The Beatles song Paul McCartney thought “lifted” the band to new heights
The journey The Beatles went on in such a short time frame is staggering. To put it into a modern context, if the band had started during the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020, releasing their debut album, then they would already be in the White Album era. They would already have caused Beatlemania, seen it in action on their world tours and then quit touring.
They would already have mastered rock and roll, folk, blues, and psychedelic sounds and would now be onto merging all of them into their own unique sound, pushing the limits and boundaries of what could be done in the studio. So when Paul McCartney discusses the one song that levelled the group up, there are countless options.
It could be ‘Please Please Me’, their debut single, which already raised them up from a standard local band or early skiffle group to a rock and roll phenomenon. It could be ‘Norwegian Wood’ as Lennon’s new interest in folk pushed them into new genres, or ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ with its early experimental edge that prophesied where the band would go next. Many would argue the case for songs like ‘Across The Universe’ or ‘Day In The Life’ being tracks that shot the band into a whole new realm of talent and made it clear that The Beatles were never simply another rock act but had so much more up their sleeves.
But the song McCartney actually picked is an unlikely one that maybe no one would have predicted. He selected ‘From Me, To You’, the band’s early single released in 1962, giving them their first ever number one. But while the track is obviously a landmark moment in their history as the piece that made them popular, it’s less about the sales for McCartney and more about what the song represented.
“That was a pivotal song. Our songwriting lifted a little with that song,” he said about the track. Beyond even being about the piece itself, it was more that ‘From Me, To You’ marked a moment when the band were beginning to exist in the world of music makers, earning respect from their peers and learning how to hone their talent and make their mark.
“We were starting to meet other musicians then, and we’d start to see other people writing. After that, on another tour bus with Roy Orbison, we saw Roy sitting in the back of the bus, writing ‘Pretty Woman’. It was lovely,” he said.
Even though McCartney’s timeline here is incorrect, as the track was actually written while on tour with Helen Shapiro, the point still stands. Recalling crafting this new song with John Lennon while the band were working, gigging and travelling around, having the opportunity to then play early versions of it to their peers and show their worth as artists even off stage, at the back of a tour bus, it was a proud and momentous moment for the songwriters. McCartney concluded, “We could trade off with each other. This was our real start.”
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