The 1966 song Paul McCartney knew couldn’t be any better: “How am I going to top that?
The job of someone like Paul McCartney is often a lot more complicated than most people think.
Anyone could rest on their laurels and try to make the same kind of ho-hum pop single if they made a dent in pop culture like Macca did, but he was more interested in trying to take his music into different directions every single time he made a record. But when you’ve amassed the kind of back catalogue that he has, there’s going to be a little bit of pressure to try and make something that’s going to measure up to what his classics always were.
Then again, the idea of him making the kind of golden pop singles that he and John Lennon used to write back in the day was probably not in the cards. He made peace with the fact that there was never going to be another collaboration like ‘A Day in the Life’ ever again, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t some more beautiful songs to be found. After all, he was the tunesmith of the band, and it was always easy for him to come up with something that was at least a little bit catchy.
Not all of them were catchy in the right ways, and the world has almost universally claimed that they weren’t a fan of tunes like ‘Ebony and Ivory’, but Macca wasn’t going to apologise for songs like that, either. He liked the idea of having different periods throughout his career and taking new avenues whenever he made a record. But there are certain tunes that almost seemed to be like works of art that no one was going to be able to replicate.
Because even if McCartney were to recreate the sound of his Beatles days live with backing tracks, it still wouldn’t have sounded as good as what they made on albums like Revolver and Sgt Pepper. Every one of those songs felt like a new creative endeavour for them whenever they pressed RECORD, and compared to the more “typical” rock and roll songs like ‘Doctor Robert’ or ‘Good Morning Good Morning’, how the hell does someone recreate a tune like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ live?
Sure, ‘Yesterday’ was the kind of song that McCartney would occasionally play with a string backing track, but he clearly hit a high watermark with this morose tune about loneliness. Every piece of the string arrangement sounds absolutely pitch-perfect, and while that could be intimidating for any other songwriter, McCartney knew not to try to compete with what he had already done.
He knew that every piece of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was perfect the way it was, and all he could hope to do was create something that lived up to it, saying, “When I write a song, I have my other songs hanging over it. I suppose the minute you write a decent song, that’s a curse. You’re always like, ‘Oh, shit, I’ve just written ‘Eleanor Rigby’, how am I going to top that?’ I think you go, ‘I’m not.’ You just realize you’re not going to top it, but you write ‘Blackbird.’ You go in another direction or whatever.”
And that’s half the reason why a lot of McCartney’s later years sound so interesting. He didn’t ever try to be pigeonholed into one sound, and while he did always slip in a handful of his granny songs that John Lennon always loathed, he was never going to apologise for writing the kind of tunes that were meant to make people happy. Because, really, that’s what he felt he was put on this Earth to do.
Whereas Lennon was used to quoting his heart and being brutally honest in his music, McCartney was here to take sad songs and make them better, and even if he had his fair share of tearjerkers in his catalogue, he knew that the best way to keep his track record up was to pick himself up and keep going whenever something went wrong.
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