At 84, Paul McCartney Finally Names 6 Songs He Regrets Writing JJ

Paul McCartney has written some of the most loved songs in history, but even he has looked back and wished he [music] had done things differently. Six songs, six regrets, all in his own words. Six, When I’m 64. Paul McCartney wrote the melody for When I’m 64 when he was 16 years old.

He played it at the Cavern Club in Liverpool when the amplifiers broke down, using it as filler while the band waited for the equipment to come back online. It was a music hall throwback, a cheerful little tune with no real lyric attached to it yet. He kept it in his back [music] pocket for years, pulling it out occasionally at rehearsals, playing it for bandmates who smiled and moved on to the next thing.

Nobody treated it as serious material. It was a charming fragment, nothing more. [music] Then in 1966, while recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, he finally gave it words. >> [music] >> The number 64 was not chosen for any particular reason. It simply sounded right. It [music] fit the rhythm. It felt vaguely futuristic to a 24-year-old who could not yet imagine being that age.

>> When I’m 64, when you were 16. >> I wrote the tune then. Yeah. That was in the days It was actually kind of pre-rock and roll. >> The song asks whether a partner will still need him, still [music] feed him when he reaches that number. It is a playful question wrapped in a waltz tempo, and in 1966, the answer seemed impossibly far away.

[music] McCartney was young and famous and at the center of the most exciting moment in popular music. 64 was an abstraction. McCartney has since admitted, more than once, that the number was entirely arbitrary. He has said in interviews that 64 should [music] probably have been 65, which was the actual retirement age in England and would have made the song’s central question more precise.

>> [music] >> He did not use 65 because it felt too predictable, too obvious. 64 sounded better, and in 1966, the difference did not seem to matter. It matters now, and McCartney knows it. He has joked that the next [music] time someone asks him about the song, he will say he should have written it about being [music] 94.

The regret sharpened when a pianist told McCartney that he plays the song in an old people’s home, but has to change the title to when I’m 84 because 64 seems too young to the residents. That story landed on McCartney in a specific way. He repeated it in interviews with the rueful amusement of someone who understands that he slightly missed the target and cannot go back to fix it.

A brilliant song, a beloved song, played in care homes to people who find the premise almost quaint. [music] One wrong number in the title, sitting there for the rest of time, and nothing to be done about it. Five. Bip Bop. When Paul McCartney retreated to his farm in Scotland after the Beatles broke up in 1970, he was in a complicated state.

The most successful songwriting partnership in history had just collapsed. [music] The most famous band in the world had just ceased to exist. >> [music] >> McCartney was grieving, regrouping, and trying to figure out what came next. He made a solo album largely by himself in his kitchen, playing every instrument, recording quietly, and without a plan.

The result was the McCartney album Ram, intimate, [music] unpolished in ways that felt deliberate. Then, he formed Wings and made Wildlife, recorded [music] in just 3 days in 1971 with almost no overdubs and very little preparation. The idea [music] was spontaneity. The result, on at least one track, was something McCartney would spend decades trying to to Bip Bop is a loose, rambling piece of nothing dressed up as a song.

>> [music] >> The lyric is essentially a repeated nonsense phrase over a shuffling acoustic groove. There is no verse that builds to anything. There is no chorus that lands anywhere worth going. McCartney has said directly that he has always hated the song. [music] That is not a qualification or a diplomatic distancing from a track that underperformed commercially.

That is [music] a clean, unambiguous statement of personal regret from a man who wrote Yesterday and Hey Jude and [music] Blackbird and then in the same lifetime wrote Bip Bop and put it on an album. >> Yeah, I think the album reflects a bit of that. That That it is time for change. >> He knows exactly what it is.

He knew it then, probably, and he has never pretended otherwise. What makes the regret interesting is what it reveals about that whole difficult period. McCartney was making a conscious choice to record loosely, to embrace imperfection, to prove that music did not have to be obsessively refined to be genuine.

That instinct was not entirely wrong. Some of the Wild Life album holds up reasonably well as a document of a man finding his feet again after a catastrophic professional loss. But Bip Bop is the sound of a great songwriter giving himself too much permission on the wrong day, and the song exists as permanent evidence of it.

