The Remarkable Story Behind One of the World’s Best Loved Songs

Scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs.

If I were to tell you that these were the original lyrics to one of the greatest songs of the 20th century, recorded by Elvis Presley, Marvin Gaye, Billie Eilish and Aretha Franklin, as well as 2200 others, you’d probably wonder what I’d been smoking.

Yet these are the original lyrics to ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles.

The story of how this much loved song came into being is not just a remarkable one, it’s an almost perfect template for the creative process.

Paul McCartney in 1964

Paul McCartney was staying at the family home of his girlfriend Jane Asher when he awoke one morning with a song stuck in his head. He’d heard it in a dream and it seemed so familiar that his first thought was to try and work out who it was by. Fred Astaire? Cole Porter? Sinatra?

Fortunately, there was a piano in the room, so Paul, still bleary with sleep, first established the chord sequence and – maybe mindful of his breakfast – jotted down those placeholder lyrics about scrambled eggs. Later that day he met John Lennon and asked him if he knew who the song was by. But John – of course – had no idea. Nor did Paul’s friend Alma Coogan, normally an encyclopaedia of musical knowledge. And when even the Beatles’ producer George Martin said he didn’t know, Paul decided he was going to claim the song as his own – “It was like finding a £10 note on the street”.

It’s not unknown for ideas to arrive almost fully formed, just like this. Artists and creatives of all kinds have spoken about songs or stories or paintings or poems coming to them unbidden, apparently out of nowhere. But to Paul it felt like magic: “People have said to me do you believe in magic and I say I have to, because of that song. I have to. How the hell did that come into my brain?”

Recent discoveries in neuroscience are able to provide something of answer. That the song came to Paul in a dream is revealing. We now know that creative inspiration is most likely to arrive when the brain’s executive centre, the prefrontal cortex, is least active, as it is when we’re in that liminal space between waking and sleeping. It’s a condition known as ‘transient hypofrontality’.  

And of course, the song didn’t really come from nowhere. Like all great ideas it was the product both of Paul’s lived experience and the cultural influences he’d absorbed. ‘Yesterday’ sits very comfortably within the songbook tradition of the mid 20th century. Compare it with other tracks on the same album, tunes like ‘Help’ or ‘Ticket to Ride’, and it seems somehow out of time, maybe more like a Nat King Cole song than a Beatles one.

This makes sense once you know that Paul was intimately familiar with the work of artists who had success long before the 1960’s. He’s described how he was ‘loaded’ with them from endless singalongs round the piano at McCartney family gatherings. Paul had unwittingly absorbed the structure, melody and rhythm of so many classic songs that it enabled him, seemingly without effort, to write one of his own.

Yet, while the melody arrived fully formed, the lyrics remained elusive. For a while, whenever he shared the song, Paul had to fall back on ‘scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs’ – words unlikely to cement the status of the tune as a classic. During a break in filming the movie ‘Help’, Paul went on holiday to Portugal with Jane. The drive from the airport to the villa was hot, dusty and long. During the three hour car ride Paul has described how he was “sort of half asleep” and staring out of the window – in that state of transient hypofrontality once again – when the words to ‘Yesterday’ began to form in his mind. The moment they reached their destination, Paul scribbled them down.

Paul’s handwritten lyrics to ‘Yesterday’

It's fascinating to me that a song as poignant and reflective as ‘Yesterday’, with lyrics like ‘I’m not half the man I used to be’, could be written by a 22 year old. And, by his own account, it kind of surprised Paul too. For a long time he refuted suggestions that the song was about losing his mother, as he had done to cancer some eight years before. But in recent conversations he’s conceded that now that reading makes sense. Although Paul’s mum was ill, the cause of her illness was never discussed. And when she was taken for the last time into hospital, Paul was given no explanation: ‘Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say’.

And it’s only in the last few years that Paul has connected another lyric with an incident from his childhood. His mum, a nurse with aspirations beyond her working class origins, was hanging out washing in the garden. As she chatted to him, Paul mocked her for always trying to sound posh. Though it went unremarked at the time, she smarted and Paul had felt her hurt. He’d ‘said something wrong’, something that could never be unsaid once his mum was gone.

It's funny how our own creative output can have a meaning and resonance that we only come to understand much later, once we have some distance from it and the work has acquired a life of its own. In the process of making we unearth deeper truths that we’re blind to at the time.

Once ‘Yesterday’ was written it became the first Beatles song to be performed by just one member. John, George and Ringo didn’t feel that they could add anything. But that’s not to say that there was no outside input. George Martin had a feeling that the song would benefit from a string quartet. Paul was resistant at first so George suggested they try it and if it didn’t work they could lose the strings. Once he heard them, Paul was blown away – though he couldn’t resist adding a flattened seventh, a ‘blue note’, to the Bach influenced arrangement to make it sound more distinctive. And it was also one of the first times that the now common trick of detuning the guitar so the song could be played in a different key was deployed. Subtle but significant touches like these enabled Paul to achieve that elusive state of “complex simplicity, or simple complexity - you want it to seem easy, but you want there to be a little bit of depth in it.”

And so one of the greatest and most loved songs of the 20th century came into being. The genesis of ‘Yesterday’ offers a wealth of insights into the often opaque process of making great work. It underscores just how important our influences are in shaping the things we create. And while we don’t have much say over some of them – Paul’s dad selected the songs to be sung at the piano – we can chose others; the more diverse our input, the richer our output. The way the melody arrived, when Paul was dreaming, and then the lyrics, when he was staring out of a car window, show how important it is to create a quiet space for inspiration to find you. And, finally, the song is a testament to flexibility, collaboration and open mindedness. Though they were used to playing as a four piece, Paul’s bandmates could see that this was the moment to change the established template. And had Paul not had the vision to see how much the recording would be enhanced by a string quartet, the song would never have found the right arrangement. 

In the end I think ‘Yesterday’ speaks to so many people because it embodies the exquisite pain of nostalgia; that intoxicating ache of looking fondly back into an unreachable past. As Paul himself has said, “A sad song is a place you put your sorrow for three minutes.”

This article owes a significant debt to Paul’s illuminating conversations with the poet Paul Muldoon in the book ‘Paul McCartney, The Lyrics’ and the podcast, ‘A Life in Lyrics’. Both are excellent.