Education Through Art
26
ALL MY TROUBLES SEEMED SO FAR AWAY
By Fernanda Catena
In my life I’ve had quite a number of favourite songs, but one in particular has marked the way in which I see things.
Yesterday was composed by Paul McCartney in 1964 and recorded by The Beatles in 1965, as part of their album Help! The song was widely acclaimed in the United States and then accepted in the UK. In 1999 it was declared the best song of the 20th Century by music experts and listeners who had voted in a BBC Radio 2 music poll; the next year, MTV and Rolling Stone magazine hailed it as the n°1 pop song of all times.
PAUL HAD A DREAM
Even though the song was said to have been composed by both John Lennon and Paul McCartney, it was a dream Paul had that gave rise to Yesterday. Paul composed the entire melody in a dream he had one night while sleeping in his, at that time, girlfriend’s house and he played the tune as soon as he woke up so as not to forget it. Researchers say Paul dreaded having stolen the melody from someone else’s work unconsciously, so he started asking everyone he knew if they had heard that melody before. Once he was certain that the melody was actually his, he started working on the lyrics. The song’s first name was Scrambled Eggs, a joke name that John and Paul had given to it until they found a suitable one. Paul once said that he originally wrote the lyrics during a Beatles’ tour in France in 1964; however, the song was not released until 1965 due to an internal disagreement over the song’s suitability for the band’s image.