“Perfect”: Stevie Nicks’ favourite song by The Beatles
When The Beatles first touched down on US soil, Stevie Nicks was just 15. Like so many other famous people, her upbringing was an itinerant one, with the family constantly moving around the US thanks to her father’s position as the vice president of Greyhound. So, culture was a crux that kept her company. When she finally settled in California for her final high school years, pop was exploding, filling her world with a sense of belonging and possibility.
It was around this time that she decided to write her first song. When she received a guitar for her 16th birthday, she quickly attended to pouring out her soul. The track she penned came with a title well ahead of her years: ‘I’ve Loved and I’ve Lost, and I’m Sad but not Blue’. It was about a break-up with a boy who barely knew she existed. But it was far from flippant creatively; the track illustrated that her creative muse was set to be fueled by the melodrama of love.
Paul McCartney provided her with the blueprint for this with a track that Nicks would still call “perfect” long after her soppy teenage period. ‘Yesterday’ arrived in 1965, mere months after she was through with composing her first folk heartbreak. The song famously came to McCartney in a dream, but in characteristic fashion, Nicks saw it more as a prognostication of the solemn times that lay ahead for the icon.
“I think ‘Yesterday’ was very much a premonition of Paul of what was to come with Linda – finding his one great love and then what it was to lose her. It’s the perfect song,” Nicks said. With spirituality and love forming the Venn of her art forevermore, it is perhaps no surprise that she looks at this song in this manner, and even less surprising that she champions it as the greatest achievement in McCartney’s illustrious career.
While many would pick out his penchant for innovation or effortless melodicism as a highlight, Nicks had a different view about the pinnacle of his work. “These guys truly wrote about the intricacies of relationships,” she told Rolling Stone. “It was going deeper, and that’s what we were surprised by.”
This ability to view the world in amber and study it for a song is, ironically, something that ‘Macca’ himself has highlighted as his secret facet. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the secret to successful songwriting is the ability to paint a picture,” he says in his recent book, The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present.
In this respect, there is a definite kinship between how the pair write. As Nicks told the Huffington Post about her worldview: “I’m going to spend my life writing poems, turning them into music that will affect people and touch their hearts. I’m going to write the songs that people can’t write for themselves.” Such a mission takes a degree of honesty, and honesty takes observant reconciliation. Both Nicks and McCartney have prided their songwriting on this, and when that’s done right, it can, indeed, be “perfect”.
‘Yesterday’: The most heard Beatles song
That perfection also seems to resonate with the masses. Using US radio plays as the main metric, ‘Yesterday’ was not just the most-played Beatles song of the 20th century but the third most-played of any artist. The data itself comes from BMI, “a performing rights organisation that represents more than 250,000 songwriters, composers and publishers with a repertoire of more than 3million songs and compositions from around the world and in all genres of music.”
The trick to reconciling its true beauty is to imagine hearing it for the first time again. The song is so transcendent and ubiquitous, as a result, that its heavenliness has almost become commonplace, but beneath that is an anthem that explains why—one that taps into the human comedy with soulful solemnity and makes sense of tragedy.
