Sir Paul McCartney has revealed he may have subconsciously drawn inspiration to write the Beatles’ 1965 hit Yesterday from the death of his mother from cancer almost a decade earlier.
“Someone did suggest to me that this was a ‘losing my mother’ song, which I always sort of said, ‘No, I don’t think so,’” Sir Paul told Irish Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon in a new episode of their A Life In Lyrics podcast.
“But the more you think about it, [the line] ‘Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.’ Losing your mother to cancer, no one said anything. We didn’t know what it was at all,” he explained of the iconic song, for years characterised to be about a romantic break-up, and the melody he said came to him in a dream when he was just 24.
There is “so much tumbled into your youth and formative years that you can’t appreciate” the influence it may have until “only in retrospect,” Sir Paul mused, later suggesting the time he embarrassed his mother over her “posh” pronunciation of the word “ask” could have unwittingly inspired the lyric: “I said something wrong.”
The musician pondered: “’When she died, I wonder, ‘I said something wrong,’ Are we harking back to that crazy little thing? I don’t know. Does this happen?
“Do you find yourself unconsciously putting songs into girl lyrics that are really your dead mother? I suspect it might be true. It sort of fits if you look at the lyrics.”