Yesterday

From Wikipedia:

“Yesterday” is a song by English rock band the Beatles written by Paul McCartney (credited to Lennon–McCartney) first released on the album Help! in the United Kingdom in August 1965.

“Yesterday“, with the B-side “Act Naturally“, was released as a single in the United States in September 1965. While it topped the American chart in October the song also hit the British top 10 in a cover version by Matt Monro. The song also appeared on the UK EP “Yesterday” in March 1966 and the Beatles’ US album Yesterday and Today released in June 1966.

McCartney’s vocal and acoustic guitar, together with a string quartet, essentially made for the first solo performance of the band. It remains popular today with more than 2,200 cover versions and is one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music. “Yesterday” was voted the best song of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll of music experts and listeners and was also voted the No. 1 pop song of all time by MTV and Rolling Stone magazine the following year. In 1997, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) asserts that it was performed over seven million times in the 20th century alone.

“Yesterday” is a melancholy ballad about the break-up of a relationship. McCartney is the only member of the Beatles to appear on the recording. The final recording was so different from other works by the Beatles that the band members vetoed the release of the song as a single in the United Kingdom, although other artists were quick to do so. It was issued as a single in the US in September 1965 and later released as a single in the UK in 1976.

Origin

According to biographers of McCartney and the Beatles, McCartney composed the entire melody in a dream one night in his room at the Wimpole Street home of his then girlfriend Jane Asher and her family. Upon waking, he hurried to a piano and played the tune to avoid forgetting it.

McCartney’s initial concern was that he had subconsciously plagiarised someone else’s work (known as cryptomnesia). As he put it, “For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it.“

Upon being convinced that he had not robbed anyone of their melody, McCartney began writing lyrics to suit it. As Lennon and McCartney were known to do at the time, a substitute working lyric, titled “Scrambled Eggs” (the working opening verse was “Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs/Not as much as I love scrambled eggs“), was used for the song until something more suitable was written. In his biography, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, McCartney recalled: “So first of all I checked this melody out, and people said to me, ‘No, it’s lovely, and I’m sure it’s all yours.’ It took me a little while to allow myself to claim it, but then like a prospector I finally staked my claim; stuck a little sign on it and said, ‘Okay, it’s mine!’ It had no words. I used to call it ‘Scrambled Eggs’.“

During the shooting of Help!, a piano was placed on one of the stages where filming was being conducted and McCartney took advantage of this opportunity to tinker with the song. Richard Lester, the director, was eventually greatly annoyed by this and lost his temper, telling McCartney to finish writing the song or he would have the piano removed. The patience of the other Beatles was also tested by McCartney’s work in progress, George Harrison summing this up when he said: “Blimey, he’s always talking about that song. You’d think he was Beethoven or somebody!“

McCartney originally claimed he had written “Yesterday” during the Beatles’ tour of France in 1964; however, the song was not released until the summer of 1965. During the intervening time, the Beatles released two albums, A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles for Sale, both of which could have included “Yesterday“. Although McCartney has never elaborated on his claims, a delay may have been due to a disagreement between McCartney and George Martin regarding the song’s arrangement, or the opinion of the other Beatles who felt it did not suit their image.

Lennon later indicated that the song had been around for a while before: “The song was around for months and months before we finally completed it. Every time we got together to write songs for a recording session, this one would come up. We almost had it finished. Paul wrote nearly all of it, but we just couldn’t find the right title. We called it ‘Scrambled Eggs’ and it became a joke between us. We made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit, we just couldn’t find the right one. Then one morning Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way, we’d had so many laughs about it.“

McCartney said the breakthrough with the lyrics came during a trip to Portugal in May 1965: “I remember mulling over the tune ‘Yesterday’, and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse. I started to develop the idea … da-da da, yes-ter-day, sud-den-ly, fun-il-ly, mer-il-ly and Yes-ter-day, that’s good. All my troubles seemed so far away. It’s easy to rhyme those a’s: say, nay, today, away, play, stay, there’s a lot of rhymes and those fall in quite easily, so I gradually pieced it together from that journey. Sud-den-ly, and ‘b’ again, another easy rhyme: e, me, tree, flea, we, and I had the basis of it.“

On 27 May 1965, McCartney and Asher flew to Lisbon for a holiday in Albufeira, Algarve, and he borrowed an acoustic guitar from Bruce Welch, in whose house they were staying, and completed the work on “Yesterday“. The song was offered as a demo to Chris Farlowe before the Beatles recorded it, but he turned it down as he considered it “too soft“.

