The Beatles song that made Paul McCartney “a bit queasy”
The Beatles‘ move towards more introspective work usually gets placed around 1965. That’s when John Lennon wrote ‘Help!’ based on his own personal circumstances and Paul McCartney wrote ‘Yesterday’ based on a dream, two songs that showed early signs of maturity in the pair’s songwriting habits.
If you wanted to go even earlier, you could point to Lennon’s acknowledgements of ‘I’m a Loser’ and ‘No Reply’ on 1964’s Beatles for Sale. In contrast, A Hard Day’s Night usually gets highlighted as the height of The Beatles’ more fluffy and lightweight songwriting styles. Indeed, the album’s title track and some of its lesser songs, like ‘I’m Happy Just To Dance With You’ and ‘Any Time At All’, found The Beatles at their most insubstantial.
If you look closer, however, A Hard Day’s Night does feature some more serious writing. There’s Lennon’s ‘I’ll Cry Instead’, which showed his vulnerability for the first time, as well as ‘If I Fell’, a more nuanced and evolved look at falling in love. McCartney had his own moments of maturity on the album, including the ballad ‘And I Love Her’ and the forward-looking ‘Things We Said Today’.
“It was a slightly nostalgic thing already, a future nostalgia: we’ll remember the things we said today, sometime in the future,” McCartney explained in the book Many Years From Now, “so the song projects itself into the future and then is nostalgic about the moment we’re living in now, which is quite a good trick. It has interesting chords.”
McCartney wrote the track while taking a vacation, but the circumstances were far from relaxing. “I remember writing ‘Things We Said Today’ in one of the cabins below deck one afternoon on my acoustic guitar,” McCartney recalled. “I got away from the main party, but it was a bit queasy downstairs; you could smell the oil and the boat was rocking a bit and I’m not the best sailor in the world, so I wrote a little bit of it downstairs and then the rest of it on the back deck where you couldn’t smell the engine. I don’t know why the engine was on, I suppose we were moving.”
McCartney’s seasick adventure produced one of the most underrated songs on A Hard Day’s Night, but even more importantly, it continued to set new standards for his own songwriting. As he continued to mature, McCartney sought to better himself and his songs as he progressed. That desire to grow would eventually bloom into new avenues for lyrical content, but even during The Beatles’ lighter days, McCartney wasn’t afraid to get serious on occasion.
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