The song Paul McCartney called a musical “therapy session”
One of the most beautiful things about Paul McCartney’s discography is how he allows his listeners in. Despite being one of the most famous men in history, his lyricism regularly peels back the curtain, allowing his followers an insight into his inner life, memories, and personal reflections. Music is his catharsis, and in the case of one song, it acts as a full therapy session in song.
There are countless examples of McCartney using his music to process tricky emotions. His timeless classic ‘Let It Be’ sees him tenderly reflecting on grief as he remembers his late mother. ‘Here Today’ is a heart-aching ode to John Lennon, written after his shocking murder as McCartney yearned for their early days and youth of friendship. Even some of his seemingly nonsensical and silly tracks like ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’ have a genuine emotional centre as he considers homesickness and how life pulls him further from where he started.
Across the Beatles’ work, his efforts with Wings and his expansive collection of solo albums, McCartney has always been reflecting on his life in his work. For one track, he dug deep into his memory to reflect on some dark childhood years, finally processing them in song decades later.
On his 14th solo album, Memory Almost Full, he proved that his memory wasn’t gone yet as he thought back to his school days back in Liverpool. “I had a real motley bunch of teachers at the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys. Some of them were complete maniacs,” he recalled. “Whereas I wrote about golden summers in ‘You Tell Me’, school was very dark and gloomy,” he continued, having already dealt with the good, this track was a chance to deal with the bad memories of those years, too.
“The building itself wasn’t the lightest of places – it was built in 1825. This seemed to affect the attitude of the teachers,” he said, adding, “They were a dark bunch of people.”
Throughout the track, he reflects on all the teachers who seemed to doubt his dreams or attempted to limit them. “Teacher said I had my head in the clouds,” he sings, remembering how he was treated as directionless as a child despite always being passionate about where he knew he would end up. It’s a similar complaint to one that John Lennon faced, declaring himself as wayward and lost on ‘Nowhere Man’.
But for McCartney, those years of being made to feel like a letdown or that he was failing himself somehow deeply impacted him. Despite having grand dreams and passions about where he wanted to end up, the lack of support from his teachers left him feeling doubtful. In his own words, it was “very very very very very very hard.”
However, decades later, with an incredibly successful career, McCartney’s return to these memories and putting them down in song proved to be a cathartic exercise. “The song is like a therapy session for me,” he said, as if he finally got to prove those teachers wrong and heal the damage done by their strictness.
