His Beatles<\/strong> song \u201cYesterday\u201d remains popular today and, with 2,200 cover versions, is one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music.<\/strong> It was voted the best song of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll of music experts and listeners and was also voted the No. 1 pop song of all time by MTV and Rolling Stone magazine. 🎵<\/p> According to ASCAP, Paul has penned 1,059 songs\u2014an output that spans six decades, multiple genres, and collaborations with everyone from John Lennon to Michael Jackson to Kanye West and Rihanna. ✨<\/p> And here\u2019s the twist that makes all of this seem impossible: Paul McCartney cannot read or write music.<\/strong><\/p> \u201cNone of us did in the Beatles,\u201d McCartney told 60 Minutes. 🎤 \u201cWe did some good stuff though. But none of it was written down by us. It\u2019s basically notation. That\u2019s the bit I can\u2019t do.\u201d<\/p> This wasn\u2019t a failure of education\u2014it was a choice, made early and never regretted. 🎹 McCartney\u2019s father was also a musician, and Paul often asked him to teach him piano. But his Dad refused, saying Paul needed a professional teacher. \u201cDad was a pretty good self-taught pianist, but because he hadn\u2019t had training himself, he always refused to teach me\u201d McCartney recalled.<\/p> So, Paul agreed to take lessons, but they didn\u2019t last long. 👃 \u201cI did then take lessons, but I always had a problem; mainly that I didn\u2019t know my tutor, and I wasn\u2019t very good at going into an old lady\u2019s house\u2014it smelt of old people\u2014so I was uncomfortable.\u201d<\/p> \u201cIn the end, I learnt to play by ear, just like him, making it all up.\u201d 👂<\/p> What emerged from this unconventional education was something remarkable: a songwriter who operated entirely on instinct, memory, and an almost supernatural ear for melody.<\/strong> None of the Beatles could read or write conventional musical notation\u2014what McCartney sometimes refers to as \u201cdots on a page.\u201d This was largely through choice and was not too unusual in guitar-based pop music. 🎸<\/p> So how does someone who can\u2019t read music write over a thousand songs? 🤔<\/p> \u201cIf I was to sit down and write a song, now, I\u2019d use my usual method,\u201d McCartney has explained. \u201cI\u2019d either sit down with a guitar or at the piano and just look for melodies, chord shapes, musical phrases, some words, a thought just to get started with.\u201d 🎼<\/p> \u201cYou just sit down and start. You start blocking stuff out with sounds\u2014I do anyway\u2014and eventually, you hear a little phrase that\u2019s starting to work, and then you follow that trail.\u201d 🛤️<\/p> The physical instrument matters. \u201cGuitar is interesting because you kind of cradle it. You kind of almost cuddle it. You hold it to you, and you play. That gives you a certain kind of feeling. With piano, you almost push it away. It\u2019s just two different attitudes.\u201d 🎸<\/p> McCartney\u2019s approach is deliberately unstructured at the start. 🌀 \u201cI don\u2019t think about what I\u2019m writing about, it spoils the magic for me. So I don\u2019t often come to writing a song with much of an idea; maybe a title, maybe just a phrase, or just a thought I\u2019ve had.\u201d<\/p> \u201cI think structure\u2019s great. But I also like to start with chaos in order to get the freedom.\u201d<\/strong> You know, if you structure too early it\u2019s like [makes hitting the brakes noise]. But if you\u2019re just creating, just free and flowing from chord to chord and idea to idea, something then sort of lands that you think is a good idea. Then I think it\u2019s a good idea to structure it. 💡<\/p> But once he starts, he pushes through to completion. ✅ \u201cTry and get to the end in one go, and it\u2019s normally, then, pretty much written. You may then look at it and go \u2018oh that line\u2019s a bit ropey\u2019. If you\u2019re lucky, more often than not, you find that you\u2019ve just sort of done it.\u201d<\/p> The most famous example of McCartney\u2019s intuitive process is \u201cYesterday\u201d\u2014and it literally came to him in his sleep. 😴<\/p> The song was written at 57 Wimpole Street, London, where Paul lived in attic rooms at the top of the family home of his girlfriend, the English actress Jane Asher<\/strong>. As Paul has testified many times over, he wrote it in his sleep<\/strong>: \u201cI woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, That\u2019s great, I wonder what that is? There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor seventh\u2014and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to G.\u201d 🎹<\/p> When asked about how he writes songs, McCartney has said he doesn\u2019t have any set process. 🎲 \u201cI tell students all the time, \u2018Look, I don\u2019t know how to do this.\u2019 Every time I approach a song, there\u2019s no rules. Sometimes the music comes first, sometimes the words\u2014and if you\u2019re lucky, it all comes together.\u201d<\/p> For \u201cYesterday,\u201d the melody arrived complete, but the lyrics took months. 📅 Lennon later indicated that the song had been around for a while: \u201cThe song was around for months and months before we finally completed it. Every time we got together to write songs for a recording session, this one would come up. We almost had it finished. Paul wrote nearly all of it, but we just couldn\u2019t find the right title. \u201c The song\u2019s working title was \u201cScrambled Eggs\u201d and it became a joke between Lennon\/McCartney.<\/p> \u201cScrambled eggs \/ Oh my baby how I love your legs.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote> 🍳 McCartney played it for everyone he met, half-convinced he must have unwittingly stolen it from somewhere. \u201cYesterday\u201d almost never saw the light of day because McCartney found it so easy to write, he thought he had cribbed it from someone.<\/strong><\/p> Without the ability to write music down, McCartney and Lennon developed a ruthless quality-control system: if they couldn\u2019t remember a song the next day, it wasn\u2019t worth keeping.<\/strong> 🧠<\/p> From the beginning they applied a \u201ccatchiness\u201d test on every new song. Could they remember the tune at their next session? If not, they abandoned work on it. Only memorable melodies would survive the ruthless jukebox jury of teenage radio listening. 📻<\/p> This forced them to write songs that stuck\u2014melodies so compelling they couldn\u2019t be forgotten even without notation to preserve them. 💪 It\u2019s a counterintuitive advantage: the inability to write music down meant every song had to be memorable enough to survive in the mind alone.<\/p> And, of course, when Lennon and McCartney started writing songs, it\u2019s not just that they didn\u2019t know how to \u201cwrite\u201d down the music, they didn\u2019t have a tape recorder, either. Not many people did back then.<\/p>The Secret He\u2019s Never Hidden<\/h3>
The Method Behind the Magic<\/h3>
The Dream That Changed Everything<\/h3>
The Catchiness Test<\/h3>
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