The song Paul McCartney claimed “didn’t really make it”
Paul McCartney’s songs have always bordered on the playful. In his creative pomp, he had a knack for making the stupid and irreverent feel profoundly sentimental. Take ‘Silly Love Songs’ for example. The Wings number wore its stupidity on its sleeve, yet it has become a very real soundtrack for everyday sentimentalism.
While his career with The Beatles was both prolific and iconic, the esoteric tracks were given plenty of real estate to be published, and if they didn’t land, well, heck, the next classic was ready to follow up. But what was at the heart of any of his greatness was his originality. The moment Paul McCartney met John Lennon, a spark was lit, and McCartney’s songwriting would be steeped in innovation thereafter.
While it may feel as though McCartney operates on a higher frequency than your average Joe Bloggs, it doesn’t mean he was immune to criticism. Let’s come back to ‘Silly Love Songs’, for example, to understand the somewhat sensitive underbelly of music’s fiercest creator. It was a song soaked in self-awareness, both justifying his full-hearted approach to life, while flipping a middle finger to the journalists who backed him into such a corner.
Or suppose we are to hop to the other end of the spectrum. In that case, we’d find his political misfire, ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish‘, which, upon its 1972 release by Wings, was swiftly banned by radio stations for its overtly activist leanings. So what is a silly love song boy to do when silenced by the journalistic masses? Adapt a nursery rhyme, obviously.
“I do things that aren’t necessarily very carefully thought out,” McCartney once said of his songwriting playfulness. Before explaining how the new era of Wings was informed by an entirely different life stage altogether. “Now, you know, I’ve just got three kids over the last few years, and when I am sitting at home playing at the piano my audience a lot of the time is the kids.”
So as he sang them to sleep with ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’, it seems as though he was presented with what he thought might be his next silly hit record. While he recorded the track before his divisive hit, digging it out from the archives may have been the perfect rebuttal for the pearl-clutching journalists who demanded the song be banished from shelves. But McCartney insisted its genesis was purely natural.
“I just wrote that one up, the words were already written, you know,” he explained. “I just found out what the words to the nursery rhyme were, wrote a little tune up around it, went and recorded it. I had an idea in my head to find out what the words to the original nursery rhyme were.”
But while many musicians would be content with a spot at 9th on the charts, McCartney was less than impressed and took it as a sign that not all of his esoteric leanings should be pursued. He said, “I thought it was all very deep and all very nice. I see now, you know, it wasn’t much of a record. That’s all. It just didn’t really make it as a record, and that’s what tells, the black plastic.”
A relatively hard-nosed commercial take from an artist who was admittedly exposed to success but felt separated from its trappings. For The Beatles quit touring altogether in pursuit of a deeper level of artistry, giving up their most lucrative revenue stream for a sea of creative genius. Regardless, both ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ and ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish‘ were consigned to the McCartney archives, and luckily dismissed in the conversation of what moment defines his undying greatness.
