Paul writes “Somedays”

On this day, Paul McCartney wrote “Somedays“, a song which would be included in his 1997 album “Flaming Pie“, during one of Linda’s cookery assignment (“Young Boy” to be released on the same album has a similar story).

This was written the day Linda was doing one of her cookery assignments. I went along too, taking an acoustic guitar, and asked the lady in the house we were using if she had a little room where I could go and sit quietly. She offered me her son’s room and I went in there. In these situations I tend to make up a little fantasy, thinking: well, they’re going to be two or three hours, and when it’s all done they’ll say to me, “What did you do?” And I’ll be able to reply, “Oh, I wrote a song!” So I just started writing, with my guitar, and came up with ‘Somedays’ -“Somedays I look, I look at you with eyes that shine, somedays I look into your soul” The first verse came quite well, then the second and the middle, and whereas, at another time, I might have thought, “I leave the words there and finish them next week”, I finished them there and then. John and I used to do this too, occasionally: I don’t think we ever really took more than three or four hours on a song. I’d go to visit him, he’d come to visit me, and we’d sit down and write. 

Paul McCartney – From interview in Club Sandwich N°82, Summer 1997

Mark Lewisohn, in Club Sandwich n°82, Summer 1997:

No matter how many songs a composer may have created, whether 5 or 500, mental mind-games are often employed to light the fuse. Paul McCartney, whose cache of hits extends much closer to the latter figure, still likes to impose arbitrary deadlines upon himself, and ‘Somedays’ was written under one such stricture. The date was 18 March 1994 when Paul drove Linda to a house in a village nearby their own, “where she would be photographed for a cookery assignment. While his wife was being snapped Paul retired to a bedroom, normally used by the house-owner’s son, and – possessing an acoustic guitar, pen and paper – conceived his newest song. Knowing that he had only 90 minutes, and realising the question “What did you do?” would be asked of him when the photo session was over, was all the prompting Paul needed to create, the melody and lyric arriving wholly intact. The house-owner’s son made his mark on the song, too, his soccer ephemera on the wall unconsciously prompting Paul to make footballing analogies in the lyric. Writing with John Lennon was often the same: the pair rarely spent more than three hours on a new song and were much influenced by everyday events and objects around them.

Going further

The Beatles Diary Volume 2: After The Break-Up 1970-2001

An updated edition of the best-seller. The story of what happened to the band members, their families and friends after the 1970 break-up is brought right up to date. A fascinating and meticulous piece of Beatles scholarship.

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