The subconscious regret Paul McCartney hid in his Beatles lyrics
There’s a reason why art is used in therapy. Creativity seems to have this mythical power to unlock our subconscious. Through the process of making something, thoughts and feelings that only ever existed under the surface or in the depths of the psyche seem to come forward and step into the spotlight, feeling safe and supported by the shrouding veil of a song, painting or poem. Sometimes, those feelings still remain a secret to the creator until years down the line, the true meaning of what they made reveals itself. That happened to Paul McCartney as it took him years to finally realise who he was talking to in one of his songs.
McCartney has always been a master at embedding rich meaning into his work while maintaining the whimsy of a track or the universality of its lyrics. On ‘Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey’, he deals with the difficult feelings of homesickness and distance by using fun characters to act it out. On ‘Hey Jude’, he turned a message of love for John Lennon’s song into a timeless anthem loved worldwide. On ‘Band On The Run’, he dealt with his complex feelings towards The Beatles through a storytelling opus. Each one is deeply emotive but open-ended, keeping room for his own personal emotions while allowing audiences to engage.
But on ‘Yesterday’, it seemed like he’d opened the song up to everyone but himself. Everyone knows the story by now: Paul McCartney woke up with a start one morning with a song in his head. He rushed to the piano and out came this tune, fully formed by his subconscious. For days, he held it like a secret, panicked he’d plagiarised the tune. But eventually, he realised it was all his own.
It’s a good story, standing as incredible proof of McCartney’s ability to craft a perfect song. It comes so naturally he can do it in his sleep.
However, the actual meaning of the song, or what prompted it, never quite made sense. McCartney was happily asleep at his girlfriend Jane Asher’s house when his subconscious mind wrote the track. Back in 1965, it was the happiest time of his life. His dreams had come true; he was in the biggest band in the world, Beatlemania was sweeping the planet, he was being incredibly creatively prolific, he got to make music with his best friends all day, and then at night, he came home to the girl he loved and the space they shared in her family home.
While the idea of moving in with the in-laws might be some people’s nightmare, McCartney loved it. Their house stood in central London, allowing the musician to move to the city and still have the sense of family and community he’d always had. The Asher family were also deeply musical, and something about their house proved inspiring as he wrote several tracks there, including ‘And I Love Her’, ‘You Won’t See Me’, and ‘I’m Looking Through You’. Even though his relationship with Asher would dissolve later, in 1965, it was all sunshine and roses for McCartney, who had the world at his feet.
Sure, real-life context isn’t always necessary for writing. Maybe McCartney just plucked this song of mourning and regret from nowhere. But years on, he started to realise that perhaps he was talking to a different figure, that it wasn’t a song of love at all but was a song of grief. “Sometimes it’s only in retrospect you can appreciate it,” he said in an interview decades later.
“I remember very clearly one day feeling very embarrassed because I embarrassed my mum,” he recalled. His mother, Mary, talked relatively “posh” in comparison to the rest of the Liverpudlian family, and her sons never stopped poking fun at it. “I know that she said something like ‘Paul, will you ask him if he’s going … ’I went ‘Arsk! Arsk! It’s ask mum.’ And she got a little bit embarrassed,” he recalled, “I remember later thinking ‘God, I wish I’d never said that’. And it stuck with me.”
In 1956, when McCartney was only 14, his mother died. As is always the way, he’s spent a lifetime since pouring over their memories together, and that one moment of embarrassment stayed with him. “After she died, I thought ‘Oh fuck, I really wish … ’ They’re little things, but they’re little things that I just think, ‘If I could just take a rubber, just rub that moment out, it would be better.’”
“I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday,” he sings as the central lyric on the track, written ten years after his mother’s death. Then, years after that, he realised that it was her the song was addressing and his lingering grief and regret over the things he said during the short time he had with her.
“Does this happen?” McCartney asked himself, “Do you find yourself unconsciously putting songs into girl lyrics [about a lost lover] that are really your dead mother? I suspect it might be true. It sort of fits, if you look at the lyrics.” But the subconcious is a big and confusing thing as he concluded, “It may be that there is so much tumbled into your youth and your formative years that you can’t appreciate it all. Sometimes it’s only in retrospect that you can appreciate it.”
