Here Today

I wrote ‘Here Today’ about John. It’s just a song saying, you know, ‘If you were here today you’d probably say what I’m doing is a load of crap. But you wouldn’t mean it, cos you like me really, I know.’

Paul McCartney

From Wikipedia:

“Here Today” is a song by Paul McCartney from his 1982 album Tug of War. McCartney wrote the song about his relationship with and love for John Lennon, who had died less than two years before. He stated the song was composed in the form of an imaginary conversation the pair might have had. The song was produced by The Beatles’ producer George Martin. Although not released as a single, the song reached #46 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock charts.

McCartney often performs the song live, and it is featured on the live albums Back in the World, Back in the U.S., and Good Evening New York City.

From an interview with Los Angeles Times, April 1982:

Did you resist writing a song about John at first?

Yes. I worried that it might not be good enough and that someone might think I was trying to cash in on it or something. I could just picture all these people sitting down after John’s death and saying, “I’m going to write a song about this…it’s a great idea.” None of the three of us [ex-Beatles] would think like that, but I had these worries in the back of my mind. I figured it was better to just avoid it. But eventually I just realized it was silly. I figured I’d just let it happen naturally, if I wrote a song about John, OK. If I didn’t, it’s OK, too. I’ve always had two sides to me: the creative and judicial. The creative starts to do something and the judicial starts to question and second-guess: ‘Is that right? Does that make sense? What will people think?’ I’ve begun trying to make sure the judicial doesn’t interfere with the creative. Anyway, I kind of forgot about the whole thing until I sat down one day and struck the beginning chords of “Here Today” and it fell out. 

Paul McCartney

From The Guardian, June 11, 2004:

[…] And then there is ‘Here Today’, the song he wrote in the wake of John Lennon’s death. “At least once a tour, that song just gets me,” he says. “I’m singing it, and I think I’m OK, and I suddenly realise it’s very emotional, and John was a great mate and a very important man in my life, and I miss him, you know? It happened at the first show, in Gijon: I was doing fine, and I found myself doing a thing I’ve done in soundcheck, just repeating one of the lines: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ I did that and I thought, ‘That’s nice – that works.’ And then I came to finish the song, to do the last verse, and it was, ‘Oh shit – I’ve just totally lost it.’”

From the Tug Of War Archive Collection, 2015:

I play ’Here Today’ every night in my concerts. It’s a very emotional thing; so there’s lots of thoughts that it brings up. One of writing it right here, and just sort of channelling John, and just sort of talking to John really, is what it is. I announce it in the show as ‘a conversation that we never had’, and that’s kind of what it is. I’m just bringing key memories. ‘What about the night we cried?’ When I said ‘key’, it came to my mind; it was actually in Key West in Florida, on a Beatles tour. That line there – we had to cancel a show in Jacksonville because of an approaching hurricane. So we went down to Key West which was nothing then, just a few houses. I understand now people say it’s a huge place, like Vegas! So anyway, it was this desolate little house, and we just sat and drank a lot and got totally wrecked, and we had very in-depth conversations like you do when you’re just stuck in a room with a few guys. But I mean normally at parties and that we’d be able to handle it but this was just stuck in a room woth nothing to do but wait until we could go to Jacksonville. It was a number of days, and that meant basically just drink, all the time. It was very emotional because we cried; it was the only time we’d cried together – “Oh. I love you” One of those drunken crying sessions. But again that was one of the memories when I’m talking to John “What about the night we cried?” you know. “What about the time we met?” and… come on man, we had the most intimate relationship. and I think that’s what you think about when you lose a friend. About all those little things that just jump into your mind. So I put a lot of that into the song. When I do it now, it’s still very emotional, and I go back . . . as I sing it. I go back to all those places and all those times. I think the only thing that I always question in the song is [hums, then sings], ‘You’d probably say that we were worlds apart.’ I don’t think he would have said that. I don’t know how that line got in there. I don’t think that he would say ‘worlds apart’. I think it was more… in answer to some of the things he’s said when we were having our… barney. After the break-up of The Beatles, and he’d sort of said, you know, ‘Oh, McCartney’s this, I’m this’ and ‘McCartney’s that, I’m that’. I think I was trying to answer that kind of thing: ‘You’d probably say that we were worlds apart…’.

Paul McCartney, in Tug Of War Archive Collection, 2015

A love song to John, written very shortly after he died. I was remembering things about our relationship and about the million things we’d done together, from just being in each other’s front parlours or bedrooms to walking on the street together or hitchhiking — long journeys together that had nothing to do with the Beatles. I was thinking of all these things in what was then my recording studio in Sussex. It was just a little house with a small room upstairs with bare, wooden plank floors and bare walls, and I had my guitar with me, so

I just sat there and wrote this.There’s one line in the lyric I don’t really mean: “Well knowing you / You’d probably laugh and say / That we were worlds apart”. I’m playing to the more cynical side of John, but I don’t think it’s true that we were so distant. “But you were always there with a smile” — that was very John. If you were arguing with him, and it got a bit tense, he’d just lower his specs and say, “It’s only me,” then put them back up again, as if the specs were part of a completely different identity.

“What about the night we cried?” That was in Key West, on our first major tour to the US, when there was a hurricane coming in and we couldn’t play a show in Jacksonville. We had to lie low for a couple of days, and we were in our little Key West motel room, and we got very drunk and cried about how we loved each other. I was talking to someone yesterday who was telling me that if he cried, his father would say, “Boys don’t cry. You mustn’t do that.” My dad wasn’t like that, but that was the attitude: male people do not cry. I think now it’s acknowledged that it’s a perfectly good thing to do, and I say, “God wouldn’t have given us tears if he didn’t mean us to cry.”

There’s a longing in the lines “If you were here today” and “I am holding back the tears no more”, because it was very emotional, writing this song. I was just sitting there in that bare room, thinking of John and realising I’d lost him. And it was a powerful loss, so to have a conversation with him in a song was some form of solace. Somehow I was with him again. “And if I say/ I really loved you” — there it is, I’ve said it. Which I would never have said to him. It’s a very charged experience to perform this song in concert.

Paul McCartney – From Paul McCartney reveals the stories behind his greatest hits | The Sunday Times Magazine | The Sunday Times (thetimes.co.uk) – From “The Lyrics”, 2021

If I do a show now, I’m happy to do Beatles songs, Wings songs, as well as my solo stuff and other people’s songs. I’m not under any silly illusions. When I do these tours, the stuff that people like the most is the old stuff. Mainly The Beatles stuff. I don’t have a problem with that. I like singing those old songs. I’ll open with “Hello Goodbye” and it works. Then I’ll do something like “Here Today” [from 1982’s Tug Of War], which was written for John with love, and that’s now a central part of the show. It’s like me talking to John and it’s emotional for me and for a lot of other people.

Paul McCartney – From interview with UNCUT, July 2004

Lyrics

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“Here Today” has been played in 425 concerts and 3 soundchecks.

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