“You really don’t”: The songs that Paul McCartney thought no one should hear
Most artists need to understand that not every song they write is ready for primetime. They can be a musical assembly line that’s able to pump out one fantastic song after another, but if they keep making great tunes like clockwork, there are bound to be a handful of them that don’t hold up or sound a bit strange compared to their usual track record. And at the risk of breaking a few hearts, this also applies to when The Beatles first started writing their classics in the early 1960s.
That’s not to say that any of the band members would willingly put out crap. From the minute that people heard Please Please Me, John Lennon and Paul McCartney had been writing tunes for years and had developed a fairly reliable sixth sense for when something worked and when they had to give it away to someone else. They were still quality songs but not necessarily up to their standards.
But it’s easy to take the band’s opinion with a grain of salt as well. Lennon had grown more cynical towards the band’s career as time went on, and no matter how much he may have liked some of his classics at the time, the thought of him bad-mouthing tunes like ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ later in his career made him seem a bit too hard on himself when it came to his classics.
While that had to do more with the production of the songs, the Fabs’ early years were more about them trying to get the next album for the holiday market. It wasn’t out of the question for them to release two albums in one year, but listening to a record like Beatles for Sale, it became a lot easier to see when the fatigue was setting in, especially when they padded out their albums with cover tunes.
“Normally I’d try to bury these songs and no put them out, but there was so much pressure from people”.
Paul McCartney
Even when they were firing on all cylinders, though, McCartney remembered tunes like ‘That Means A Lot’ never cutting it compared to their old tracks. This was already in the midst of recording Help!, but even for one of McCartney’s typical power pop tunes, he felt that those tunes should have never seen the light of day.
Despite them being released on Anthology later in their career, McCartney saw most of those “work-job” songs as something that didn’t deserve to be heard by anyone, saying, “Normally I’d try to bury these songs and no put them out, but there was so much pressure from people, they’d say, ‘Have you got anything?’ I’d say, ‘I have, but you really don’t want to see them’. So PJ Proby, a friend of ours, wanted to do it, so I gave it to him. He had a minor hit with it.”
And despite ‘That Means A Lot’ not being the most energetic tune in McCartney’s songbook, it does fit nicely with some of the weary tracks on the album. Lennon had already made a more sombre tune when putting out ‘Yes It Is’, so this could have McCartney’s attempt at doing the same thing, only this time with a far more optimistic ending than the story of a man who is haunted by the thoughts of his ex.
For all of the harsh criticism that Macca could level at himself, though, it’s hard to take everything that he says about his own work too seriously. He would eventually be even harder on himself when talking about his years with Wings, but when someone with a track record as impressive as he does, even some of his lesser albums are much more important to make up the full picture.
