This Never Happened Before

Song facts

“This Never Happened Before” is a track from Paul McCartney’s 2005 album “Chaos And Creation In The Backyard“. From an interview of Paul by Gary Crowley:

It’s Never Happened Before is a straight love song and, you know, I’m a lover not a fighter as they say.  I think that’s such an important thing in the world and it gets spoken of, sung about a lot but I, certainly you know Silly Love Songs, what’s wrong with the message of that?  I love that, I love to do that so this one was really exactly that.  It just kind of wrote itself a bit, you know, it just (sings) ‘I’m very sure it’s never happened to me before.’  The chords, it’s always a big help if you get a nice little chord sequence and the opening chords to the verse of that go a nice place so they settle you down with your melody and you feel like you’re going somewhere, so that was what was happening and wrote it and recorded it, one of the very first things we did with Nigel at Rak, that was one of the things to see if we could sort of get it on and I thought, ‘This is good.  We’re going to go somewhere with this’.  That and Follow Me were really the first two that Nigel and I did together and nice little story about it was, I was in America and I was actually getting a massage and I happened to play it and the girl who was doing the massage said, ‘Oh, I love that song, it’s magnificent,’ and she happened to tell me she was getting married so very quietly I just sort of sent her, a few weeks later, she told me when she was getting married and you know where it would be so I got her number off her, sent her a little letter saying, ‘Look, if you love it that much, why don’t you play this at your wedding?’ so I said, ‘but this is highly bootleggable,’ I said, ‘so just play it and send it me back.  You can’t keep it, but,’ I said, ‘I’ll send you the proper record when we’re done with it,’ and it was great, really lovely. They did do that.  They got married to it and it was like their first dance.  Highly romantic stuff this and, but it was very nice because she just wrote me a letter, thanks and all that and told me about the wedding and all that, about her husband but she just put this one little line, she said, ‘You know we had a great time. We laughed.  We cried,’ and I thought that sums up that song for me.

Paul McCartney – from 2005 UK promotional-only interview CD, recorded July 2005 at Air Studios in London

“This Never Happened Before” was released to radio stations in the United States in 2006, peaking at #27 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart. It was intended to be the 3rd single from “Chaos And Creation In The Backyard“ (after “Fine Line” and “Jenny Wren“) but got cancelled. It was thought that the single would have included three unreleased songs from the “Chaos And Creation In The Backyard” sessions: “A Modern Dance”, “Perfect Lover” and “Watching My Fish Drown”.

In 2006, “This Never Happened Before” was included in the soundtrack of the movie “The Lake House”.

Last updated on January 19, 2021

Lyrics

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