‘Yesterday’: The Beatles song George Martin called an “icon of an era”
George Martin was always going to have a little bit of bias towards The Beatles’ work than most.
While he could see when the Fab Four were going well outside of their comfort zone and needed to be reined in, his arrangements of their work were enough to put them in the same conversation as classical composers when he started work on tracks like ‘Eleanor Rigby’. But even with the endless amount of fantastic tunes in their arsenal, Martin knew when certain tracks would last far beyond his lifetime.
When the band first walked into Abbey Road Studios, though, that wasn’t exactly what Martin expected out of them. They were still fairly scruffy lads looking to make rock and roll, but once they hit on the formula for the catchy single on tracks like ‘Please Please Me’, every single one of their songs felt like a new creative endeavour. It may have only been one new chord change like on ‘From Me To You’, but if it was another leap forward, that’s all they needed.
There would be the occasional throwaway B-side or a song that simply didn’t work on albums like Beatles for Sale, but Martin never backed down from a challenge in the studio, either. A lot of their ideas would have seemed physically impossible to pull off, and yet ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ became more than rock and roll tunes. They were the template for what psychedelic rock was going to become.
But before all of that, Martin was known for arrangements first, and getting the right sound for a ballad was going to be his wheelhouse. While A Hard Day’s Night had plenty of mellow tunes like ‘If I Fell’ and ‘And I Love Her’, ‘Yesterday’ needed more than the soft-rock arrangement. This was a beautiful melody, and Martin knew adding a string quartet to everything would turn it into something completely different.
While this was dangerously close to easy-listening territory, it hardly mattered. McCartney had made the kind of song that could stand with the great jazz tunes of the day, and even if parts of it seemed a little bit awkward when he performed it live with a backing track, his natural ear for writing the string lines was enough to knock out Martin when he was putting things together.
Even years after the fact, when working on Love, Martin admitted that what they created back in 1965 was nothing short of iconic, saying, “We agonised over the inclusion of ‘Yesterday’ in the show. It is such a famous song, the icon of an era, but had it been heard too much? How could anyone ignore such a marvellous work? We introduce it with some of Paul’s guitar work from ‘Blackbird’, and hearing it now, I know that I was right to include it. Its simplicity is so direct; it tugs at the heartstrings.”
And hearing it paired with ‘Blackbird’ in the show actually serves to help both of the songs perfectly well. The transition into ‘Yesterday’ is absolutely seamless since ‘Blackbird’ has been transposed to the same key, and since McCartney’s sad breakup song was the first time they branched out into new sonic lands, it makes sense to pair it with a track that showed how musically sophisticated he became as a guitarist towards the end of their run.
But even with the iconic status that ‘Blackbird’ has amongst guitar players, there’s a universal truth about ‘Yesterday’ that’s never going to be taken away. Both of them are perfect songs in their own right, but chances are you could show this to the most senile member of society who wants nothing to do with music, and they would still find beauty in it.
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