Paul McCartney has always been a visionary. This is to the extent that every so often, his vivid dreams from Slumberland would provide him with the basic ideas for songs. Two of his most culturally important compositions for The Beatles originated from his semi-unconscious state.
The first track is ‘Yesterday’, taken from the 1965 album Help. The story behind the song is one of music’s most famous. McCartney claims to have awoken with the timeless melody after a dream and ad-libbed the words “scrambled eggs” in order not to forget it. At the time, McCartney was convinced that he must have heard the tune before through one of his father’s old jazz records. In a stroke of luck, though, he couldn’t source it anywhere and began to turn his dream into a musical reality.
In the years since the anecdote about ‘Yesterday’ circulated, several musicologists have attempted to uncover if there is any truth to the melody originating in jazz. British expert Spencer Leigh has even claimed that the tune might have landed in McCartney’s mind via Nat King Cole’s 1953 song ‘Answer Me’. Listening closely, there are similarities, with Leigh’s argument finding some substance in the lyric, “Yesterday, I believed that love was here to stay”. As is often the case in music, though, a definite answer has never been found and likely never will be. That’s the thing with dreams; by nature, they are intangible.
The other classic Beatles track that emerged in a Paul McCartney dream was the 1970 hit ‘Let It Be’, a now-iconic track from The Beatles’ final album of the same name. For context, at the time of composing, the Vietnam War was coming to a bloody stalemate, Martin Luther King Jr had been assassinated, and the Cold War continued to rage on. In short, the future looked bleak.
As the promise of the 1960s started to fade, McCartney’s work was affected. He revealed during an episode of Carpool Karaoke that ‘Let It Be’ originated in a dream where his late mother, Mary, who passed away when he was 14, reassured him that everything would be OK. “I had a dream in the ’60s,” McCartney explained, “Where my mum, who died, came to me in a dream and was reassuring me saying: It’s going to be okay. Just let it be.”
Recalling how the song’s simple but universal message materialised, he continued: “She was reassuring me, saying, ‘It’s going to be ok, just let it be.’ It felt so great. She gave me positive words, [..] So I wrote the song ‘Let It Be’ out of positivity.”
Listen to the two tracks below.
