'Yesterday' by The Beatles: The making of Paul McCartney's masterpiece

14 October 2025, 09:53

The story of how one of The Beatles' biggest ever songs was almost not released under the band's name.

The Beatles were always so much more than the sum of their parts.

Despite the delights of John Lennon and Paul McCartney's solo careers (and those of George Harrison and Ringo Starr, too), when the Fab Four were together they genuinely changed the history of popular music and the whole society.

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But even when they were together there were moments when individual members of the band were in complete creative control.

That was especially true on The Beatles (aka The White Album), when each corner of the band was frequently off doing their own thing. But there's one much earlier example that really stands out, too.

'Yesterday' is one of the most famous Beatles song that very nearly wasn't a Beatles song. This is why.

Who wrote 'Yesterday'?

Yesterday (With Spoken Word Intro / Live From Studio 50, New York City / 1965)

Like the vast majority of The Beatles' original songs, 'Yesterday' was credited to Lennon–McCartney. It says it right there on the label.

But we all know that while some of the duo's songs for the Fab Four were true co-writes and many were driven by one of the pair and polished by the other, there were songs that were pretty much or actually entirely written only by either Paul McCartney or John Lennon.

These songs were still credited to the duo, thanks to an agreement they had from their earliest days writing songs together.

So 'Yesterday' was a Lennon–McCartney song, but it was actually written almost entirely by Paul McCartney.

In one interview in 1966, Lennon suggested he'd pitched in a little ("we just held finish off the ribbons 'round it"), but by his Playboy interview in 1980 he said plainly: "That's Paul’s song, and Paul's baby. Well done. Beautiful – and I never wished I'd written it."

There was a little bit of afters, decades later, when Sir Paul tweaked the songwriting credits for The Beatles songs on 2002 Back in the US live album to "Paul McCartney and John Lennon".

Yoko objected, ad a year later he switched it back, and told the Sunday Herald: "I'm happy with the way it is and always has been. Lennon and McCartney is still the rock 'n' roll trademark I'm proud to be a part of – in the order it has always been."

Regarding the actual writing, the "official" story goes that Paul McCartney woke one night at the family home of his then-girlfriend Jane Asher at 57 Wimpole Street with the melody for the song in his head.

In those pre-voice note days, he jumped on to the nearby piano and played it out so he wouldn't forget it.

"There wasn't any room for me to keep my records," McCartney said in The Lyrics book of his room at Jane's. "They had to be kept outside on the landing. But somehow I had a piano in there - a small, sawn-off piano that stood by my bed."

Blackbird / Yesterday

That top line was so incredibly, obviously brilliant that Macca was initially convinced that he'd pinched it from somewhere.

As well as friend, singer and pop fan Alma Cogan ("I think she may have thought I was writing it for her," McCartney later recalled), Paul revealed in Hulu doc 3, 2, 1 that he played the melody to George Martin: "George's got a wider knowledge of particularly older songs.

"So I said, 'What's this?' He said, 'I don't know.' I said...it's this melody, y'know, 'cause I can't have written it. There was no conscious effort involved. I just woke up and it was there.'"

According to Phillip Norman's Paul McCartney: The Biography, Martin was thorough, and had considered the vague influence of Peggy Lee's 'Yesterdays', Ray Charles' 'Georgia on my Mind' and Nat King Cole's 'Answer Me, My Love' ("You were mine yesterday / I believed that love was here to stay") but Paul's song was definitely his own.

Answer Me, My Love (Remastered 2005)

He was later quoted as saying in The Beatles: Day-by-Day, Song-by-Song, Record-by-Record: "For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before.

"Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it."

So he had the tune, but what about those haunting words? Well, they didn't come to the future Sir Paul in a dream. The song wasn't even called 'Yesterday'. It's working title? 'Scrambled Eggs'. No, really.

That's because Paul needed some nonsense words to help the tune along, and started off with "Scrambled eggs/ Oh my baby how I love your legs/ Not as much as I love scrambled eggs".

"The song was around for months and months before we finally completed it," John Lennon was later quoted as saying in Anthology.

"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't find the right title. We called it 'Scrambled Eggs' and it became a joke between us.

"We made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit, we just couldn't find the right one. Then one morning Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way, we'd had so many laughs about it."

(As for the "full Scrambled Eggs" lyrics you might find online, Macca later confirmed to Hunter Davies that it was a fan-written spoof.)

