Yesterday

From Wikipedia:

“Yesterday” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by Paul McCartney and credited to Lennon–McCartney. It was first released on the album Help! in August 1965, except in the United States, where it was issued as a single in September. The song reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart. It subsequently appeared on the UK EP Yesterday in March 1966 and made its US album debut on Yesterday and Today, in June 1966.

McCartney’s vocal and acoustic guitar, together with a string quartet, was essentially the band’s first solo performance. It remains popular today and, with 2,200 cover versions, is one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music. “Yesterday” was voted the best song of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll of music experts and listeners and was also voted the No. 1 pop song of all time by MTV and Rolling Stone magazine the following year. In 1997, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) asserts that it was performed over seven million times in the 20th century.

“Yesterday” is often interpreted as a melancholic ballad about lost love. Paul McCartney later suggested that the lyric “I said something wrong” may have been inspired not by romance but by a childhood memory of mocking his mother for sounding “posh”. McCartney is the only member of the Beatles to appear on the track. The final recording was so different from other works by the Beatles that the band members vetoed the song’s release as a single in the United Kingdom. However, other artists quickly recorded versions of it for single release. The Beatles’ recording was issued in the U.K. as a single in 1976 and peaked at number 8 on the UK Singles Chart.

Origin

According to biographers of Paul McCartney and the Beatles, the entire melody came to McCartney in a dream one night in his room at the Wimpole Street home of his then-girlfriend Jane Asher and her family. Upon waking, he hurried to a piano and played the tune to avoid forgetting it. Initially he was concerned, though, that he had subconsciously plagiarised someone else’s work; as he put it:

“For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it.“

Upon being convinced that he had not copied the melody, McCartney began writing accompanying lyrics. As John Lennon and McCartney were known to do at the time, they used placeholder words as temporary working lyrics until something more suitable could be written. The working title was “Scrambled Eggs”. The working opening verse was “Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs/Not as much as I love scrambled eggs“.

During the shooting of Help!, a piano was placed on one of the stages where filming was being conducted, and McCartney took advantage of this opportunity to tinker with the song. This eventually greatly annoyed the director Richard Lester, who lost his temper, telling McCartney to finish writing the song or he would have the piano removed. The patience of the other Beatles was also tested by McCartney’s work in progress; George Harrison summed this up when he said: “Blimey, he’s always talking about that song. You’d think he was Beethoven or somebody!“

McCartney originally claimed he had written “Yesterday” during the Beatles’ tour of France in 1964; however, the song was not released until the summer of 1965. During the intervening time, the Beatles released two albums, A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles for Sale, each of which could have included “Yesterday”. Although McCartney has never elaborated on his claims, a delay may have been due to a disagreement between McCartney and George Martin regarding the song’s arrangement or the opinion of the other Beatles who felt it did not suit their image.

Lennon later indicated that the song had been around for a while before:

The song was around for months and months before we finally completed it. Every time we got together to write songs for a recording session, this one would come up. We almost had it finished. Paul wrote nearly all of it, but we just couldn’t find the right title. We called it ‘Scrambled Eggs’ and it became a joke between us. We made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit, we just couldn’t find the right one. Then one morning Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way, we’d had so many laughs about it.

McCartney said the breakthrough with the lyrics came during a trip to Portugal in May 1965:

I remember mulling over the tune ‘Yesterday’, and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse. I started to develop the idea … da-da da, yes-ter-day, sud-den-ly, fun-il-ly, mer-il-ly and Yes-ter-day, that’s good. All my troubles seemed so far away. It’s easy to rhyme those a’s: say, nay, today, away, play, stay, there’s a lot of rhymes and those fall in quite easily, so I gradually pieced it together from that journey. Sud-den-ly, and ‘b’ again, another easy rhyme: e, me, tree, flea, we, and I had the basis of it.

On 27 May 1965, McCartney and Asher flew to Lisbon for a holiday in Albufeira, Algarve, and he borrowed an acoustic guitar from Bruce Welch, in whose house they were staying, and completed the work on “Yesterday”. The song was offered as a demo to Chris Farlowe before the Beatles recorded it, but he turned it down as he considered it “too soft”. In a March 1967 interview with Brian Matthew, McCartney said that Lennon came up with the word that would replace “scrambled eggs”: Yesterday.

Resemblance to other songs

In 2001, Ian Hammond speculated that McCartney subconsciously based “Yesterday” on Ray Charles’ version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind”. Hammond concluded his article by saying that, despite the similarities, “Yesterday” is a “completely original and individual [work]”.

