In his podcast A Life in Lyrics, Paul McCartney opened up about an embarrassing moment with his mother that influenced one of The Beatles’ most famous songs, ‘Yesterday.’
The musician disclosed the personal memory that subconsciously inspired the line ‘I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday’ in the song with the following words:
“Sometimes it’s only in retrospect you can appreciate it. I remember very clearly one day feeling very embarrassed because I embarrassed my mum. We were out in the backyard, and she talked posh. She was of Irish origin, and she was a nurse, so she was above street level. So she had something sort of going for her, and she would talk what we thought was a little bit posh. And it was a little bit Welshy as well – she had connections; her auntie Dilys was Welsh.”
A Painful Memory
He continued, sharing how he corrected his mother’s pronunciation in a way that embarrassed her:
“I know that she said something like, ‘Paul, will you ask him if he’s going…’ I went ‘Arsk! Arsk! It’s ask mum.’ And she got a little bit embarrassed. I remember later thinking, ‘God, I wish I’d never said that.’ And it stuck with me. After she died, I thought, ‘Oh f*ck, I really wish …'”
Linking Personal Loss To Songwriting
Released in 1965 on The Beatles’ album ‘Help!,’ ‘Yesterday’ has become one of the most covered songs in music history. McCartney wrote the song nearly a decade after his mother’s death, and he previously spoke about whether his songwriting has been unconsciously influenced by his mother’s death. He noted:
“When she died, I wonder, ‘I said something wrong,’ are we harking back to that crazy little thing. So I don’t know. Does this happen? Do you find yourself unconsciously putting songs into girl lyrics [about a lost lover] that are really your dead mother? I suspect it might be true. It sort of fits, if you look at the lyrics.”
In another episode of A Life in Lyrics, McCartney shared an intriguing connection between ‘Let It Be’ and Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet.’ Unaware of the similarity until recently, he found it fascinating that the phrase ‘Let it be’ appeared in a dream about his mother, which later became the central theme of the song.
