The song Paul McCartney needs to fight back the tears to sing: “I find it very emotional”
There’s plenty of good reasons why The Beatles chose to end things at the time they did, and the fact that the group could barely stand the sight of one another by the end of an intense decade together is perhaps at the top of that list.
The two main songwriting forces in the group, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, were at odds with one another long before the demise of the band, and were working together far less frequently than they had done on the band’s earliest material. This is how both began to establish their own individual styles as songwriters to a greater extent, but it was also the first major sign of the band’s downfall.
As far as the other remaining members go, Ringo Starr wasn’t exactly as sick of it, given how he ended up continuing to have a professional relationship with Lennon after their breakup, and George Harrison simply wanted more opportunity to write his own material and explore things that he never had the opportunity to do while with the band. However, having the two main members at war with one another wasn’t going to help the general dynamic stay strong, and separating seemed the only logical way in which they could continue to have successful careers.
It was only speculated that this was the case at the time, but the feud became a lot more public when Lennon and McCartney started openly writing solo songs aimed as barbs at one another early on in their respective solo careers.
McCartney, despite seeming like the more mature of the two, was the first to attack with the release of his song, ‘Too Many People’, which is seen as a jab at Lennon. Released on Ram, the single album credited to both Paul and his wife, Linda McCartney, the song contains lyrics like “That was your first mistake / You took your lucky break and broke it in two,” which irked Lennon, as he saw it as a personal dig on how he was the one who broke up The Beatles.
Lennon struck back a matter of months later with ‘How Do You Sleep?’, an even more scathing track that doesn’t mince its words in quite the same way, with him suggesting that McCartney’s great contributions to the band were few and far between: “The only thing you done was Yesterday / And since you’re gone you’re just another day.”
McCartney evidently felt a sense of guilt over this, and ended up releasing a more touching song later in 1971 to try and make peace with Lennon, even though it was actually written during the Ram sessions. During a 2022 interview with the official Paul McCartney fan site, he claimed that the song ‘Dear Friend’, taken from Wings’ debut album, Wild Life, was meant as an apology to Lennon, and that hearing it to this day makes him weep.
“That’s sort of me talking to John after we’d had all the sort of disputes about The Beatles break up,” McCartney confirmed. “I find it very emotional when I listen to it now. I have to sort of choke it back.”
While the peacemaking didn’t exactly work as planned, with the two never reconciling fully or coming together to release any more music as a partnership, they stopped fighting quite as much in the public eye, and considering the circumstances of Lennon’s death less than a decade later, you can imagine that the song feels like even more of a gut punch now than it ever did.