In July 2003, British musicologists stumbled upon superficial similarities between the lyric and rhyming schemes of “Yesterday” and David Whitfield’s, Frankie Laine’s, and Nat King Cole’s “Answer Me, My Love”; originally a German song by Gerhard Winkler and Fred Rauch called Mütterlein, it was a number 1 hit for Laine on the UK Singles Chart in 1953 as “Answer Me, O Lord”, leading to speculation that the song had influenced McCartney. McCartney’s publicists denied any resemblance between “Answer Me, My Love” and “Yesterday”.

Composition and structure

Ostensibly simple, featuring only McCartney playing an Epiphone Texan steel-string acoustic guitar backed by a string quartet in one of the Beatles’ first uses of session musicians, “Yesterday” has two contrasting sections, differing in melody and rhythm, producing a sense of variety and fitting contrast. The main melody is seven bars in length, extremely rare in popular songs, while the bridge, or “middle eight”, is the more standard form of eight bars, often two four-bar phrases combined.

The first section (“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away …”) opens with an F chord (the 3rd of the chord is omitted), then moving to Em7 before proceeding to A7 and then to D minor. In this sense, the opening chord is a decoy; as musicologist Alan Pollack points out, the home key (F major) has little time to establish itself before “heading towards the relative D minor”. He points out that this diversion is a compositional device commonly used by Lennon and McCartney, which he describes as “deferred gratification”.

As is often the case with the over-exposed war horses of any artsy genre, whether or not you “like” this song, there’s some good reason why it became so over-exposed in the first place. (hint) It’s a fine piece of work with something going for it in virtually every department: the unique arrangement, an attractive tune, even some asymmetrical phrasing and a couple of off-beat chord progressions.

Musicologist Alan W. Pollack, 1993

According to Pollack, the second section (“Why she had to go I don’t know …”) is less musically surprising on paper than it sounds. Starting with Em7, the harmonic progression quickly moves through the A major, D minor, and (closer to F major) B♭, before resolving back to F major, and at the end of this, McCartney holds F while the strings descend to resolve to the home key to introduce the restatement of the first section, before a brief hummed closing phrase.

Pollack described the scoring as “truly inspired”, citing it as an example of “[Lennon & McCartney’s] flair for creating stylistic hybrids”; in particular, he praises the “ironic tension drawn between the schmaltzy content of what is played by the quartet and the restrained, spare nature of the medium in which it is played”.

The tonic key of the song is F major (although, since McCartney tuned his guitar down a whole step, he was playing the chords as if it were in G), where the song begins before veering off into the key of D minor. It is this frequent use of the minor, and the ii–V7 chord progression (Em and A7 chords in this case) leading into it, that gives the song its melancholic aura. The A7 chord is an example of a secondary dominant, specifically a V/vi chord. The G7 chord in the bridge is another secondary dominant, in this case a V/V chord, but rather than resolve it to the expected chord, as with the A7 to Dm in the verse, McCartney instead follows it with the IV chord, a B♭. This motion creates a descending chromatic line of C–B–B♭–A to accompany the title lyric.

The string arrangement reinforces the song’s air of sadness in the groaning cello line that connects the two halves of the bridge, notably the “blue” seventh in the second bridge pass (the E♭ played after the vocal line “I don’t know / she wouldn’t say”) and in the descending run by the viola that segues the bridge back into the verses, mimicked by McCartney’s vocal on the second pass of the bridge. This viola line, the “blue” cello phrase, the high A sustained by the violin over the final verse and the minimal use of vibrato are elements of the string arrangement attributable to McCartney rather than George Martin.

When the song was performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, it was done in the key mentioned above of F, with McCartney as the only Beatle to perform and the studio orchestra providing the string accompaniment. However, all of the Beatles played in a G-major version when the song was included in tours in 1965 and 1966.

When McCartney appeared on The Howard Stern Show, he stated that he owned the original lyrics to “Yesterday” written on the back of an envelope. McCartney later performed the original “Scrambled Eggs” version of the song, plus additional new lyrics, with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

When asked whether some of the lyrics from “Yesterday” are a reference to his early loss of his mother, Mary McCartney, he stated that “I didn’t mean it to be, but … it could be”.

