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October 31st, 2026 · 8:53pm GMT
There aren’t many songs that Paul McCartney hasn’t been able to turn into something magical whenever he starts to sing.
Even when he was making the most sentimental songs in The Beatles’ canon, the gift that Macca was put on this Earth to give was the melodies in his head, whether that was him screaming his way through ‘Helter Skelter’ or showing us around Liverpool throughout every single second of ‘Penny Lane’. But no matter how many times he made rock and roll classics, there was never a moment when he needed to learn sheet music for any reason.
That kind of approach to music never made any sense to him, and he would have been a lot happier just to follow his ear than spend his time going over every single scale in the book. That sounded a lot more like work to him, and despite him being a workaholic, every time he played guitar, you don’t work music. You play it, and McCartney has made a habit of having a little too much fun during his profession.
So many of his greatest hits have come from him having a laugh and making a bunch of decent rock and roll tunes, but there are usually one or two songs on each record that remind the world why he’s considered a genius. Sure, they might have had to sit through a few whimsical numbers now and again, but even up until his later years, tunes like ‘Calico Skies’ were as good as anything he could have made during his first solo days.
But that’s never enough to satisfy the more sophisticated listeners in the band’s audience. No matter how much they were considered innovators in the pop sphere, the classical world alluded them a lot of the time, but George Martin was normally the one who was operating as their musical translator whenever they brought in orchestras to give their songs that extra push that they needed on every one of their records.
That wasn’t unheard of at the time, but McCartney figured that there was a lot more for him to learn if he broadened his palette. After all, his girlfriend’s parents at the time were already known for being accomplished professional musicians, but even when working on a tune that sounded as cinematic as ‘Eleanor Rigby’, McCartney remembered getting shot down the minute that he hit those stabbing chords.
The tune lives and dies on that beautiful arrangement of single chords, but McCartney remembered his tutors being less than impressed with him, saying, “I even played ‘Eleanor Rigby’ on piano for the teacher, but this was before I had the words. At the time, I was just blocking out the lyrics and singing ‘Ola Na Tungee’ over vamped E-minor chords. I don’t remember the teacher being all that impressed. The teacher just wanted to hear me play even more scales, so that put an end to the lessons.”
Further reading: From The Vault
The song wasn’t in its finished form yet, but you could already hear the melody coming into being. Macca had a habit of blocking out lyrics like that until he had the right idea for what he wanted, and when his vocal was doubled by a string quartet on the final version, a lot of people were gobsmacked that a rock and roll band could have made something that sounded this sophisticated.
Now the genre didn’t have to be limited to one sound for the rest of its lifespan, and while McCartney wasn’t going to give his teachers the time of day, that’s because he didn’t need to. This was a different manner of working on music, and even if it wasn’t the linear way to learn, no one should ever get in the way of someone who has a song in their heart and is willing to play it for everyone.
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