The five best Paul McCartney songs about fictional characters
There are only so many problems a songwriter can have when quoting their own heart. It’s one thing to be able to make a great song that shows a side of you no one else ever sees, but it’s just as important to create surreal images from time to time that no one realised they needed in their lives. The Beatles had their fair share of absurd and personal lyrics, but Paul McCartney has made an entire career out of being a fiction writer.
Throughout both his Beatle years and his solo career, Macca has been responsible for some of the strangest and most off-the-wall stories that anyone put to tape. Although John Lennon was much better at showcasing an intimate side of himself when reaching songs like ‘Love’ and ‘God’, McCartney was still over there talking about everything from old Western heroes to mild-mannered people living ordinary lives.
While usually, any of these faceless characters would have seemed boring on paper, the melody and the charm McCartney puts into them have made them endure throughout the years. Yes, some of them can be too saccharine for some, but it’s hard to resist them when he puts that one little slice of ear candy into the mix that makes it impossible to leave someone’s head.
So despite him being one of the biggest songwriters of the past half-century, a handful of these tunes show that he’s equally capable of being a novelist should it strike his fancy. Whether it’s a slice-of-life story or just one long surreal tall tale, McCartney has a way of keeping us invested and lingering on every word he says.
Paul McCartney’s best songs about fantasy characters:
5. ‘The Fool on the Hill’ – Magical Mystery Tour
McCartney never claimed to have that many reservations in terms of his writing. Whatever he was thinking about at the time never really took long to make it into a tune, and looking at some of his more surreal pieces, it’s not like he was willing to go for something a bit more existential. When the group started getting interested in the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, though, ‘The Fool on the Hill’ became his facsimile of what the wise sage had to offer.
While the group initially found his work amusing before venturing to India to study transcendental meditation, ‘The Fool on the Hill’ was the first time McCartney covered a character like the guru. Although many people criticised the religious leader for being nothing but a fool, this was McCartney’s argument that people like that are much smarter than they look, even crying out for people who don’t understand when the tune turns dark in the chorus. McCartney might frolic through a field during the sequence in the Magical Mystery Tour film, but the whole point of the song is something else is going on behind those brown eyes.
4. ‘Penny Lane’ – Magical Mystery Tour
Anyone writing a standard character piece will want to go into detail about everything. Even if it’s about the most mundane thing in the world, they will go so far as to tell the listener what the person is wearing, how their life looks that day, and whether or not they will end up alone by the end of the night. McCartney had no such problem making those big leaps, but ‘Penny Lane’ was the first time he brought an entire community together in the span of a few verses.
As a way of one-upping John Lennon’s song ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘Penny Lane’ puts an entire Liverpool suburb into the span of one tune. In just a few seconds, we are up to speed on everyone from the banker with a motorcar, a nurse selling poppies out of a tray, and a barber working in the middle of a roundabout. Is it important to know exactly what their day-to-day lives are supposed to be? Not necessarily, but each of those fine details adds another layer to why McCartney still held his home in such high regard.
3. ‘Jenny Wren’ – Chaos and Creation in the Backyard
Looking back on McCartney’s solo career, there seemed to be a definite step down in terms of the characters that he was writing about. It’s not that all of the stories were bad per se, but it’s not hard to see some of the inspiration going a little bit sideways when going from the standard fanciful tune like ‘Lovely Rita’ to something like ‘Magneto and Titanium Man’. both are great in their own way, but ‘Jenny Wren’ was the first time Macca returned to making a vivid character portrait.
Because out of every single character he had talked about in the past, this felt like a much more sombre affair. Despite the hopeful guitar passages reminiscent of ‘Blackbird’, there’s a pure melancholy in some of the chords, especially when he talks about Wren not cowering to anyone’s foolish ways and then going to a different key centre. Chaos and Creation in the Backyard is already one of the most McCartney releases he ever made, but you need a tale like ‘Jenny Wren’ to appreciate the whimsy of ‘English Tea’.
2. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – Revolver
By the time of Revolver, the Fab Four were working well outside the confines of traditional pop songs. Now that they had stopped talking purely about love, nothing was off the table to discuss, whether that was taxes, drugs, or the broad nature of existence. When McCartney stepped up to the plate, he draped his first character piece in some of the darkest tones that he had ever worked on.
While also being one of the first Beatles tunes not to feature any guitars, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is the kind of song that feels all too true to life sometimes. As much as everyone is looking for someone out there, looking at a poor woman who spends her time wasting away in a church until her dying day is absolutely haunting, especially since it doesn’t have too much of a happy ending. For someone known to be a glorified ray of sunshine on most of his records, this was proof that McCartney was more than just Mr Optimism.
1. ‘Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band’ – Sgt Peppers
After Revolver, though, something had triggered in McCartney’s brain. They were off the road for the first time in years, and it wasn’t clear what they would do as an album-only outfit. It was time for them to start thinking outside the box even more, and ‘The Cute One’ had just the right idea when he started to put together a fictional band in his head.
Although Sgt Peppers didn’t pan out as a full conceptual piece, the titular band is still a stroke of genius for him. Outside of being just a musical alter ego, it gave the group the freedom to work in whatever stylistic costume suited them, whether that was working on a handful of non-rock tunes like ‘Fixing a Hole’ or ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’ or making weird left turns like ‘Good Morning Good Morning’. The rest of the group could have done without the concept, but if there wasn’t that main theme, the allure of their magnum opus wouldn’t have been nearly as enticing.
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