Recording

The track was recorded at Abbey Road Studios on 14 June 1965, immediately following the taping of “I’m Down” and four days before McCartney’s 23rd birthday. There are conflicting accounts of how the song was recorded. Some sources state that McCartney and the other Beatles tried a variety of instruments, including drums and an organ, and that George Martin later persuaded them to allow McCartney to play his Epiphone Texan steel-string acoustic guitar, later overdubbing a string quartet for backup. Regardless, none of the other band members were included in the final recording.

McCartney performed two takes of “Yesterday” on 14 June 1965. Take 2 was deemed better and used as the master take. On 17 June, an additional vocal track by McCartney and a string quartet were overdubbed on take two and that version was released.

Take 1, without the string overdub, was later released on the Anthology 2 compilation. On take 1, McCartney can be heard giving chord changes to Harrison before starting. Still, while Harrison does not appear actually to play, he is most certainly present because his voice is captured on the session tapes. Take 2 had two lines transposed from the first take: “There’s a shadow hanging over me”/”I’m not half the man I used to be”, though it seems clear that their order in take 2 was the correct one because McCartney can be heard, in take 1, suppressing a laugh at his mistake.

In 2006, just before the album Love was released, George Martin elaborated on the recording set-up of the song:

Paul played his guitar and sang it live, a mic on the guitar and mic on the voice. But, of course, the voice comes on to the guitar mic and the guitar comes on to the voice mic. So there’s leakage there. Then I said I’d do a string quartet. The musicians objected to playing with headphones, so I gave them Paul’s voice and guitar on two speakers either side of their microphones. So there’s leakage of Paul’s guitar and voice on the string tracks.

The sound leakage from one track to another caused concern when the surround version of the song was mixed for Love, but it was decided to include the track nevertheless. As Martin explained in the liner notes of Love:

We agonised over the inclusion of “Yesterday” in the show. It is such a famous song, the icon of an era, but had it been heard too much? The story of the addition of the original string quartet is well known, however, few people know how limited the recording was technically, and so the case for not including it was strong, but how could we ignore such a marvellous work? We introduced it with some of Paul’s guitar work from “Blackbird“, and hearing it now, I know it was right to include it. Its simplicity is so direct; it tugs at the heartstrings.

Release

Concerning the debate on how the song should be released, Martin later said: “[‘Yesterday’] wasn’t really a Beatles record and I discussed this with Brian Epstein: ‘You know this is Paul’s song … shall we call it Paul McCartney?’ He said ‘No, whatever we do we are not splitting up the Beatles.’” Since “Yesterday” was unlike the Beatles’ previous work and did not fit in with their image, the Beatles refused to permit the release of a single in the United Kingdom. This did not prevent Matt Monro from recording the first of many cover versions of “Yesterday”. His version made it into the top ten in the UK charts soon after its release in the autumn of 1965.

The Beatles’ influence over their US record label, Capitol, was not as strong as it was over EMI’s Parlophone label in Britain. A single was released in the US, pairing “Yesterday” with “Act Naturally“, a track which featured vocals by Ringo Starr. The single was released on 13 September 1965 and topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart for four weeks, beginning on 9 October. The song spent a total of 11 weeks on the chart, selling a million copies within five weeks. The single was also number one for three weeks on the US Cash Box pop singles chart the same year.

“Yesterday” was the fifth of six number-one Beatles singles in a row on the American charts, a record at the time. The other singles were “I Feel Fine“, “Eight Days a Week“, “Ticket to Ride“, “Help!” and “We Can Work It Out“. On 4 March 1966, the song was issued as the title track of the British EP Yesterday. On 26 March, the EP went to number one, a position it held for two months. Later that year, “Yesterday” was included as the title track of the North American album Yesterday and Today.

“Yesterday” was released on the album A Collection of Beatles Oldies, a compilation album released in the United Kingdom in December 1966, featuring hit singles and other songs issued by the group between 1963 and 1966.

On 8 March 1976, “Yesterday” was released by Parlophone as a single in the UK, featuring “I Should Have Known Better” on the B-side. The single peaked at number 8 on the UK Singles Chart. The release came about due to the expiration of the Beatles’ contract with EMI, which allowed the company to repackage the Beatles’ recordings as they wished. EMI reissued all 22 of the Beatles’ UK singles, plus “Yesterday”, on the same day, leading to six of them placing on the UK chart.

In 2006, a version of the song was included on the album Love. The version begins with the acoustic guitar intro from the song “Blackbird” transposed down a whole step to F major from its original key G to transition smoothly into “Yesterday”.

