‘When I’m Sixty-Four’: The Beatles song Paul McCartney regrets writing
There wasn’t much room for regret when it came to The Beatles. Any potential concerns were buried beneath the overarching ideals of peace and love that the Fab Four embodied. For the most part, the band achieved their fame and became global superstars through genuine adoration for the art they created. More than six decades later, it’s difficult to imagine another artist accomplishing the same cultural and artistic feat.
For the group, which consisted of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, taking their message of peace to the masses was the most important thing they could do. As McCartney said himself when looking back at the message of his art: “I still believe that love is all you need. I don’t know a better message than that”.
Nevertheless, even Edith Piaf knew that ‘No Regrets’ was a lie. Artists have a way of always looking forward and rarely resting long enough to make a glance behind them seem worthy of their time. Especially when considering an artist as perpetually busy as McCartney. However, with decades in the business and a hoard of journalists always keen to divert the musician’s attention back over his shoulder, McCartney was bound to take respite some time and reflect on the work he had achieved.
Naturally, as the evolving creator he is, he took retrospective issue with some of the art he extolled with The Beatles amid a manic fanfare of rapid progression. In fact, it is truly remarkable, and a measure of the majesty of the band, that during a prolific period of pioneering – the likes of which the world has rarely seen – there aren’t more obvious regrets in the back catalogue and more.
Beyond the whirlwind, the second astounding fact on this front is that Paul McCartney was only 24 when Promethean feats like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came to the fore. This had Macca look 40 years into the future with the track ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, and there is a fair dose of thorny irony in that this is one of the anthems he regrets writing.
As the star explained in a Los Angeles Times interview: “It was really an arbitrary number when I wrote [‘When I’m Sixty-Four’]. I probably should have called it ‘When I’m 65,’ which is the retirement age in England. And the rhyme would have been easy, ‘something, something alive when I’m 65.’ But it felt too predictable. It sounded better to say 64.”
As it happens, there was something fateful about the anthem in prognosticating the end of The Beatles, too. The Beatles didn’t have much time to look ahead when the world was getting busy around them. The song presented this moment of reflection, and it found Lennon thinking differently. As he famously told Dick Cavett: “We didn’t want to be dragged on stage playing ‘She Loves You’ when we’ve got asthma and Tuberculosis when we’re 50.”
He continued: “A long time ago, I said I didn’t want to be singing ‘She Loves You’ when I’m 30, I said that when I was about 25 which in a roundabout way meant that I wouldn’t be doing whatever I was doing then.” Thus, this looking ahead of the moment, in some ways, foreshadowed what was to come.
Lennon also generally disliked such tracks written by McCartney. Falling firmly in the Venn diagram of music hall patter and ‘story song’ smiles that Lennon would eloquently deem as “granny shit”, there’s a good cause to suggest ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ is a tune that Lennon regrets having been put out under The Beatles moniker, too.
However, when Paul McCartney reached a ripe old age, his main regret was that the song wasn’t foreshadowing enough. “I met someone who plays piano in an old persons’ home, and he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I play some of your songs, and the most popular one is ‘When I’m Sixty-Four,’ but I have to change the title to ‘When I’m 84’ because 64 seems young to those people,’ he said. ‘They don’t get it.’”
Seeing as though the song grapples with the crux of ageing, McCartney seemingly found it too juvenile to do justice. As he said with a sigh, “If I were to write it now, I’d probably call it ‘When I’m 94.’” However, if ageing teaches us one thing, it’s that you can’t go back and change the past, so McCartney’s sigh with the song doesn’t last long and the artist, looking forward as ever, rarely dwells or such a thing.
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