The 1977 song Paul McCartney was insanely jealous of: “A song you wish you’d written”
No one can really argue with the amount of hits that Paul McCartney has had over the course of his career.
Anyone could claim to have a few tunes that are quite catchy in their discography, but even after everyone hurls spitballs at Macca for being more lightweight than his fellow Beatles, the fact that he has made some of the greatest anthems of all time more than makes up for some of the more embarrassing parts of his catalogue. But even when Wings were riding high, there were still more than a few songs that made him a little bit jealous of the new school in town.
But if McCartney was going to make any new music, the first thing he needed to do was get off his ass. He was heartbroken after The Beatles had ended, and while everyone else would have been happy to fade into obscurity, Linda McCartney was the real reason why he kept going. He wanted to make music again by any means necessary, and getting his new band to the top of the rock and roll world all over again was a feat in itself.
Wild Life was already an extremely mixed bag when it first came out, but when you look at how far a journey they had taken by the time of Wings at the Speed of Sound, they were ready to take on anyone. They were one of the greatest live acts of their generation, but even with a few Beatles songs sprinkled into the set for good measure, McCartney did have his ear close to the ground when he heard what Billy Joel was doing.
Because when you look at the criticism thrown Joel’s way, it’s not all that different from what Macca was dealing with. ‘The Piano Man’ has always been given a fair bit of flak from critics for being a bit too pedestrian or cornier than what the other legends of rock were doing, but Joel wasn’t afraid to pull from his influences. As far as he was concerned, ‘derivative’ was a compliment, and it didn’t matter as long as he could make tunes that everyone could enjoy.
And by the time he made The Stranger, every single tune could have been a hit in its own right. Joel was already taking his fair share of cues from the Fab Four when making an epic like ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’, but for someone who could appreciate more than his fair share of silly love songs, McCartney felt that he should have been the one to write a tune as simple as ‘Just the Way You Are’.
That kind of sentiment is what every balladeer strives for, and McCartney always wished that he could have written the tune, saying, “The song that really made me know that [Billy] was happening was ‘Just the Way You Are’. And when I get asked, ‘Is there a song that you wish you’d written?’, that’s the one I always say.” But at the risk of pissing off many Beatles fans, the harmony might have been a bit complicated for what McCartney was known for.
That’s not to say that McCartney wasn’t capable of making those kinds of tunes every single time he wrote one of his tunes, but Joel is flying through different borrowed chords from other keys and turning in one of the more difficult songs that anyone would ever have to play at a wedding. There’s a lot of thought that goes into a song like this, and that kind of harmony is one of the reasons why someone like George Martin was so taken with him when he first heard his music.
But throughout every single era of his career, the fact that Joel can remain humble about being one of the biggest songwriters of all time is what makes him a national treasure. He was willing to do whatever it took to make the best records that he could, but he was usually just happy to have written a few half-decent tunes rather than trying to compete with what Lennon or McCartney were doing.