In a March 1967 interview with Brian Matthew, McCartney claimed that Lennon came up with the song’s title:

Brian: “Give us the inside story on the song ‘Yesterday.’“

John: “Ah well, this is John saying I don’t know anything about that one. I’ll hand you over to Paul.“

Paul: “[laughs] This is Paul, taking up the story in a holiday villa in Corsica. Strumming away on a medieval guitar, I thought [sings] ‘Scrambled Egg.’ But I never could finish it, and eventually I took it back in. With the ancient wisdom of the east, John came out with [sings] ‘Yesterday’.“

Recording

Studio work

The track was recorded at Abbey Road Studios on 14 June 1965, immediately following the taping of “I’m Down“, and four days before McCartney’s 23rd birthday. There are conflicting accounts of how the song was recorded, the most quoted one being that McCartney recorded the song by himself, without bothering to involve the other band members. Alternative sources, however, state that McCartney and the other Beatles tried a variety of instruments, including drums and an organ, and that George Martin later persuaded them to allow McCartney to play his Epiphone Texan steel-string acoustic guitar, later on editing-in a string quartet for backup. Regardless, none of the other band members were included in the final recording. However, the song was played with the other members of the band in concert during 1966, in G major instead of F major.

McCartney performed two takes of “Yesterday” on 14 June 1965. Take 2 was deemed better and used as the master take. On 17 June, an additional vocal track by McCartney and a string quartet were overdubbed on take 2 and that version was released.

Take 1, without the string overdub, was later released on the Anthology 2 compilation. On take 1, McCartney can be heard giving chord changes to George Harrison before starting, but George does not appear to actually play. Take 2 had two lines transposed from the first take: “There’s a shadow hanging over me”/”I’m not half the man I used to be“, though it seems clear that their order in take 2 was the correct one, because McCartney can be heard, in take 1, suppressing a laugh at his mistake.

In 2006, just before the album Love was released, George Martin elaborated on the recording set-up of the song: “Paul played his guitar and sang it live, a mic on the guitar and mic on the voice. But, of course, the voice comes on to the guitar mic and the guitar comes on to the voice mic. So there’s leakage there. Then I said I’d do a string quartet. The musicians objected to playing with headphones, so I gave them Paul’s voice and guitar on two speakers either side of their microphones. So there’s leakage of Paul’s guitar and voice on the string tracks.“

Debate on the release of the song

Concerning the debate on how the song should be released, Martin later said: “[Yesterday] wasn’t really a Beatles record and I discussed this with Brian Epstein: ‘You know this is Paul’s song … shall we call it Paul McCartney?’ He said ‘No, whatever we do we are not splitting up the Beatles.“

Surround mix for the album Love

The leakage of sound from one track to another was a concern later, when the surround version of the song was mixed for the album Love, but it was decided to include it nevertheless. As Martin explained in the liner notes of Love: “We agonised over the inclusion of “Yesterday” in the show. It is such a famous song, the icon of an era, but had it been heard too much? The story of the addition of the original string quartet is well known, however, few people know how limited the recording was technically, and so the case for not including it was strong, but how could we ignore such a marvellous work? We introduced it with some of Paul’s guitar work from “Blackbird”, and hearing it now, I know it was right to include it. Its simplicity is so direct; it tugs at the heartstrings.“

Composition and structure

Ostensibly simple, featuring only McCartney playing an Epiphone Texan steel-string acoustic guitar backed by a string quartet in one of the Beatles’ first use of session musicians, “Yesterday” has two contrasting sections, differing in melody and rhythm, producing a sense of disjunction.

