Tom Hagen
Footballguy
I love everything about Yesterday, the strings, the melody, Paul's vocals but mostly I love "Why she had to go I don't know she wouldn't say I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday". Sometimes people grow apart and breakups are mutual and sometimes one person decides it isn't working and the other is left with what Paul conveys in this song. A sense of longing to recapture what you lost, but also guilt and confusion trying to figure out what you did wrong to make the person you cared about so much stop wanting to be with you. It's such a simple song but it captures that feeling perfectly.Yesterday
2022 Ranking: 10
2022 Lists: 35
2022 Points: 577
Ranked Highest by: OH Dad (1) Son1 (1) @lardonastick (2) @fatguyinalittlecoat (2) Slug (2) @PIK95 (3) @Tom Hagen (3) @MAC_32 (3) @falguy (4) @Yankee23Fan (4) @AAABatteries (4) @Wrighteous Rayhub (4) @ekbeats (4) Daughter (5) @pecorino (5)
2019 Ranking/Lists/Pts: 15/16/225
Getz: Two #1 and One #24 votes from finishing #4. Twenty more votes and 352 more points than 2019, to gain five slots.
FIFTEEN Top FIVE votes. One three songs had more.
23 Top 10 votes.
Although it came close to finishing #4, it was really never close while counting the votes. It was ranked very well on 8 of the last 11 ballots that came in.
Krista4
My 2019 ranking: 24
2019 write-up:
Yesterday (Help!, 1965)
I didn't purposefully rank "Helter Skelter" and "Yesterday" next to each other, but I like the way this turned out, showing the incredible diversity of the Beatles and in particular the breadth of Paul's songwriting talent. As Yankee mentioned above, Paul somehow developed this reputation as the soft, "ballad" guy despite having written songs that in my opinion showed much wider range than the others, so he wanted to write the hardest rock song he could, specifically to out-rock The Who, and I think he accomplished that.
But we're not here to talk about "Helter Skelter"! We've moved on! Instead I'll discuss what is merely the most covered and most played song in history. The song was innovative at the time for using a string quartet, redefining what "pop" or "rock" could be. It was also the first solo song by a Beatle, since no others joined Paul on the recording. Unlike when they were going their separate ways on, for instance, the White Album, this wasn't a sign of splintering of the group, but instead was confirmation of its strength and security. It's not that Paul didn't want to include anyone else, but that when he played the song to the others, they liked it and couldn't come up with any way to improve upon it, suggesting to Paul that he should record it solo. Paul recorded his vocal and guitar in only a couple of takes, thinking the song was done.
Naturally, it was George Martin who then suggested adding the string quartet instead of finishing there, which Paul was initially skeptical of, believing that it wouldn't be proper for a rock group. Martin convinced him to give it a try, assuring Paul they would just drop the string part if it didn't work. They sat down together the next day at Martin's house to see if they could sketch it out. Paul described this collaboration: “We’d sit down and it would be quite straightforward because I’d have a good idea of how I wanted to voice it. Or George would show me possibilities... There was just one point in it where I said, ‘Could the cello now play a slightly bluesy thing, out of the genre, out of keeping with the rest of the voicing?’ George said, ‘Bach certainly wouldn’t have done that, Paul.’ I said, ‘Great!’ I mean, obviously it was my song, my chords, my everything really, but because the voicing now had become Bach’s, I needed something of mine again to redress the balance. So I put a 7th in, which was unheard of. It’s what we used to call a blue note, and that became a little bit well known. It’s one of the unusual things in that arrangement.” (You can hear this "blue note" just after "she wouldn't say" in the second bridge.)
The melody for "Yesterday" first came to Paul in a dream. When he awoke, it seemed so familiar that Paul was afraid he had inadvertently copied an existing song, so he played it for a few friends who all confirmed they'd never heard it before. The lyrics didn't come in the dream, though; as a placeholder, he initially sang the opening lines as "scrambled eggs, oh, my baby, how I love your legs." I still sing the song aloud as "scrambled eggs" to amuse myself juvenilely.
I love that this song is more subtle than many of the other Paul "love" songs. I do appreciate how the song establishes itself immediately with the word "yesterday," followed by a 1/2 beat too long pause, to tell us that we're going to spend the rest of our time evoking loss. We don't really know what happened - the song actually has few differing lyrics - but somehow it still kindles a compelling sense of loss without those descriptors. The song also doesn't reach a resolution, as John pointed out in an interview as a possible flaw, but that doesn't make it incomplete. So much of life remains unresolved that I think this sense of its being incomplete is what makes the song so universally understood and appreciated. Who among us hasn't had a relationship end in an unsettled fashion? I'd expect we all have experienced that feeling of an incomplete ending, for which we'll not ever get the answers we want.
In terms of the music itself, of course I love Paul's simple but poignant delivery. It's amazing that the guy who shredded in "Helter Skelter" can also capture such loneliness in a pure way, without being at all overwrought. The string arrangement, again a breakthrough at the time, is my favorite of George Martin's arrangements, though some credit goes to Paul for this as well; in agreeing to the strings, he insisted that they remain pure and without any vibrato. The arrangement's perfection is in supplementing the song without intruding on it, always finding ways to bring us back onto the vocal; for instance, listen for how the viola(s) provide a low harmony beginning partway through the third verse. And the melody...ohhhhh, uncomplicated as it might seem on the surface, there's so much going on, from the hopeful rise of the first line of each verse followed by the melancholic fall of the second... The way the last line of the verse enhances the longing and despondency by the drop off, "yes-ter-da-a-a-ay"... The descending bass notes as a counterpoint to Paul's vocal rise on "had to go"...