Reception and legacy

“Yesterday” is one of the most recorded songs in the history of popular music. Its entry in Guinness World Records states that, by January 1986, 1,600 cover versions had been made. After Muzak switched in the 1990s to programs based on commercial recordings, its inventory grew to include about 500 “Yesterday” covers. In his 1972 article on the development of rock music, Joel Vance of Stereo Review magazine credited the song with originating the vogue for classical and baroque rock, anticipating the Rolling Stones’ recording of “As Tears Go By” and works by artists such as the Moody Blues and the Classics IV.

“Yesterday” won the Ivor Novello Award for “Outstanding Song of 1965”, and came second in the “Most Performed Work of the Year” category, behind the Lennon–McCartney composition “Michelle“. More recently, Rolling Stone ranked “Yesterday” at number 13 on its 2004 list “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” and fourth on its 2010 list of “The Beatles’ 100 Greatest Songs”. In 1999, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) placed “Yesterday” third on its list of songs of the 20th century most performed on American radio and television, with approximately seven million performances. “Yesterday” was surpassed only by the Association’s “Never My Love” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’“. “Yesterday” was voted Best Song of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll.

The song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1997. Although it was nominated for Song of the Year at the 1966 Grammy Awards, it lost out to Tony Bennett’s “The Shadow of Your Smile”. “Yesterday” was nominated for six Grammys in total that year, and “Help!” was also nominated in four categories. After the band had failed to win any of the ten awards, Alan Livingston, the head of Capitol Records, officially protested about the results, saying that “Yesterday” being passed over for the Song of the Year “makes a mockery of the whole event”.

Chuck Berry said that “Yesterday” was the song that he wished that he had written. “Yesterday” has also been criticised for being mundane and mawkish. Bob Dylan had a marked dislike for the song, stating that “If you go into the Library of Congress, you can find a lot better than that. There are millions of songs like ‘Michelle’ and ‘Yesterday’ written in Tin Pan Alley.” Accompanied by Harrison, Dylan recorded his own version of “Yesterday” four years later, on 1 May 1970, but it was never released.

Shortly before he died in 1980, Lennon commented, “Although the lyrics don’t resolve into any sense, they’re good lines. They certainly work … but if you read the whole song, it doesn’t say anything” and added the song was “beautiful – and I never wished I’d written it”. Lennon made reference to “Yesterday” in his song “How Do You Sleep?” on his 1971 album Imagine. The song appears to attack McCartney with the line “The only thing you done was yesterday, but since you’ve gone you’re just another day”, a reference to McCartney’s then recent hit “Another Day“.

In 2001, McCartney said that he had asked Yoko Ono to agree to change the writing credit for “Yesterday” from “Lennon/McCartney” to “McCartney/Lennon”. He said that Ono refused, which was one of the reasons for their poor relationship at the time.

At the 2006 Grammy Awards, McCartney performed “Yesterday” live as a mash-up with Linkin Park and Jay Z’s “Numb/Encore”.

In 2012, the BBC reported that “Yesterday” remained the fourth-most-successful song of all time in terms of royalties paid, having amassed a total of £19.5 million in payments. […]

I was living in a little flat at the top of a house and I had a piano by my bed. I woke up one morning with a tune in my head and I thought, ‘Hey, I don’t know this tune — or do I?’ It was like a jazz melody. My dad used to know a lot of old jazz tunes, I thought maybe I’d just remembered it from the past. I went to the piano and found the chords to it (a G, F#minor7 and a B), made sure I remembered it and then hawked it round to all my friends, asking what it was: ‘Do you know this? It’s a good little tune, but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it.’ I took it round to Alma Cogan, a friend of ours (I think she may have thought I was writing it for her), and she said, ‘I don’t know it, but it is rather nice.’ It didn’t have any words at first so I blocked it out with ‘scrambled eggs’: ‘Scrambled eggs, oh, my baby, how I love your legs — diddle diddle — I believe in scrambled eggs.’ Over the next couple of weeks I started to put in the words. I liked the tune and I thought I’d like to take some time over the words, get something that fitted like ‘scrambled eggs’. And then, one day, I had the idea of ‘Yesterday’.