The first section (“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away …“) opens with an F chord (the 3rd of the chord is omitted), then moving to Em7 before proceeding to A7 and then to D-minor. In this sense, the opening chord is a decoy; as musicologist Alan Pollack points out, the home key (F-major) has little time to establish itself before “heading towards the relative D-minor.” He points out that this diversion is a compositional device commonly used by Lennon and McCartney, which he describes as “delayed gratification“.

The second section (“Why she had to go I don’t know …“) is, according to Pollack, less musically surprising on paper than it sounds. Starting with Em7, the harmonic progression quickly moves through the A-major, D-minor, and (closer to F-major) B♭, before resolving back to F-major, and at the end of this, McCartney holds F while the strings descend to resolve to the home key to introduce the restatement of the first section, before a brief hummed closing phrase.

Pollack described the scoring as “truly inspired“, citing it as an example of “[Lennon & McCartney’s] flair for creating stylistic hybrids“; in particular, he praises the “ironic tension drawn between the schmaltzy content of what is played by the quartet and the restrained, spare nature of the medium in which it is played.“

The tonic key of the song is F major (although, since McCartney tuned his guitar down a whole step, he was playing the chords as if it were in G), where the song begins before veering off into the key of D minor. It is this frequent use of the minor, and the ii-V7 chord progression (Em and A7 chords in this case) leading into it, that gives the song its melancholy aura. The A7 chord is an example of a secondary dominant, specifically a V/vi chord. The G7 chord in the bridge is another secondary dominant, in this case a V/V chord, but rather than resolve it to the expected chord, as with the A7 to Dm in the verse, McCartney instead follows it with the IV chord, a B♭. This motion creates a descending chromatic line of C–B–B♭–A to accompany the title lyric.

The string arrangement reinforces the song’s air of sadness, in the groaning cello line that connects the two halves of the bridge, notably the “blue” seventh in the second bridge pass (the E♭ played after the vocal line, “I don’t know / she wouldn’t say“) and in the descending run by the viola that segues the bridge back into the verses, mimicked by McCartney’s vocal on the second pass of the bridge. This viola line, the “blue” cello phrase, the high A sustained by the violin over the final verse and the minimal use of vibrato are elements of the string arrangement attributable to McCartney rather than George Martin.

When the song was performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, it was done in the above-mentioned key of F, with McCartney as the only Beatle to perform, and the studio orchestra providing the string accompaniment. However, all of the Beatles played in a G-major version which was used in the Tokyo concerts during their 1966 tours.

When McCartney appeared on The Howard Stern Show, he stated that he owns the original lyrics to “Yesterday” written on the back of an envelope. McCartney later performed the original “Scrambled Eggs” version of the song, plus additional new lyrics, with Jimmy Fallon and The Roots on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Resemblance to other songs

In 2001, Ian Hammond speculated that McCartney subconsciously based “Yesterday” on Ray Charles’ version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind“, but closed his article by saying that despite the similarities “Yesterday” is a “completely original and individual [work].“

In July 2003, British musicologists stumbled upon superficial similarities between the lyric and rhyming schemes of “Yesterday” and Nat King Cole’s and Frankie Laine’s “Answer Me, My Love” (originally a German song by Gerhard Winkler and Fred Rauch called Mütterlein, it was a No.1 hit for Laine on the UK charts in 1953 as “Answer Me, O Lord“), leading to speculation that McCartney had been influenced by the song. McCartney’s publicists denied any resemblance between “Answer Me, My Love” and “Yesterday“. “Yesterday” begins with the lines: “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they’re here to stay.” In its second stanza, “Answer Me, My Love” has the lines: “You were mine yesterday. I believed that love was here to stay. Won’t you tell me where I’ve gone astray“.

Release

Since “Yesterday” was unlike the Beatles’ previous work and did not fit in with their image, and was essentially a solo recording, the Beatles refused to permit the release of a single in the United Kingdom. This did not prevent Matt Monro from recording the first of many cover versions of “Yesterday“. His version made it into the top ten in the UK charts soon after its release in the autumn of 1965.

