The reason why Paul McCartney was “embarrassed” by ‘Yesterday’
Some of the best songs tend to fall out of the sky, and that’s exactly what happened to Paul McCartney. As The Beatles were on the upswing in the early 1960s, Macca had a tune working around in his head that came to him in a dream, which would soon become ‘Yesterday’. Although the writing might have taken some time to turn into the melancholy ballad, McCartney had reservations about committing it to The Beatles.
When McCartney originally dreamed the idea, he thought he remembered it from one of his father’s old jazz records, thinking that nothing that brilliant could have come into his brain that quickly. As he fleshed it out during the production of the movie Help!, McCartney started to take the song more seriously, painting a vivid picture of a romantic relationship in its bitter end stages.
Before springing the song upon the rest of the band, McCartney had mentioned that the track was a little too syrupy for what the band had become after transcending their teenybopper images of their early days. Despite doing show tunes and ballads in their past like ‘Til There Was You’, the easy listening side of the tune didn’t appeal to McCartney, telling Howard Stern: “It was a little bit embarrassing. I didn’t want to be the guy out on the stage on his own. When I brought it in, it was just me and a solo guitar. That was it. We elected not to release it as a single in England. Like, ‘Nah, we’re a rock group’. We liked it, but it wasn’t a big feature on our stage act”.
McCartney even had come trepidation recording the final track, once telling Rolling Stone that he had to be goaded by producer George Martin to add the strings in the final mix, recalling, “I said ‘Are you kidding?’. I hated the idea. [Martin] said, ‘Well, let’s just try it, and if you hate it, we can just wipe it and go back to you and the guitar’. So I sat at the piano and worked out the arrangements with him, and we did it, and of course, we liked it”.
Going on to become one of the most covered songs of all time, McCartney’s pure heartbreak struck a nerve with fans worldwide while also driving a dividing line between the rest of The Beatles. Despite not having any hand in writing the song, John Lennon still received the songwriter’s credit as part of his partnership with McCartney. Although the song could have easily been released as a solo single, Brian Epstein quickly shot down any of those ideas, thinking that any solo single might lead people to think that The Beatles were breaking up.
Even though Lennon had his ups and downs with McCartney both in and out of The Beatles, he always had the utmost respect for this tune, even joking that people in restaurants would come up and play him the tune that he had nothing to contribute. Speaking about it after the fact, Lennon still mentioned how the song knocked him out, saying in 1980, “I have had so much accolade for ‘Yesterday’. That’s Paul’s song, and Paul’s baby. Well done. Beautiful—and I never wished I’d written it”.
