“From the gods”: The Beatles song Paul McCartney called a blessing
Some of the best songs ever written are usually the ones that don’t feel like work to get down on paper. As much as people like to agonise over specific words until they have the final product down in writing, the best way to work usually involves surrendering to the muse and letting it take you wherever it wants. Paul McCartney does have a habit of working at his craft until he has a perfect tune by the end, but he could admit when some of his best Beatles songs came together by happenstance.
Because when he and John Lennon first started making their own tunes, it was easy for them to be drawn in by whatever they were seeing at the time. They knew they had a model that appealed to people with their usual love song format, but by the time they got to work on some of their later albums, it wasn’t out of the question for them to come up with anything that came into their heads, whether that was a country and western tune about a shootout like ‘Rocky Raccoon’ or a lighthearted tune about an axe murderer on ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’.
Both of those tunes may have divided Beatles fans for years, but McCartney was never meant to stay in one place for too long. He knew that love songs could get the job done, and looking at the model they had to work with on the Fab Four’s first handful of releases, there’s no question that they had a formula that worked every time they played.
Although A Hard Day’s Night did finally give them a singular identity with every song being written by Lennon and McCartney, Beatles for Sale couldn’t help feeling dull by comparison. As if the album cover didn’t clue everyone in enough, the band were tired as hell and growing desperate for material, but while they filled out half the album with covers, there were a lot more interesting pieces in the deep cuts.
“Neither of us had heard that expression before so we had that chauffeur to credit for that.”
paul mccartney
‘What You’re Doing’ is the textbook definition of how to make a compelling vocal melody, and Lennon found some time to stretch out his Dylan influence on ‘I’m A Loser’, but ‘Eight Days A Week’ was the clear frontrunner as a deep cut. Despite it never being released as a single in the UK, McCartney felt that him grabbing the title off of one of his chauffeurs was one of the best examples of musical synergy he could ask for.
When heading over to Lennon’s house for a writing session, the driver’s response about working eight days a week was the perfect shoo-in for a song title, with McCartney recalling, “Neither of us had heard that expression before so we had that chauffeur to credit for that. It was like a little blessing from the gods. I didn’t have any idea for it other than the title, and we just knocked it off together, just filling in from the title.”
Even though this could have easily fallen into the category of one of the duo’s ‘work-job’ songs, it certainly stood apart from the title alone. Syllables notwithstanding, the song could have been changed to something like ‘Every Day of the Week’, but with something as intriguing as ‘Eight Days A Week’, people were already hooked in before they had even heard the guitars fading up at the top of the tune.
Although there were some genuine musical miracles to come out of The Beatles’ partnership, like the edit in ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, the ability to seize upon lines like this is the reason why Lennon and McCartney worked so well. They didn’t even know where the song would be going apart from the title, but their ability to tell a whole story based on only a few words is what any great writer should strive for.
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