yesterday

The first time you listen to Yesterday, what grabs you most isn’t the chorus or the riff, but the loneliness that permeates everything. Paul McCartney sings accompanied only by his acoustic guitar and a string quartet, something that in 1965 sounded like heresy to the Beatles. There were no drums or electric guitars, just that melody that seems to float between classical and pop, as if someone had mixed a waltz with a bar song. The lyrics, simple yet heart-wrenching, speak of a love that vanished without explanation: "I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday." What’s curious is that McCartney never clarified whether that "wrong word" was due to a couple’s fight or, as he confessed years later, because he mocked his mother as a child for speaking "properly." The song was born from a dream that woke him at three in the morning in Jane Asher’s house on Wimpole Street, and to avoid forgetting it, he rushed to the piano to play it before it vanished. For weeks, he asked everyone he met in the music world if they recognized the melody, convinced he had unknowingly stolen it. When no one claimed it, he breathed a sigh of relief and gave it a provisional title: "Scrambled Eggs," because at first he hummed, "scrambled eggs, oh my baby how I love your legs."

They recorded it in two sessions in June 1965 at EMI Studios in London, with George Martin producing and a string quartet that barely dared to breathe for fear of drowning out McCartney’s voice. The other three Beatles hated the idea: George Harrison went so far as to say McCartney acted as if he were Beethoven reincarnated, and director Richard Lester, tired of the piano on the Help! set being used only for McCartney to work on the song, threatened to kick him out of the studio. Despite everything, the song made it onto the album Help! in August of that year, though in the United States it was released first as a single in September, where it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. In the UK, it wasn’t released as a single until 1976, when it peaked at number 8. The detail that surprises most is that McCartney is the only Beatle on the recording: neither John Lennon, George Harrison, nor Ringo Starr appear on the track. The version we hear today lasts 2:03, though some credits list it as 2:07, and its structure—a acoustic ballad with strings—broke all the band’s previous conventions. In 1997, it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 1999, a BBC poll declared it the best song of the 20th century. But the most incredible thing is that, with over 2,200 recorded versions, it remains the most covered song in history, from Elvis Presley to Daffy Duck. That said, the Beatles initially didn’t even want it: they considered it too different from their style, and even imposed a ban to prevent it from being released as a single in their home country. Time, as usual, proved them right.