he’s certainly written some great stuff.”
Back in 2011, Simon was asked to name who he considers to be the greatest songwriters of all time. “I’d put Gershwin, Berlin and Hank Williams,” Simon told Mojo. “I’d probably put Paul McCartney in there too. Then I’d have Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Then, in the second tier, Lennon is there, Dylan is there, Bob Marley and Stephen Sondheim are there, and maybe I’m there, too. It’s about whose songs last.”
John Lennon
Perhaps the most obvious entry for this list is McCartney’s partner in crime, John Lennon. The pair were responsible for the biggest band of all time and a general countercultural revolution throughout the ’60s. This wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for their strange songwriting telekinesis. Many of the Lennon-McCartney compositions were, at inception, solo compositions enhanced by a rivalry between the two. A constant need to upstage one another led to a rapidly rising bar.
Speaking to NPR for their ‘All Songs +1’ podcast in 2016, McCartney discussed how he missed writing alongside Lennon. He also explained how he hasn’t changed his writing process since his days opposite the late Beatle. “If I was to sit down and write a song now, I’d use my usual method: I’d either sit down with a guitar or at the piano and just look for melodies, chord shapes, musical phrases, some words, a thought just to get started with,” McCartney said. “And then I just sit with it to work it out, like I’m writing an essay or doing a crossword puzzle. That’s the system I’ve always used, that John and I started with. I’ve really never found a better system and that system is just playing the guitar and looking for something that suggests a melody and perhaps some words if you’re lucky.”
Later in the conversation, McCartney touched upon his personal relationship with Lennon. “Obviously, the biggie I miss working with is John because that was something very special, and you know it’s very difficult to replicate that,” he said. “In fact, it’s almost impossible because we met each other as teenagers and went through a lot of life together: hitchhiking to Paris and holidays and working together and being in Hamburg together with The Beatles. So we were very intimate; we knew each other intimately as only teenage friends can.”
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