McCartney has been honest enough to admit that without making excuses or reframing it as misunderstood experimentation. He hated it when he made it. He has hated it every day since. He said so plainly. That kind of directness about your own worst work without deflection or spin is rarer in the music industry than it ought to be.

And it says something about the clarity McCartney brings even to his failures. Four, Give Ireland back to the Irish. On the 30th of January 1972, British [music] soldiers opened fire on unarmed civil rights protesters in Derry, Northern Ireland. 14 people died. The day became known as Bloody Sunday and it sent a shockwave through the United Kingdom and Ireland [music] that has never fully dissipated.

Paul McCartney was watching the news like the rest of the world >> [music] >> and he was appalled. >> The British paratroopers killed some people who were innocent bystanders. >> He felt the way millions of people [music] felt that day, angry, horrified, and desperately in need of doing something with the feeling.

He was a songwriter, so he wrote a song. Within days he had recorded a response and delivered [music] it to his record label. Give Ireland back to the Irish was released in February 1972, [music] just weeks after the massacre. It was banned immediately by the BBC and by independent UK radio stations. It reached number one in Ireland and Spain and then largely [music] disappeared from McCartney’s public life.

McCartney has since described the lyrics as clumsy, that is his own word, chosen carefully and used more than once. The song states its position plainly but without nuance, painting a conflict with centuries of deeply complicated history in the broadest possible strokes. [music] The intention behind it was genuine. The outrage behind it was real and justified, but the execution did not match the weight of what it was trying to address and McCartney understood that in retrospect with the clarity that only time provides. He pulled the song from live

setlists and later compilations. He did not pretend it had not happened or reframe it as a misunderstood masterpiece. He acknowledged, quietly and consistently, that he had reached for something important [music] and not quite got there. The regret here is not about having a political opinion or using music to express it.

McCartney [music] has never walked back the underlying sentiment. What he regrets is the craft, the feeling that the words were not careful enough, not considered [music] enough for the gravity of the moment they were trying to address. Bloody Sunday deserved more than a slogan set to a melody, and McCartney has been honest enough [music] to say so.

The impulse to respond was the right one. The speed at which he acted [music] and the bluntness of what he produced in that speed left him with a song he could not comfortably stand behind once the immediate heat of the moment had [music] passed. Three. Yesterday. Paul McCartney did not know what Yesterday was really about for a very long time.

He thought he knew. He wrote it as a love song or something close to one. A narrator looking back at a moment before something went wrong and longing to return [music] to it. He performed it that way for decades, introducing it at concerts with the easy confidence of a man who understood his own [music] most famous composition completely.

He sang those words to stadium crowds all over the world, night after night, for 30 years, and at no point [music] during any of those performances did he fully understand what the song contained. >> And [music] yesterday, why >> [singing] >> she had to go. >> He thought it was about a relationship. It was about something much older and much deeper than that.

McCartney’s mother, Mary, died of cancer [music] in October 1956. He was 14 years old. She went quickly, and McCartney did what 14-year-old boys often do with grief of that size. He moved [music] forward without stopping. He kept playing music. He kept going to school. He kept being Paul McCartney. The loss went somewhere deep inside him [music] and stayed there, unexamined, for years.

Then, slowly and then all at once, he began to hear something in the lyric of Yesterday that he had not consciously [music] placed there. I said something wrong. Now I long for Yesterday. He had sung that line thousands of times. He had never fully understood who it was [music] really about until the distance of decades made it impossible to ignore.

The regret McCartney has expressed >> [music] >> is gentle and specific. He does not regret the song. The song is one of the great achievements of his life, and he knows it. What he regrets is the decades he spent performing it without understanding what it truly contained, [music] singing about his mother’s death to billions of people without either he or they knowing [music] that was what he was doing.

He has spoken about this realization in interviews with genuine care and quiet surprise, the way [music] you speak about something you have understood too late to do anything about it. >> That’s quite unusual, I think. You know, I think what’s maybe unusual is remembering it. >> There is a particular kind of sadness [music] in that story.

A 14-year-old boy loses his mother and does not stop moving. A 23-year-old songwriter sits down at a piano and writes her a letter without knowing that is what he is doing. And then for 30 years, he stands in front of the largest audiences in history and sings that letter out loud night after night while everyone in the room hears a love song.

