The classic song Paul McCartney never bothered finishing: “I like the brass”
The songwriting process is one of the most confusing forms of art to ever exist. From Paul McCartney to Bob Dylan to Leonard Cohen, there is no consistency within the process.
Some songs took a great deal of time to write. For instance, we might take Leonard Cohen’s biblical-adjacent classic, ‘Hallelujah’, for granted, but the fact remains, it took him a great deal of time to finish, as he went through rough draft after rough draft before he landed on something solid. Even when he came up with the final version of the song, his record label turned their noses up at it for vague reasons such as “not liking the mix”.
“Leonard asked if I wanted to make a record as he had some new songs, including one called ‘Hallelujah’,” recalled producer John Lissauer when discussing the Leonard Cohen hit. “I never asked about the lyrics or for him to explain them as that would have been insulting. I simply wanted to be the audience. I really thought Columbia would like it. Boy, was I wrong. Yetnikoff hated it.”
Alternatively, there are some classic songs that have been written within a matter of musically magnificent moments. Tom Petty was always an artist who was happy to enter some kind of otherworldly flow state when writing songs, which allowed him to churn out hits without even really considering them. There are some songs he barely even remembered putting together.
“I just took a deep breath and it came out. The whole song. Stream of consciousness: words, music, chords. Finished it,” said Petty when discussing his song ‘Wildflowers’ and the seemingly simple approach to writing it, “I mean, I just played it into a tape recorder and I played the whole song and I never played it again.”
One of the greatest songwriters of all time is Paul McCartney, and in his pursuit of great music, he has experienced both sides of the process. In other words, some songs he has written in a matter of moments, meanwhile, other songs have taken him a great deal of time. However, in the middle of this broad creative spectrum, there sits the song ‘Call Me Back Again’ by Wings. It wasn’t that this song was easy to finish, it also wasn’t the fact that it took a long time to finish, instead, this song just simply…. wasn’t finished.
When writing the song, McCartney had a simple structure and melody in mind, but knew that he needed to add to it. When he started trying to expand the song and brought more people in on it, he realised that actually, the unfinished version might be enough to go out on its own.
“That’s one I wrote about a year ago in Los Angeles, in the Beverly Hills,” he said when discussing the track, “I had an electric piano and thought of this tune. I wrote a few words for it and thought I’d write a few more, but I never did! I just ad-libbed a bit and had a go. It was a chance to sing. Then we put the brass on it – I like the brass on it. Tony Dorsey helped me on that in New Orleans.”
