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Credit: Raph Pour-Hashemi<\/p>\n
Fri 19 June 2026 16:00, UK <\/p>\n
The job of someone like Paul McCartney<\/a> is often a lot more complicated than most people think. <\/p>\n Anyone could rest on their laurels and try to make the same kind of ho-hum pop single if they made a dent in pop culture like Macca did, but he was more interested in trying to take his music into different directions every single time he made a record. But when you\u2019ve amassed the kind of back catalogue that he has, there\u2019s going to be a little bit of pressure to try and make something that\u2019s going to measure up to what his classics always were.<\/p>\n Then again, the idea of him making the kind of golden pop singles that he and John Lennon used to write back in the day<\/a> was probably not in the cards. He made peace with the fact that there was never going to be another collaboration like \u2018A Day in the Life\u2019 ever again, but that didn\u2019t mean that there weren\u2019t some more beautiful songs to be found. After all, he was the tunesmith of the band, and it was always easy for him to come up with something that was at least a little bit catchy.<\/p>\n Not all of them were catchy in the right ways, and the world has almost universally claimed that they weren\u2019t a fan of tunes like \u2018Ebony and Ivory\u2019<\/a>, but Macca wasn\u2019t going to apologise for songs like that, either. He liked the idea of having different periods throughout his career and taking new avenues whenever he made a record. But there are certain tunes that almost seemed to be like works of art that no one was going to be able to replicate.<\/p>\n Because even if McCartney were to recreate the sound of his Beatles days live with backing tracks, it still wouldn\u2019t have sounded as good as what they made on albums like Revolver and Sgt Pepper. Every one of those songs felt like a new creative endeavour for them whenever they pressed RECORD, and compared to the more \u201ctypical\u201d rock and roll songs like \u2018Doctor Robert\u2019 or \u2018Good Morning Good Morning\u2019,<\/a> how the hell does someone recreate a tune like \u2018Eleanor Rigby\u2019 live?<\/p>\n Sure, \u2018Yesterday\u2019 was the kind of song that McCartney would occasionally play<\/a> with a string backing track, but he clearly hit a high watermark with this morose tune about loneliness. Every piece of the string arrangement sounds absolutely pitch-perfect, and while that could be intimidating for any other songwriter, McCartney knew not to try to compete with what he had already done.<\/p>\n He knew that every piece of \u2018Eleanor Rigby\u2019 was perfect the way it was, and all he could hope to do was create something that lived up to it, saying<\/a>, \u201cWhen I write a song, I have my other songs hanging over it. I suppose the minute you write a decent song, that\u2019s a curse. You\u2019re always like, \u2018Oh, shit, I\u2019ve just written \u2018Eleanor Rigby\u2019, how am I going to top that?\u2019 I think you go, \u2018I\u2019m not.\u2019 You just realize you\u2019re not going to top it, but you write \u2018Blackbird.\u2019 You go in another direction or whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n And that\u2019s half the reason why a lot of McCartney\u2019s later years sound so interesting. He didn\u2019t ever try to be pigeonholed into one sound, and while he did always slip in a handful of his granny songs that John Lennon always loathed, he was never going to apologise for writing the kind of tunes that were meant to make people happy. Because, really, that\u2019s what he felt he was put on this Earth to do.<\/p>\n Whereas Lennon was used to quoting his heart and being brutally honest in his music, McCartney was here to take sad songs and make them better, and even if he had his fair share of tearjerkers in his catalogue, he knew that the best way to keep his track record up was to pick himself up and keep going whenever something went wrong.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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<\/a> The Far Out Beatles Newsletter<\/p>\n