The masterful music theory trick that saved The Beatles song ‘Yesterday’

I’ll open this article with a big statement: ‘Yesterday’ is the greatest song ever written. You can keep your ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and all that nonsense. When those songs were written, Prince and Queen were clearly actively trying to make the best song ever written, but the same can’t be said for Paul McCartney when he penned ‘Yesterday’.

He wrote the song because he awoke from the dream with the melody in his head. He could have quite easily got the rhythm down and then tried to build upon it, add layers and atmosphere, but he decided to write the song and then leave it as it is. George Martin added a subtle string section, but other than that, there’s no bass, no drums, no backing vocals, just one man, a guitar in his arms and his heart on his sleeve.

Despite the simplicity of the song, it conveys beautifully just why we adore music (and specifically the music of the Beatles) so much. It’s deeply moving, sounds gorgeous and feels as though it could be used as a most wonderful love letter to anyone in the world. It was never trying to be the best song ever made, and that’s exactly why it is.

“I did the tune easily,” said Paul McCartney when discussing the track that came to him in a dream, “And then the words took about two weeks.” This sounds incredibly impressive, but what’s even more impressive is that in making the song, McCartney moved musical convention to the side in a bid to create something well and truly stunning. Despite writing with a relatively standard rhythm, he manipulates the use of bars that make up a section so that his melody can seep through better.

The song has a structure which is commonly used in jazz circles, where there are four sections that make it up, three of which are the same, one of which is different. These songs are laid out in AABA, A being the identical structures and B being the different one. They always make up 32 bars, with each section being eight bars each; however, this is what McCartney changed.

He had the melody in his head, and he wasn’t willing to change it, even when it didn’t fit in the strict structure which had already been established by hundreds of songs prior. His solution was simple: make the A sections one bar shorter. This is why it sounds sometimes like those verses cut slightly short, it’s because they literally are short. The only section that consists of eight bars is the B section, meaning the total number of bars in the track are only 29.

The inventive piece of musical theory was a great move, as it allowed McCartney to pen one of the greatest songs ever written. Even when he and John Lennon were at each other’s throats, Lennon had to admit that ‘Yesterday’ remains a pretty great song. He wrote in his song that took aim at Paul McCartney, “The only thing you done was yesterday.”

When a song received credit from a pissed off Lennon, you know you’ve done something right.