The truth was always there. It just took a long time to arrive. Two, The Long and Winding Road. Paul McCartney wrote The Long and Winding Road in 1969, sitting [music] at the piano in his farmhouse in Scotland. The Beatles were falling apart in a way that everyone could feel, but nobody wanted to say out loud.

The sessions that would become the Let It Be album were tense and fractured, full of arguments and long silences, and the specific misery of people who love each other trying to work together past the point where it is still possible. McCartney wrote the song in that atmosphere, and the atmosphere is in every note of it. It is one of his most nakedly emotional pieces, a slow, searching ballad about reaching for something that keeps receding, about a road that leads you back to the same door, [music] no matter how far you walk.

He knew what he had. He was proud of it. He wanted it presented simply, the way he had written it, with nothing [music] added that did not need to be there. >> Many times I’ve been alone. >> [music] >> And many times I’ve cried. >> Then Phil Spector got hold of it. Producer Allen Klein, who had taken over the Beatles business affairs over McCartney’s explicit and repeated objection, handed the Let It Be tapes to Spector in 1970.

Spector added a full orchestra, a choir, [music] and layers of strings to McCartney’s piano ballad without asking him. McCartney found out when the finished version arrived in the post. He wrote a letter to Klein immediately, [music] asking for the overdubs to be removed before the album was released. The letter was ignored.

The Spector version came out anyway, reached number one in the United States, and became one [music] of the biggest hits the Beatles ever released. McCartney has described his reaction as one of the most genuine and sustained moments of professional outrage in his entire career. He has called Spector’s treatment deplorable. He has said the orchestration was the opposite of what the song required, that the whole point of the piano ballad was its simplicity, its nakedness, its refusal to hide behind arrangement.

Spector buried all of that under strings and voices that McCartney never asked for and never wanted. He eventually released the original unadorned version on the Let [music] It Be Naked album in 2003, 33 years after the fact, specifically so that people could hear the song the way he had always intended it to sound.

The regret here >> [music] >> is not about the writing. The song is exactly what McCartney intended it to be. The regret is about losing control of it at the precise moment it mattered most, handing over the tapes in good faith, and getting back something unrecognizable. It is the regret of a craftsman watching someone else take a chisel to his work and being [music] powerless to stop it.

One, Too Many People, the Beatles broke up in 1970, and it was not quiet. John Lennon and Paul McCartney, two of the greatest songwriters who ever lived, spent the first years of the following decade [music] doing something that both of them would eventually regret, using their music as a weapon against each [music] other.

Lennon’s How Do You Sleep? was the most famous salvo. It was direct and brutal, a full-length attack on McCartney’s character, his talent, and his choices, delivered over a hard rock backing track [music] that included George Harrison on slide guitar, as if to make the message perfectly clear about where the other Beatle stood.

It was a devastating [music] piece of work, even if it was also a cruel one. McCartney’s response was more veiled, but unmistakable [music] to anyone paying close attention. Too Many People, the opening track on his 1971 album Ram, contained pointed lines aimed squarely at Lennon and Yoko Ono. McCartney later confirmed the song’s targets in [music] interviews, removing any doubt about what he had intended.

It was his way of hitting back without [music] quite admitting that he was hitting back. The kind of move that feels satisfying in the moment and complicated in retrospect. Both men were hurting. Both men were angry. Both men had the songwriting ability to turn that hurt and [music] anger into something that would be heard by millions of people and preserved forever.

They used that ability on each other and both of them eventually understood the cost of having done so. The regret [music] came slowly and then heavily. McCartney has said in multiple interviews that the public feud with Lennon was one of the things he looks back on with the most genuine sadness. >> [music] >> He has described the period as painful and unnecessary.

Two men who had created something extraordinary [music] together choosing to spend their creative energy diminishing each other instead. He has said that Lennon’s murder in December 1980 closed the door on any possibility of real reconciliation and that the songs from that ugly period now carry a weight they were never meant to carry.

Even the greatest songwriter who ever lived has looked back and wished for a do-over. A wrong number, a hated lyric, a stolen arrangement, a friendship that ran out of time. Paul McCartney is human after all. Subscribe for more music history that gets under your skin.