Which Paul McCartney solo songs were actually intended for The Beatles?
“The Beatles’ career had been great,” Paul McCartney proclaimed, “We’d gone from A to Z and it had been a great journey. If now we were going to go to Z plus, and it wasn’t very good, you’d ruin the whole thing.” Nevertheless, when their days looked numbered, nobody fought harder to keep things together.
By the later stages of The Beatles’ time together as a band, Paul McCartney had developed into the group’s most prolific songwriter, spending endless hours in the studio. In their final three years recording together, he contributed more songs than any other band member to Beatles albums, including the majority of tracks on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Abbey Road and Let It Be.
Due to the control he increasingly exerted over The Beatles following Brian Epstein’s death, all of the singles they released during that period were McCartney’s, bar two. To some extent, he was keeping the lights on, but by equal measure, the extent to which he was doing this was to the chagrin of his old mates in the Fab Four.
He was also better at finishing what he started as a songwriter than John Lennon and George Harrison, seeing songs through to the end either at home or in the studio. Again, the somewhat unbalanced dynamic within the band during studio sessions from Magical Mystery Tour onwards likely gave him the upper hand when it came to polishing tracks off.
That being said, McCartney still carried a few songs he brought to Beatles sessions into his recording output as a solo artist. Not as many as Lennon or Harrison, but enough to make us wonder what might have been had they ended up on the last three studio albums released by the Fab Four. Three of the tracks on McCartney’s self-titled debut album were actually intended for The Beatles, as was his first solo single. And a further Beatles demo ended on his acclaimed second album as a solo artist, Ram.
If the band hadn’t split up, these five songs would probably have been released under their name in one form or another. It’s well-known that McCartney himself initially didn’t want The Beatles to break up when they did, but Lennon’s departure in September 1969 made it impossible for them to continue. “I think we should go back to little gigs,” McCartney told his bandmate at the time. “I really think we’re a great little band.” Lennon put their little band to bed, though, leaving McCartney no choice but to go it alone.
So, which songs were left over from The Beatles?
Two of the highlights on McCartney, the brilliantly melodic ‘Every Night’ and the quaintly charming ‘Junk’, were originally written for The Beatles. Demoed in 1968, ‘Junk’ is the second-oldest song McCartney carried over into his solo career after the hippie reverie ‘Cosmically Conscious’, which he wrote in India earlier the same year. The track didn’t see the light of day until it was recorded for his 1993 album Off the Ground.
The third song on McCartney’s debut record, which started out as a potential Beatles number, is ‘Teddy Boy’, which was rightly not considered good enough for Let It Be. The track is more befitting of the album’s general mediocrity, falling far below the standard of ‘Every Night’ and ‘Junk’.
Meanwhile, the schmaltzy easy-listening single ‘Another Day’, which blagged its way to number two in the UK chart and number one in Australia, came about during the abortive Get Back recording sessions, too. So did ‘The Back Seat of My Car’, the rousing closing track on Ram, which is more worthy of a Beatles album but didn’t fit the mood either of Get Back as it was originally intended or of the final version of Let It Be. In truth, the band had always written more than they needed anyway.
Unlike some of Lennon’s and Harrison’s discarded Beatles compositions, which proved to be early masterpieces in their solo outputs, pretty much all of the six songs McCartney wrote for The Beatles but released as a solo artist have now been forgotten by time. He gave his best work to the band he loved, up to the moment it was over. And going it alone meant starting songwriting afresh, and starting life anew.So, now all there’s left to wonder is what a Fab Four version of ‘Another Day’ might have sounded like. Our guess is that it would be utterly cosmic. But then again, we wouldn’t have the deliriously magnificent Ram if fate had made that the case. Sometimes, you just have to let it be.
Every solo Paul McCartney song written for The Beatles:
- ‘Another Day’
- ‘Back Seat of My Car’
- ‘Cosmically Conscious’ (Hidden track at the end of Off the Ground)
- ‘Every Night’
- ‘Junk’
- ‘Teddy Boy’
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