The Beatles’ influence over their US record label, Capitol, was not as strong as it was over EMI’s Parlophone in Britain. A single was released in the US, pairing “Yesterday” with “Act Naturally“, a track which featured vocals by Starr. The single was released on 13 September 1965 and topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart for four weeks, beginning on 9 October. The song spent a total of 11 weeks on the chart, selling a million copies within five weeks. The single was also number one for three weeks on the U.S. Cashbox pop singles chart the same year.

“Yesterday” was the fifth of six number one singles in a row on the American charts, a record at the time. The other singles were “I Feel Fine“, “Eight Days a Week“, “Ticket to Ride“, “Help!“, and “We Can Work It Out“. “Yesterday” also marked a turning point in who wrote number one singles for the group. Lennon wrote five through “Help!“, whereas afterwards McCartney wrote eight starting with “Yesterday“. On 4 March 1966, “Yesterday” was released as an EP in the UK, joined by “Act Naturally” on the A-side with “You Like Me Too Much” and “It’s Only Love” on the B-side. By 12 March, it had begun its run on the charts. On 26 March 1966, the EP went to number one, a position it held for two months. Later that same year, “Yesterday” was included as the title track for the US-only Yesterday and Today album, which was originally packaged in the “butcher sleeve“.

The “Yesterday“/”Act Naturally” single was reissued on Apple Records in 1971, with “Act Naturally” having the “full apple” side and “Yesterday” on the “sliced apple” side. At the time of its original US release in September 1965, “Act Naturally” was the intended A-side and has always been listed as such in Capitol’s files.

Ten years later on 8 March 1976, “Yesterday” was released by Parlophone as a single in the UK, featuring “I Should Have Known Better” on the B-side. Entering the charts on 13 March, the single stayed there for seven weeks, but it never rose higher than number 8 (however, by this time the song had been featured on no less than three top 5 albums and an EP which topped the charts). The release came about due to the expiration of the Beatles’ contract with EMI, Parlophone’s parent. EMI released as many singles by the Beatles as they could on the same day, leading to 23 of them hitting the top 100 in the UK charts, including six in the top 50.

In 2006, a version of the song was included on the album Love. The version begins with the acoustic guitar intro from the song “Blackbird” only with “Blackbird” transposed down a whole step to F major from its original key G to transition smoothly into “Yesterday“.

Reception

“Yesterday” is one of the most recorded songs in the history of popular music; its entry in Guinness World Records states that, by January 1986, 1,600 cover versions had been made. After Muzak switched in the 1990s to programs based on commercial recordings, Muzak’s inventory grew to include about 500 “Yesterday” covers. At the 2006 Grammy Awards, McCartney performed the song live as a mash-up with Linkin Park and Jay-Z’s “Numb/Encore“.

“Yesterday” won the Ivor Novello Award for ‘Outstanding Song of 1965‘, and came second for ‘Most Performed Work of the Year‘, losing out to the Lennon/McCartney composition, “Michelle“. The song has received its fair share of acclaim in recent times as well, ranking 13th on Rolling Stone’s 2004 list “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” and fourth on the magazine’s list “The Beatles 100 Greatest Songs” (compiled in 2010). In 1999, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) placed “Yesterday” third on their list of songs of the 20th century most performed on American radio and television, with approximately seven million performances. “Yesterday” was surpassed only by The Association’s “Never My Love” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling“. “Yesterday” was voted Best Song of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll.

The song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1997. Although the song was nominated for Song of the Year at the 1966 Grammy Awards, it ultimately lost to Tony Bennett’s “The Shadow of Your Smile.“

In an interview with one of McCartney’s influences, Chuck Berry said that “Yesterday” was the song that he wished that he had written.

“Yesterday“, however, has also been criticised for being mundane and mawkish; Bob Dylan had a marked dislike for the song, stating that “If you go into the Library of Congress, you can find a lot better than that. There are millions of songs like ‘Michelle’ and ‘Yesterday’ written in Tin Pan Alley“. Ironically, Dylan ultimately recorded his own version of “Yesterday” four years later, but it was never released.

