Thanks to the use of artificial intelligence, 2023 offered the chance for The Beatles to close their discography with one final song.
In fitting fashion, ‘Now and Then’ went on to claim yet another number one spot, earning the band an unprecedented 21 chart-toppers. As the chief writer of around 90 tracks for the band, this means that Paul McCartney certainly knows his way around more smash hits than Mike Tyson.
When appraising the 20th century, an era where he was perhaps the most pivotal engine of influence in the arts, the Liverpudlian heaped praise upon his peers. “I figure no one is educated musically ’til they’ve heard Pet Sounds. I love the orchestra, the arrangements – it may be going overboard to say it’s the classic of the century – but to me, it certainly is a total, classic record that is unbeatable in many ways,” he once said of The Beach Boys masterpiece.
He also called Bob Dylan his “idol”, Stevie Wonder a “genius”, and he thought that Paul Simon knew his way around writing a glorious song, too. However, in the charts, The Beatles eclipsed them all, and of all the lads in the Fab Four, Macca was the biggest cheerleader of his own band, and with pride, he opines that ‘Yesterday’ was the “smash of the century”.
“It was my most successful song. It’s amazing that it just came to me in a dream,” he states in The Beatles Anthology. “That’s why I don’t profess to know anything; I think music is all very mystical. You hear people saying, ‘I’m a vehicle; it just passes through me.’ Well, you’re dead lucky if something like that passes through you.”
This is a recurring theme among many great songwriters, with Dylan quoting Hoagy Carmichael on the matter when he said, “And then it happened, that queer sensation that this melody was bigger than me. Maybe I hadn’t written it all. The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters in the studio”.
Dylan continued: “I wanted to shout back at it, ‘maybe I didn’t write you, but I found you’,” he said before the original vaganbond added: “I know just what he meant”. Paul Simon further clarified the matter, explaining that this sensation neuroscientific quirk of the creative flow state, and it’s a state that has produced some crackers. McCartney knew he had coaxed out a seemingly subconscious classic from the off.
Nevertheless, the band popped it in their pocket and honed it for a while as youngsters rather than rushing the release of this rarified gem. Keeping up appearances prevented them from releasing it in the UK, as they thought the ballad wasn’t quite rock ‘n’ roll enough. While it certainly wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll, it was the Beatles’ electicism that made them unique.
“I am proud of it. I get made fun of because of it a bit,” McCartney says, having warmed to its tenderness over the years. “I remember George saying, ‘Blimey, he’s always talking about ‘Yesterday’, you’d think he was Beethoven or somebody.’ But it is, I reckon, the most complete thing I’ve ever written.”
Considering that he has also penned the likes of ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, among hundreds of other perfectly polished pieces of music, that’s high praise indeed. It is a track that typifies the transcendence of the band. Now, perhaps the song’s potency has been somewhat eroded by virtue of its ubiquitous exposure, but that just proves its pervasiveness: can you imagine a world without ‘Yesterday’? Can you imagine hearing it for the first time? Hell, they made a whole film about that ponderance!
But McCartney still has one notable regret about the “smash of the century”. “For ‘Yesterday’, which I wrote totally on my own, without John’s or anyone’s help, I am on 15%,” he continued. “To this day I am only on 15% because of the deals Brian [Epstein] made, and that is really unjust, particularly as it has been such a smash. It is possibly the smash of this century.”
In actual fact, the track’s official sales are far eclipsed by the likes of ‘She Loves You’, which remains The Beatles’ best-selling single, but ‘Yesterday’ is certified as the most covered song in history, showcasing its durable simplicity and staple status in society at large. In terms of TV and radio plays, it was even the third most played song of the entire 20th century.