This is a song that, now that I've written it out, I wish I had put higher. Damn it.
Fun fact: Before recording it himself, Paul offered the song to two singers, Billy J. Kramer and Chris Farlowe, who each rejected it. Maybe a not-so-fun fact for those two guys.
Fun story: Paul was especially (understandably) proud of this song, which sometimes drove the other Beatles crazy. Paul claimed George once said, "Blimey, he's always talking about 'Yesterday'; you'd think he was Beethoven or somebody." But it was John who was sometimes irritated and sometimes amused by always being congratulated for his work on a song that he had little or nothing to do with: "I sat in a restaurant in Spain and the violinist insisted on playing 'Yesterday' right in my ear. Then he asked me to sign the violin. I didn't know what to say so I said 'OK,' and I signed it, and Yoko signed it. One day he's going to find out Paul wrote it. But I guess he couldn't have gone from table to table playing 'I Am The Walrus.'"
Mr. krista: ""It's anti-nostalgia. Not every break-up song can evoke regret like this. It reminds me of my favorite genre of literature, which can be described as 'old man sits in chair and reckons with troubling past and then either dies or doesn't, whichever is most tragic.' I usually don’t like the strings, but these seem in service of the song. I’d like to hear a naked version. I like hearing super-successful person in despair. It’s such a special song. When they’re just like everyone…regretting…"
Suggested cover: Marvin Gaye
2022 Supplement: In 2019, I said I wish I had ranked this higher, and indeed in 2022 I have vaulted it all the way…checks notes…one slot above where it was last time. Baby steps.
Paul has described falling out of bed and finding this song in his consciousness as “like finding a £10 note on the street.” I’d say it was more like finding a £1,000,000,000 note* on the street given how lucrative the song became, but who am I to quibble. Paul worked on this so much during the filming of Help!, including composing the middle eight on set, that Richard Lester threatened to take the piano away if he heard the song again. Paul’s ascribes some of Lester’s annoyance to the fact that it still had the “scrambled eggs” lyrics at the time. During a break in the filming, Paul and Jane Asher went on holiday in Portugal, and in the back seat of the car during the three or so hours to their villa, Paul worked out the lyrics to the song,** going for something sad because he thought people liked sad songs. Although for years Paul didn’t think this was about his mother, he now realizes that a lot of the lines might have subconsciously have been about that loss – “Why she had to go I don’t know, she wouldn’t say” or even the line about not being half the man he used to be, since he’d lost his mother half a life ago. He identified this song that’s become more poignant for him as he’s grown older and has so many more “yesterdays” than he had as a 22-year-old.
Fun fact: Paul worked with Delia Derbyshire possibly to make this into an electronic avant-garde thingie, but they eventually went back to the original arrangement instead. Shades of McCartney II to come?
*Fun fact I just learned: “The Bank of England £100,000,000 note, also referred to as Titan, is a non-circulating Bank of England banknote of the pound sterling used to back the value of Scottish and Northern Irish banknotes. It is the highest denomination of banknote printed by the Bank of England.”
**Writing or reading in any seat in a car, but particularly the back, would be insta-hurl for me. You feeling me, simey and Pip’s wife?
Guido Merkins
Songwriting can very much be an activity that you sit down and do and sometimes the results can be very good. Also, what can happen is sometimes a song can come to you without very much effort from the songwriter.
Paul McCartney wakes up one morning with the melody going around his head and he’s not sure what it is. He goes to the piano and finds the chords and starts making up words “Scrambled eggs, oh baby how I love you legs….” Paul goes around to the other Beatles and George Martin and everyone he knows and asks if they know this song. None of them do. So Paul starts to finish a song that came to him in a dream. This song would only become the most recorded song in the history of music. Not bad for a dream.
Yesterday is a song that sounds like it’s always existed. I can see why Paul thought it might be a standard or something that he heard from his Dad because it sounds a bit like that. In any event, when it came to the recording, George Martin and the other Beatles agreed that drums didn’t belong on it and none of them really thought they could add anything to Paul’s acoustic guitar, but Martin thought strings might be appropriate. Paul didn’t want anything too extravagant that might verge on schmaltz, so Martin suggested a string quartet. Paul thought it was a good idea. Paul suggested that the last verse the quartet would go to this kind of sad, bluesy thing and Martin thought that sounded corny, but they tried it and it’s the best part of the song, IMO (around 2 minutes in).
Obviously a great song. So why wasn’t it a single? Well, Paul explained that they were a rock and roll band and didn’t think it was appropriate to be released as a single. Also, it was just Paul on the record so Paul didn’t want that either. So they just stuck it on the B side of the Help album. Another case where the embarrassment of riches is on full display.
Unfortunately in the Guess the Top 15 contest, I ranked it #12.