Shortly before his death in 1980, Lennon explained that he thought the lyrics did not “resolve into any sense … They’re good – but if you read the whole song, it doesn’t say anything; you don’t know what happened. She left and he wishes it were yesterday – that much you get – but it doesn’t really resolve. … Beautiful – and I never wished I’d written it.” “Paul wrote this great song, ‘Yesterday.’ It’s a beautiful song. I never wished I’d written it, and I don’t believe in yesterday … Life begins at 40, so they promise and I believe it. What’s going to come?” Lennon made reference to the song on his album Imagine with the song “How Do You Sleep?“. The song appears to attack McCartney with the line “The only thing you done was Yesterday, but since you’ve gone you’re just another day“. Lennon later said to Playboy that the song reflected a struggle with his own feelings rather than an attack on the apparent target, McCartney.

In 2012, it was reported by the BBC that “Yesterday” remained the 4th most successful song of all-time in terms of royalties paid, having amassed a total of £19.5 million in payments .

Paul McCartney, in MOJO, July 2004:

On the subject of “Yesterday”, does it surprise you that as many people violently hate that song as love it?

My personal take on it is that it’s not a bad little song. Whether it’s the most popular or whatever, it’s certainly loved by quite a few people. When you get a song like that, whether it’s “Yesterday” or “I Will Always Love You”, a lot of people will react against it. Because it’s always on the radio or at the top of the chart or always playing in restaurants, some people will get annoyed having to listen to it. It’s a bit of a British thing, that. We Brits are not that big on success, especially when someone else is having it [laughs].

Paul McCartney remembering George Martin, March 9th 2016:

[…] It’s hard to choose favourite memories of my time with George, there are so many but one that comes to mind was the time I brought the song ‘Yesterday’ to a recording session and the guys in the band suggested that I sang it solo and accompany myself on guitar. After I had done this George Martin said to me, “Paul I have an idea of putting a string quartet on the record”. I said, “Oh no George, we are a rock and roll band and I don’t think it’s a good idea”.  With the gentle bedside manner of a great producer he said to me, “Let us try it and if it doesn’t work we won’t use it and we’ll go with your solo version”.  I agreed to this and went round to his house the next day to work on the arrangement.

He took my chords that I showed him and spread the notes out across the piano, putting the cello in the low octave and the first violin in a high octave and gave me my first lesson in how strings were voiced for a quartet. When we recorded the string quartet at Abbey Road, it was so thrilling to know his idea was so correct that I went round telling people about it for weeks. His idea obviously worked because the song subsequently became one of the most recorded songs ever with versions by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye and thousands more. […]

The Ashers’ house in Wimpole Street. A very small attic room with one window. A garret. Perfect for an artist. There wasn’t any room for me to keep my records — many of which had been mailed to me from the US before they were available in the UK — in there. They had to be kept on the landing. But somehow I had a piano in there — a small, sawn-off piano that stood by my bed. Somewhere in a dream, I heard this tune. When I woke up, I thought, “I love that tune. What is it? Is it Fred Astaire? Is it Cole Porter? What is it?”

I fell out of bed and the piano was right there, just to the side. I thought I’d try and work out how the song went. I thought it had to be some old standard I’d heard years earlier and had forgotten. I just had this tune, and I now had some chords. And to solidify it in my memory I blocked it out with some dummy words: “Scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs, scrambled eggs”. Using dummy lyrics wasn’t something I did a lot. It was a rare thing.

So, I had this tune, and I think the first person I saw that morning outside the house was John. I said, “What’s this song?” He said, “I don’t know. I’ve never heard it.” I got the same response from George Martin and my friend the singer Alma Cogan, who had pretty comprehensive knowledge of popular songs. After a couple of weeks it became clear that no one knew the song and it didn’t exist, except in my head. So I claimed it and spent time playing around with it, adding to it and perfecting it. It was like finding a £10 note on the street.