He worked on the song while the band shot their second movie Help! much to the annoyance of director Richard Lester and bandmate George Harrison, and he apparently finished it off during a trip to Portugal in May 1965.

"I remember mulling over the tune 'Yesterday', and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse," McCartney said in Many Years From Now.

"I started to develop the idea ... da-da da, yes-ter-day, sud-den-ly, fun-il-ly, mer-il-ly and Yes-ter-day, that's good. All my troubles seemed so far away."

What is 'Yesterday' about?

I really reckon 'Yesterday' is probably my best song,' McCartney was quoted as saying 1980 in The Beatles Diary

"I like it not only because it was a big success, but because it was one of the most instictinve songs I've ever written. I was so proud of it. I felt it was an original tune – the most complete thing I've ever written. It's very catchy without being sickly."

And while took a lot of tweaking, when it was all finished the lyrics for 'Yesterday' ended up as much more than rhyme for rhyme's sake.

In the same interview that Lennon admitted the song was Paul's baby, John was 50/50 on the lyrics.

"Although the lyrics don't resolve into any sense, they're good lines," Lennon said. "They certainly work ... but if you read the whole song, it doesn't say anything."

On its face the song seems to be a classic break-up song ("Why she had to go, I don't know, she wouldn't say") all rooted in our heartbroken protagonist regretting saying something foolish or hurtful and wishing he could turn back the clock ("I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday").

There is a pretty brilliant story in Paul McCartney: The Biography that lends some weight to this reading.

After they'd split, Paul's ex-girlfriend Iris Caldwell's mum refused to pass the phone on to her daughter when Macca tried to get in touch. "You've got no heart, Paul," Vi had told him.

The day before he played 'Yesterday' on the telly for the first time he gave Vi a buzz. "Watch Blackpool Night Out and tell me if I've still got no heart..."

Years later though, Macca revealed that the root of that feeling of shame and regret actually was less about romantic love and more about familial bonds.

"I remember very clearly one day feeling very embarrassed because I embarrassed my mum," Paul said in the McCartney: A Life in Lyrics podcast in 2024.

"We were out in the backyard and she talked posh. She was of Irish origin and she was a nurse, so she was above street level.

"So she had something sort of going for her, and she would talk what we thought was a little bit posh."

He added: "I know that she said something like 'Paul, will you ask him if he's going...'. "I went 'Arsk! Arsk! It's ask mum'. And she got a little bit embarrassed."

I remember later thinking 'God, I wish I’d never said that'. And it stuck with me. After she died I thought 'Oh f**k, I really wish...'."

A few years earlier, Macca had been quizzed about whether or not the song could be about losing his mother when he was so young.

He told Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 2019: "I didn't mean it to be, but ... it could be."

Which of The Beatles actually play on 'Yesterday'?

Yesterday (Remastered 2009)

More striking than being solely or almost solely written by Paul McCartney is the fact that Paul is the only Beatle to actually appear on the recording.

"I brought (Yesterday) into the studio for the first time and played it on the guitar, but soon Ringo said, 'I can't really put any drums on – it wouldn't make sense'," Paul explained.

"And John and George said, 'There’s no point in having another guitar'. So George Martin suggested, 'Why don’t you just try it by yourself and see how it works?'."

So, of the Fab Four, there's just Paul on vocals and acoustic guitar. He recorded just a couple of takes on June 14, 1965, with the second being the keeper. There was an extra vocal record three days later, the same day a string quartet was overdubbed on the recording. (Take 1 would eventually surface on Anthology 2).

Macca was resistant about the idea, not wanting it to "sound schmaltzy, like Mantoviani" , Hunter Davies writes in The Beatles Lyrics (Mantoviani would of course later cover 'Yesterday', along with pretty much everyone else).

So George Martin arranged the string section, which for those who are curious, are: Tony Gilbert and Sidney Sax (violin), Kenneth Essex (viola), and Peter Halling/Francisco Gabarró (cello).

When was 'Yesterday' released and where did it get in the charts?

Given that i) Paul wrote it by himself ii) He performed it without any other Beatles, and iii) it didn't really sound like the music that had already made The Beatles incredibly successful by this point, there was serious consideration of releasing 'Yesterday' not under The Beatles banner but instead as a Paul McCartney's solo number.

George Martin suggested that 'Yesterday' "wasn't really a Beatles record" and floated the idea of it being released under just Paul's name to manager Brian Epstein.

