Words of Love
The melody to Yesterday famously came to Paul in a dream — without a lyric sheet.
In late 1964 Paul McCartney was lodging with the Asher family, squashed with his piano into the attic of their Wimpole Street home .
I woke up with a lovely tune in my head…I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor seventh — and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to G.
While the melody was presented to Paul, gift-wrapped, the words were more of a slog. Worried that he would forget the melody, he created a dummy lyric the following morning.
For the hook he needed three syllables — always tricky — so he went with the food in front of him as a working title ‘Scrambled Eggs’. The opening couplet was similarly unpromising: ‘Scrambled eggs/Oh how I love your legs.’
Once Paul had established that he hadn’t sleep-stolen the tune he began working on an appropriate setting. The melody was in F Major but it drifted towards D minor — creating an elegiac feel. For a popular song in 1965 this could only mean lost or unrequited love.
Clearly, those eggs couldn’t stay — but their replacement need to be chosen carefully. With the John Lennon looking fiercely over his shoulder, McCartney knew he had to guard against sentimental bombast.
For the artless declaration of pure feeling he looked to the popular show tunes of his childhood. The best of these followed Sondheim’s golden rules: “Content Dictates Form,” “Less Is More”, “God Is in the Detail” and above all ‘Without clarity nothing else matters.” For McCartney another key dimension was to retain British diction and not — ‘sing American’ as his father would put it.
It was a daunting task and Paul worked closely with George Martin on fine tuning the words and the arrangement. The other Beatles were a little uneasy about the time spent on a song they would not even play on.
During the filming of Help, George Harrison became impatient with his bandmate’s endless fiddling with Yesterday, complaining “Who does he think he is? Beethoven?”
In his gift for melody, perhaps. But McCartney did not have a Friedrich Schiller to provide a lyric sheet for his Ode to Joy.
The evolution of the recorded version of the Yesterday is complex and disputed. It first appeared on Help in August 1965, and though an obvious standout, was passed over as a single in the UK. This may seem inexplicable in the light of it subsequent success but a slow, mournful ballad with strings was felt to be off brand.
There was also band dynamics to consider. John Lennon never denied the song’s quality, even when he was snarling abuse in How Do You Sleep? (‘the only song you did was Yesterday’). But it did not escape him that the that the recording only features one Beatle. This was something George Harrison explicitly draws attention to when introducin the song during the promotional Ed Sullivan appearance in New York on September 12, 1965:
Reception
Yesterday was immediately popular with crooners. First out of the traps in the UK it was Matt Munroe (‘the singing bus conductor’). His fine rendition treats the song as an old-school standard:
The thousands of cabaret cover versions that followed confirm that Yesterday is at the very least a competent lyric. That said, I would argue that it does not have the effortless flow of masterpieces from the Great American Songbook, like Summertime or The Way You Look Tonight.
The opening couplet, for example, is a little forced:
All my troubles seemed so far away / Now it looks as though they’re here to stay
Which ‘troubles’? Isn’t the set up that the singer’s love has inexplicably bailed? In that case, surely the troubles began as the door closed behind her. Thise seems to be confirmed in the bridge.
Why she had to go, I don’t know. She wouldn’t say.
Then he appears to concede that he does know — or at least suspect — the source of the problem. He said ‘something wrong’. But what? And why?
A childhood regret?
Is Yesterday autobiographical? Or rather one of what John would later call ‘one of Paul’s story songs’? Generally, McCartney was less openly confessional than his songwriting partner, preferring to disguise personal references (see Martha My Dear, for example).
With Yesterday there appeared to be no obvious parallel with his life at time — when it was widely assumed that he would eventually marry Jane Asher. But Paul has recently suggested a ‘subconscious’ inspiration for the ‘something wrong’ line from his childhood:
“Sometimes it’s only in retrospect you can appreciate it. I remember very clearly one day feeling very embarrassed because I embarrassed my mum…We were out in the backyard and … she would talk what we thought was a little bit posh. She said something like ‘Paul, will you ask him if he’s going … I went ‘Arsk! Arsk! It’s ask mum.’
The context of this vivid memory is that Paul would lose his mother when he was fifteen. This shattering blow was all the more disorientating because Mary McCartney’s cancer had been kept secret from her two boys.
So was it a submerged influence on his famous song? Perhaps, but the words do not communicate this autobiographical dimension. Yesterday remains an unambiguous, if enigmatic, song about lost romantic love. The line why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say is in the same mode as the plea from squabbling lover (Try to see it my way) in We Can Work It Out.
In the English classes he enjoyed at school, Paul would have been asked to write stories to match a title in a specified genre. Here the brief was similar but with the key components established by the melody.
And the grade? I would go with A minus but other opinions are available, notably in the form of royalty cheques that would fund a small country.