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

This song was around for months and months before we finally completed it. Every time we got together to write songs for a recording session, this would come up. We almost had it finished. Paul wrote nearly all of it, but we just couldn’t find the right title. We called it ‘Scrambled Egg’ and it became a joke between us. We had made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit, we just couldn’t find the right one. Then one morning Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there; completed. I was sorry in a way, we’d had so many laughs about it. And it has been issued in America as an orchestral piece by George Martin — called ‘Scrambled Egg’! Now we are getting letters from fans telling us they’ve heard a number called ‘Scrambled Egg’ that’s a dead copy of ‘Yesterday’.

John Lennon – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

On the subject of “Yesterday”, does it surprise you that as many people violently hate that song as love it?

My personal take on it is that it’s not a bad little song. Whether it’s the most popular or whatever, it’s certainly loved by quite a few people. When you get a song like that, whether it’s “Yesterday” or “I Will Always Love You”, a lot of people will react against it. Because it’s always on the radio or at the top of the chart or always playing in restaurants, some people will get annoyed having to listen to it. It’s a bit of a British thing, that. We Brits are not that big on success, especially when someone else is having it [laughs].

Paul McCartney – Interview with MOJO, July 2004

[…] It’s hard to choose favourite memories of my time with George, there are so many but one that comes to mind was the time I brought the song ‘Yesterday’ to a recording session and the guys in the band suggested that I sang it solo and accompany myself on guitar. After I had done this George Martin said to me, “Paul I have an idea of putting a string quartet on the record”. I said, “Oh no George, we are a rock and roll band and I don’t think it’s a good idea”.  With the gentle bedside manner of a great producer he said to me, “Let us try it and if it doesn’t work we won’t use it and we’ll go with your solo version”.  I agreed to this and went round to his house the next day to work on the arrangement.

He took my chords that I showed him and spread the notes out across the piano, putting the cello in the low octave and the first violin in a high octave and gave me my first lesson in how strings were voiced for a quartet. When we recorded the string quartet at Abbey Road, it was so thrilling to know his idea was so correct that I went round telling people about it for weeks. His idea obviously worked because the song subsequently became one of the most recorded songs ever with versions by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye and thousands more. […]

Paul McCartney – Remembering George Martin, March 9, 2016

The Ashers’ house in Wimpole Street. A very small attic room with one window. A garret. Perfect for an artist. There wasn’t any room for me to keep my records — many of which had been mailed to me from the US before they were available in the UK — in there. They had to be kept on the landing. But somehow I had a piano in there — a small, sawn-off piano that stood by my bed. Somewhere in a dream, I heard this tune. When I woke up, I thought, “I love that tune. What is it? Is it Fred Astaire? Is it Cole Porter? What is it?”

I fell out of bed and the piano was right there, just to the side. I thought I’d try and work out how the song went. I thought it had to be some old standard I’d heard years earlier and had forgotten. I just had this tune, and I now had some chords. And to solidify it in my memory I blocked it out with some dummy words: “Scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs, scrambled eggs”. Using dummy lyrics wasn’t something I did a lot. It was a rare thing.

So, I had this tune, and I think the first person I saw that morning outside the house was John. I said, “What’s this song?” He said, “I don’t know. I’ve never heard it.” I got the same response from George Martin and my friend the singer Alma Cogan, who had pretty comprehensive knowledge of popular songs. After a couple of weeks it became clear that no one knew the song and it didn’t exist, except in my head. So I claimed it and spent time playing around with it, adding to it and perfecting it. It was like finding a £10 note on the street.

Not long after the song came to me, we were working on the film Help!. A Hard Day’s Night had been such a success the year before that there was pressure on us to make a follow-up, but the scripts just weren’t right. I think we had rejected so many versions that by the time we came to say yes to one, we had only really just browsed it, rather than taking it very seriously. To be honest, we were starting to outgrow these “mop top” caricatures that we were being typecast as. One thing the film had going for it, though, was that if we said something like, “Can we go somewhere nice to film this bit?” they’d say yes.

Jumping from one place to the next might not have helped the film much, but that bit was fun. We’d say things like, “I’ve never been to the Caribbean. Can you work that into the story, please?” So they did. “Have you been skiing before?” “No!” “OK, let’s get that in the film too!”

All this was going on during the incubation of Yesterday, and when there was a chance I would ask for a piano to be near by so I could work on the song. And it got to the point where the film’s director, Richard Lester, started to get annoyed at always hearing the song. One day he shouted, “If I hear that once more, I’ll have the bloody piano taken away!” I don’t think it helped matters that when he would ask what the song was called, I’d reply, “Scrambled Eggs”.

