Every musician has an underlying fear of getting stuck whenever they try to write songs. It’s one thing to have a signature sound that fans call on you for every time you write, but there’s a fine line between delivering what they want and painting yourself into a corner and having nowhere else to go. The Beatles were never going to be confined by what their core audience wanted, and when Paul McCartney found something that was beyond his capabilities on piano, he turned it into an iconic track on ‘Martha My Dear’.
It’s not like the Fab Four had peaked as musicians when they first became famous. From the moment they walked into the studio with George Martin, the producer knew that they were far from the most competent players he had ever heard, but he knew that they had a charm and charisma that would appeal to a lot of people if he could only hone their gifts for songwriting.
With each passing album, though, every member seemed to move up a step in terms of musicianship. George Harrison was always fine-tuning his guitar chops and Indian influence, and John Lennon was down to experiment with anything he got his hands on, but Macca was aiming to be the perfect well-rounded musician.
By the time he made The White Album, McCartney would turn in a masterclass as a player, either flip-flopping between different instruments or going so far as to play everything himself on ‘Mother Nature’s Son’. There was some intricate work to be found on ‘Blackbird’ or even his drum break on ‘Dear Prudence’, but ‘Martha My Dear’ was a different beast of a song.
Because when you listen to it, there’s hardly a real chorus to be found. In fact, this might be closer in construction to Lennon’s ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ in some respects, down to the fact that it has three distinct movements that make for a coherent song but not always the most commercial record.
When crafting the opening piano figure, though, McCartney deliberately wrote it knowing he would have to work up to it, saying, “This started life almost as a piece you’d learn as a piano lesson. It’s quite hard for me to play, it’s a two-handed thing, like a little set piece. In fact, I remember one or two people being surprised that I’d played it because it’s slightly above my level or competence really, but I wrote it as that, something a bit more complex for me to play.”
And considering his habit of perfectionism whenever he walked into the studio, McCartney worked himself up to the point where the whole track sounded immaculate. He was nowhere close to the seasoned piano veterans, but the time and effort he put into it sounded like someone who had been playing ragtime piano their entire lives.
Even though McCartney would have more impressive runs in his solo catalogue, the fact that he could fully realise a song like this all by himself was one of the many strokes of genius that balanced out the questionable tracks on The White Album like ‘Wild Honey Pie’. Not bad for a breezy tune about his lovable dog.
