The song that made Paul McCartney believe in magic: “I have to”

There’s always been a mystical element to the greatest songs in the world. Someone can spend their entire life studying the intricacies of music theory and creating something brilliantly sophisticated, but the best songs tend to be the ones that fall out of the sky with no real rhyme or reason to them. And for someone who has admitted that he doesn’t know the first thing about music theory, Paul McCartney has turned his musical imagination into a full-time job for over half his life.

But do I really need to go over the kind of musical genius that Macca wields? We all know the type of masterpieces that he has created over the years, and even when he’s only using three basic chords, he can turn a song like ‘Hey Jude’ into the world’s greatest sing-along or shred his throat until it’s raw on his versions of Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’.

Even as far back as the early 1960s, though, The Beatles wanted to be thought of as something more than a traditional rock and roll outfit. They had many facets to their sound, and outside of throwing in the odd jazz chord on some of their early records, they were always concerned with making something that would last for a bit longer than the average rock and roll song from the 1950s.

That normally meant exploring different places on the guitar neck or mucking about on the piano, but when ‘Yesterday’ came to McCartney in a dream, he knew something different was happening, saying, “People say, ‘Do you believe in magic?’ and I say, ‘I have to.’ Because I woke up one morning with this [hums the tune to Yesterday], and I went, ‘I love that. What was that?’ I thought I was dreaming someone else’s song.”

Then again, it’s easy to see why McCartney had reservations about turning ‘Yesterday’ into one of his own tunes. It’s hard to imagine that any song that perfect falls out of the sky, but after shopping it around to everyone, it was clear that he had had a stroke of genius when working on the track. Now all that was left to do was create lyrics that didn’t centre around the working title ‘Scrambled Eggs’.

But outside of the sophisticated melody, the lyrics that he came up with for the track were magical in their own right. Outside of being a sad lament of a bitter breakup, McCartney seemed to capture his past, present and future within one line. He had already lost his mother to cancer, he was on the rocks with Jane Asher at the time, and would eventually lose his wife Linda to cancer, so the line ‘Why she had to go, I don’t know?’ could easily sum up every one of those relationships.

Although this kind of soppy ballad would normally fall into the realm of McCartney’s ‘granny music’, there’s a reason why even John Lennon gave this one a pass. This was McCartney coming up with pure beauty on the spot, and while the people sequencing the album Help! should never be forgiven for throwing on ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ after this tune, it’s still a fantastic song no matter where it’s put on the album.

Beyond how and when it came out, though, ‘Yesterday’ is not only proof of magic, but also an affirmation of what McCartney’s music was outside of the jokes people made at his expense. He may have been the eternal optimist whenever in front of the camera, but for someone only known for making whimsical ditties, tapping into something this melancholy should have logically shut up every one of his naysayers.