Not long after the song came to me, we were working on the film Help!. A Hard Day’s Night had been such a success the year before that there was pressure on us to make a follow-up, but the scripts just weren’t right. I think we had rejected so many versions that by the time we came to say yes to one, we had only really just browsed it, rather than taking it very seriously. To be honest, we were starting to outgrow these “mop top” caricatures that we were being typecast as. One thing the film had going for it, though, was that if we said something like, “Can we go somewhere nice to film this bit?” they’d say yes.

Jumping from one place to the next might not have helped the film much, but that bit was fun. We’d say things like, “I’ve never been to the Caribbean. Can you work that into the story, please?” So they did. “Have you been skiing before?” “No!” “OK, let’s get that in the film too!”

All this was going on during the incubation of Yesterday, and when there was a chance I would ask for a piano to be near by so I could work on the song. And it got to the point where the film’s director, Richard Lester, started to get annoyed at always hearing the song. One day he shouted, “If I hear that once more, I’ll have the bloody piano taken away!” I don’t think it helped matters that when he would ask what the song was called, I’d reply, “Scrambled Eggs”.

During a break in the filming, Jane Asher and I went to Portugal for a little holiday. We were heading down to Albufeira, and I was in the back of the car, doing nothing. It was very hot and very dusty, and I was sort of half-asleep. One of the things I like to do when I’m like that is try to think. “Scrambled eggs, bah, bah, bah . . . What can that be?” I started working through some options. I wanted to keep the melody, so I knew I’d have to fit the syllables of the words around that. “Scrambled eggs” — “da-da-da”. You have possibilities like “yes-ter-day” and “sud-den-ly”. And I also remember thinking, “People like sad songs.” I remember thinking that even I like sad songs. By the time I got to Albufeira, I’d completed the lyrics.

When we got back home, I took the song to the band, and Ringo said, “I don’t think I can really drum on that.” George added, “Well, I’m not sure I can put much guitar on it either.” And then John said, “I can’t think of anything. I think you should just do it by yourself. It’s really a solo song.”

Now, this was kind of a big deal at the time, because we’d never recorded like that before. It had always been the band. After some hesitation I decided to give it a go.

When the album was released, Dick Lester was away on holiday, so I sent him a copy of it with a note saying, “I hope you like Scrambled Eggs!”

And then the song did phenomenally well. The record label wanted to release it as a single. We wouldn’t let them do it in the UK, since we were a rock and roll band, but we let them get away with it in the US because we didn’t live there. It’s still strange to me when people tell me things like Yesterday is the number one pop song of all time. Apparently Rolling Stone described it as the best song of the 20th century. It all seems quite grand for something that came into the world so mysteriously.

Some people find it hard to believe that I was 22 when I wrote Yesterday. Every time I come to the line “I’m not half the man I used to be”, I remember I’d lost my mother about eight years before that. It’s been suggested to me that this is a “losing my mother” song, to which I’ve always said, “No, I don’t believe so.” But, you know, the more I think about it — “Why she had to go I don’t know, she wouldn’t say” — I can see that that might have been part of the background, the unconsciousness behind this song after all. It was so strange that the loss of our mother to cancer was simply not discussed. We barely knew what cancer was, but I’m now not surprised that the whole experience surfaced in this song where sweetness competes with a pain you can’t quite describe.

Paul McCartney – From Paul McCartney reveals the stories behind his greatest hits | The Sunday Times Magazine | The Sunday Times (thetimes.co.uk) – From “The Lyrics” book, 2021

Paul woke up with the melody [of “Yesterday”] in his head fully formed but without any lyrics. First, he thought it must be something he was remembering and asked everybody what tune it was. And when I say everybody, I include my mother, who was one of the first people he saw that day since he was living in our house. I was not there, but my mother (a musician herself, of course) told Paul that she did not recognize the tune and had never heard it before. After many other people said the same thing, Paul finally realized that he had written it magically in his head.

Peter Asher – From “The Beatles from A to Zed: An Alphabetical Mystery Tour“, 2019

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