The legends Paul McCartney thought screwed up his song | CPT PPP Coverage

Even though that kind of song usually drove John Lennon nuts, that’s the whole reason why their partnership worked so well. They were both joined at the hip and polar opposites in many respects, and even when Lennon could get cynical, McCartney always found a way to balance everything out in his favour as well.

That’s not to say that McCartney couldn’t get dark on occasion. When the band started to get more involved with orchestral pieces, tunes like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘For No One’ taken from Revolver had many dark undercurrents of love affairs gone wrong, but looking back on ‘Yesterday’, McCartney was already ready to make songs that had a melancholy tone to them.

While Lennon had no involvement in writing the tune whatsoever, he always had a special affection for ‘Yesterday’ from afar. Compared to every other love ballad they had made up until that point, McCartney created a melody any jazz musician would have been proud to have come up with, especially when bringing in the string quartet to play along with McCartney and his acoustic guitar.

Despite becoming one of the most covered songs in history, McCartney found it interesting that some of the greats got the lyrics wrong, saying, “The funny thing about Marvin Gaye, Sinatra, and Elvis, they change the words. I go, ‘I said something wrong now I long for yesterday’, but all of them said, ‘I must have said something wrong.’ They’re not owning up to it.”

And listening back to it, it does have a bit less weight when they start deflecting the blame. There are a lot of times when people have to tweak lyrics either to work around their voice or gender-flip everything, but it’s a much less potent message when the narrator refuses to take the high road and admit that they did something wrong.

Because the whole reason why ‘Yesterday’ works is that it’s only pure sadness over screwing up and watching the love of their life walk out on them. And if the narrator can’t even fathom the idea that he made a mistake, maybe it was for the best that his lover dropped him on his ass for being too vain.

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