The two songs Paul McCartney considers his best: “I was pleased with it”
When you’ve created a songbook as massive and mighty as Paul McCartney has, he must find it incredibly annoying when people have the audacity to ask which singular one is his favourite.
Out of literally hundreds of the world’s most iconic songs when he was at the helm of the biggest band to ever exist, let alone any of the other myriad of musical efforts up his sleeve from over the course of decades, it’s basically an impossible task to expect the man to have one overarching North Star which he sees as the pinnacle of his life’s work. Cut the guy a bit of slack, people, come on.
But given how used to the questions and the cameras as he naturally now is, Macca is happy enough to form some semblance of an answer, even if it doesn’t ever come anywhere close to scratching the surface of his true inner feelings towards his discography. Boiling an entire career of incessant mania down to a symbol of just two songs is never going to be easy, but true to form, it is the workings of the Fab Four that the pair of prized spots.
With how mind-bending and psychedelic The Beatles’ back catalogue had become by the time it reached its end, you might assume that McCartney would grab on to something within this stratosphere to consider as one of his best. But instead, his first selection was reflective of far humbler beginnings, namely one of the band’s first-ever songs, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’.
As the B-side to their debut single ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and the opening track to their first album Please Please Me, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ evidently held a close place in all The Beatles’ hearts for essentially kickstarting their lives as rockstars. But it was also a sense of cheeky charm harboured within the tune that captured the hearts of audiences. McCartney later recalled the story in which he wrote the opening lyric of “She was just 17/ She’d never been a beauty queen,” which Lennon forced him to change into “If you know what I mean.”
It was this rough-around-the-edges glimmer of charm that these young romantics possessed back in 1963 that catapulted them into stardom, but no one could have expected where this would lead them next. With mania ensuing and the artistic stakes rising all the time, you would think a magnum opus tune akin to ‘A Day in the Life’ might take the other top spot in McCartney’s estimations, but again, it was something far more understated.
Only three years later, in 1966, with the release of Revolver, came Macca’s other favourite tune, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’. Explaining his reasons in a 2017 interview, he said: “It’s a quite good song and I was pleased with it when I wrote it.” That almost seems like a simple way of putting it compared to what the track truly achieves, but it is undercut by his own admission that John Lennon told him that it was his favourite track of his partner’s.
All of this just goes to show that beneath the veneer of psychedelia, LSD, and rock and roll, McCartney has always been a hopeless romantic at heart. Sure, all the mania and bedlam would have been fun while it lasted, but deep down through it all, the only things he really loved were his guitar and his girl.