Fully aware of the strength of the Beatles brand already (and the possible risks and ego clashes if a massive song like 'Yesterday' came out from just one of his boys), Epstein wouldn't countenance it. "No," Epstein told Martin. "Whatever we do we are not splitting up the Beatles."

As something of a compromise, this most obvious of hits was not released as a single in The Beatles' native UK, and it instead came out with relatively little fanfare as the penultimate song on the second side of Help!, which was released on August 6, 1965.

'Ticket to Ride' and 'Help' were the singles from the Help! album, wedged between the non-album 'I Feel Fine'/'She's A Woman' and 'We Can Work It Out'/'Day Tripper'.

Over in the US, the band had much less control over their back catalogue, and that didn't just extend to the odd cut and paste versions of their LPs.

For what it's worth, while he floated the idea of a McCartney–Lennon credited, Macca never wanted the song to be his solo debut.

"I wouldn't have put it out as a solo 'Paul McCartney' record," he was quoted as saying in Anthology.

The Beatles – Anthology ABC TV trailer

"We never entertain those ideas. It was sometimes tempting; people would flatter us: 'Oh, you know you should get out front,' or, 'You should put a solo record out'. But we always said 'no'.

"In fact, we didn't release 'Yesterday' as a single in England at all, because we were a little embarrassed about it – we were a rock 'n' roll band."

In America, 'Yesterday' was released as a single on September 13, 1965, between 'Help!' and 'We Can Work It Out'/'Day Tripper'. Like all Beatles releases back then, it went straight to the top of the Billboard charts.

The song did get a belated single release in the UK a few years after the split, when Parlophone released all 22 of The Beatles singles plus 'Yesterday' on March 8, 1976, with six getting into the UK charts, and 'Yesterday' (backed with 'I Should Have Known Better') peaking at number 8.

Who has covered 'Yesterday'?

Yesterday

With its quirky un-Beatles genesis, it's probably no surprise that 'Yesterday' nearly became one of those Lennon–McCartney songs that they gifted to other artists, like The Rolling Stones' 'I Wanna Be Your Man' or Cilla Black's 'Step Inside Love'.

Chris Farlow, who had a major hit with the Jagger/Richards 'Out of Time', was offered 'Yesterday' when it was still in demo form, but incredibly turned it down.

Why? he explained it all to Eric Burdon (he of The Animals), who recounted the amazing tale in his own memoir.

Apparently Paul had nipped by Chris's house with the offer of the song, and with Farlowe being out and about, had left a demo disc for the performer to listen to.

Marianne Faithfull 'Yesterday' live 1966, remastered

"This was wonderful news," Burdon said. "When was Chris going into the studio to cut this gift from the gods?" Chris wasn't having it though.

"I don't like it. It's not for me. It's too soft. I need a good rocker, you know, a shuffle or something." Eric urged him to give it a go nonetheless, just to give himself a start, but Chris stuck to his rocker guns and sent it back. Amazing.

Eventually, Farlowe would be among the many, many thousands of artists who covered the song. He recorded his version a year after The Beatles did theirs.

It was once said to be the most-covered pop song of all time (a very difficult thing to prove), though to this day, Guinness World Records does list The Beatles as the most covered act and 'Yesterday' as their most covered song.

Boyz II Men singing "Yesterday" in 1995 at the first Blockbuster Entertainment Awards Show

SecondHandSongs lists 1,398 covers, if you fancy going through them all.

We're certainly not going to list them now... but here are (just a few) of the very biggest hitters): Matt Monro, Marianne Faithfull, Mary Wells, Cilla Black, The Supremes, Brenda Lee, Pat Boone, Johnny Mathis, Willie Nelson, The Seekers, John Denver, James Last, Patti LaBelle and Perry Como.

The fun thing... all of the above were in the shops before the end of 1966. In the 60 years since the covers have just piled up in mountains.

Lou Rawls, Ray Charles, Alma Cogan, Tom Jones, Joan Baez, Val Doonican, Diana Ross, PP Arnold, Gladys Knight, The Walker Brothers, Bill Medley, Marvin Gaye, Dionne Warwick, Vera Lynn. Dr John, David Essex, Johnnie Ray, Jon Pertwee, Merle Haggard, Shirley Bassey, En Vogue, Michael Bolton, LeAnn Rimes, Boyz II Men and Eva Cassidy and we're just going to stop there because we've already gone on long enough.