During a break in the filming, Jane Asher and I went to Portugal for a little holiday. We were heading down to Albufeira, and I was in the back of the car, doing nothing. It was very hot and very dusty, and I was sort of half-asleep. One of the things I like to do when I’m like that is try to think. “Scrambled eggs, bah, bah, bah . . . What can that be?” I started working through some options. I wanted to keep the melody, so I knew I’d have to fit the syllables of the words around that. “Scrambled eggs” — “da-da-da”. You have possibilities like “yes-ter-day” and “sud-den-ly”. And I also remember thinking, “People like sad songs.” I remember thinking that even I like sad songs. By the time I got to Albufeira, I’d completed the lyrics.

When we got back home, I took the song to the band, and Ringo said, “I don’t think I can really drum on that.” George added, “Well, I’m not sure I can put much guitar on it either.” And then John said, “I can’t think of anything. I think you should just do it by yourself. It’s really a solo song.”

Now, this was kind of a big deal at the time, because we’d never recorded like that before. It had always been the band. After some hesitation I decided to give it a go.

When the album was released, Dick Lester was away on holiday, so I sent him a copy of it with a note saying, “I hope you like Scrambled Eggs!”

And then the song did phenomenally well. The record label wanted to release it as a single. We wouldn’t let them do it in the UK, since we were a rock and roll band, but we let them get away with it in the US because we didn’t live there. It’s still strange to me when people tell me things like Yesterday is the number one pop song of all time. Apparently Rolling Stone described it as the best song of the 20th century. It all seems quite grand for something that came into the world so mysteriously.

Some people find it hard to believe that I was 22 when I wrote Yesterday. Every time I come to the line “I’m not half the man I used to be”, I remember I’d lost my mother about eight years before that. It’s been suggested to me that this is a “losing my mother” song, to which I’ve always said, “No, I don’t believe so.” But, you know, the more I think about it — “Why she had to go I don’t know, she wouldn’t say” — I can see that that might have been part of the background, the unconsciousness behind this song after all. It was so strange that the loss of our mother to cancer was simply not discussed. We barely knew what cancer was, but I’m now not surprised that the whole experience surfaced in this song where sweetness competes with a pain you can’t quite describe.

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” book, 2021

Paul woke up with the melody [of “Yesterday”] in his head fully formed but without any lyrics. First, he thought it must be something he was remembering and asked everybody what tune it was. And when I say everybody, I include my mother, who was one of the first people he saw that day since he was living in our house. I was not there, but my mother (a musician herself, of course) told Paul that she did not recognize the tune and had never heard it before. After many other people said the same thing, Paul finally realized that he had written it magically in his head.

Peter Asher – From “The Beatles from A to Zed: An Alphabetical Mystery Tour“, 2019

‘Yesterday’ was a breakthrough; it was recorded by just Paul and a group of other musicians. No other Beatle was on that recording and no other Beatle heard the song until we played it back. John listened to it, and there’s a particular bit where the cello moves into a bluesy note which he thought was terrific, so it was applauded.

But it wasn’t really a Beatles record and I discussed this with Brian Epstein: ‘You know, this is Paul’s song… Shall we call it Paul McCartney?’ He said, ‘No, whatever we do we are not splitting up The Beatles.’ So even though none of the others appeared on the record, it was still The Beatles – that was the creed of the day.

George Martin – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

I wouldn’t have put it out as a solo ‘Paul McCartney’ record. We never entertained those ideas. It was sometimes tempting; people would flatter us: ‘Oh, you know you should get out front,’ or, ‘You should put a solo record out.’ But we always said ‘no’. In fact, we didn’t release ‘Yesterday’ as a single in England at all, because we were a little embarrassed about it – we were a rock’n’roll band.

I am proud of it. I get made fun of because of it a bit. I remember George saying, ‘Blimey, he’s always talking about “Yesterday”, you’d think he was Beethoven or somebody.’ But it is, I reckon, the most complete thing I’ve ever written.

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

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“Yesterday” has been played in 703 concerts and 47 soundchecks.

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Going further

The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present

"Yesterday" is one of the songs featured in the book "The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present," published in 2021. The book explores Paul McCartney's early Liverpool days, his time with the Beatles, Wings, and his solo career. It pairs the lyrics of 154 of his songs with his first-person commentary on the circumstances of their creation, the inspirations behind them, and his current thoughts on them.

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