Beatles News
No one would be foolish enough to turn down songwriting advice from Paul McCartney. The former Beatle has a plethora of hits to his name—both in the band’s discography and his own. He has so many songwriting credits, in fact, that his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present (which contains his thoughts on his entire discography) had to be split up into two volumes. While most of the book consists of behind-the-scenes stories from the writing of each of McCartney’s songs, there are also moments of hard-earned wisdom throughout. Find five McCartney tips you need to apply to your own songwriting, below.
1. Being self-taught has its merits
Though The Beatles were a highly revered force, you can’t chalk up their success to formal training. The group was little more than four boys who loved the blues, getting together, and creating their brand of rock magic. According to McCartney, he feels that informality actually helped the group in the long run.
“With the Beatles, we were always operating on the cusp between being conscious of how a ‘refrain’ contributed to a song and basically having no idea what we were doing,” McCartney writes in The Lyrics. “One of the things I always thought was the secret of the Beatles was that our music was self-taught. We weren’t able to read music or write it down, so we just made it up. There’s a certain joy that comes into your stuff if you didn’t [try] to make it happen.”
Source: Alex Hopper/americansongwriter.com
After 55 years, Julian Lennon has made peace with “Hey Jude.”
Julian, 60, recently spoke about the song that Paul McCartney wrote to console him while his parents, John Lennon and Cynthia Lennon (née Powell), went through a divorce. “It was ‘Hey Jules’ at first, but that didn’t quite sit well rhythmically,” Julian told Esquire in an interview published on Monday, December 18. “‘Hey Jude’ was a better interpretation. Paul wrote it to console Mum, and also to console me.”
Julian went on to admit that he doesn’t exactly love hearing the tune anymore despite its connection to his family. “It’s a beautiful sentiment, no question about that, and I’m very thankful — but I’ve also been driven up the wall by it,” he explained. “I love the fact that [Paul] wrote a song about me and for Mum, but depending on what side of the bed one woke up on and where you’re hearing it, it can be a good or a slightly frustrating thing. But in my heart of hearts, there’s not a bad word I could say about it.”
Source: Jason Brow/usmagazine.com
One of the factors that made The Beatles so special was their willingness to do whatever was best for the song. In some cases, that meant putting aside their own instrumental gifts to do so. Case in point: George Harrison’s guitar work.
When The Beatles came hurtling like a benevolent meteor out of Liverpool onto an unsuspecting world, Harrison was barely out of his teens but was already a master craftsman on his instrument. Realizing early that Lennon/McCartney songs didn’t need a lot of embellishment to make them special, he instead concentrated on developing parts that would enhance the overall effect without overwhelming it. Hence, he was more of an expert marksman than a gunslinger with his guitar work with the group.
You can point again and again to instances where a subtle touch added here or there by Harrison made a major difference. Here are five that stand out more than most.
Source: Jim Beviglia/americansongwriter.com
Last month, a British band topped the U.K. charts with its new single, reaching number 2 in America, behind only Taylor Swift; they also landed two albums in Billboard’s Top 20.
That’s a decent showing for a band that broke up 50 years ago.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, once again, The Beatles are back. The new song, “Now and Then,” and the expanded Red and Blue greatest hits albums join a world that has seen at least three dozen podcasts, a never-ending library of books, the latest a biography of the band’s roadie Mal Evans that runs nearly 600 pages, along with a parade of documentary programs like “McCartney 3,2,1,” and, most notably, Peter Jackson’s revelatory “Get Back.”
Meanwhile, in Ireland, two diehard fans, Steven Cockcroft and Jason Carty, could arguably be described as the Beatles of Beatles podcasters.
After winning the 2018 “Beatle Brain of Ireland” quiz, they launched “Nothing is Real,” their own podcast for all things John, Paul, George and Ringo. Since then, they’ve had three million downloads in the last three years, won PodBible’s 2022 Music Podcast of the Year Award and, Cockcroft says, “inexplicably,” were a No.1 music podcast recommendation in the New York Times this summer.
Source: Stuart Miller/redlandsdailyfacts.com
Despite many believing there to be resentment between John Lennon's sons, Julian Lennon said rumours of a feud between him and half-brother Sean Lennon are "such bull.
Being the sons of John Lennon must come with as many pros as it does cons.
Of course, there's the luxury of life being The Beatles' superstar's offspring. But that comes with the weight of the band's legacy, and the expectation of such a legacy.
Coupled with the fact that Julian Lennon and Sean Lennon lost their father at such a young age, you could understand why the pair's lives might be anything but normal.
The half-siblings also may've had a fractured relationship over the years, given the nature of Julian's upbringing.
Born to John and Cynthia in 1963, Julian was left with just his mother to raise him effectively after John eventually moved on with Yoko Ono.
Source: Thomas Curtis-Horsfall/goldradiouk.com
Paul McCartney said Elvis Presley was different from everyone else on the cover of The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. His comments might surprise fans.
Even though Elvis Presley deserved to be there, he’s not on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Paul McCartney explained why this was the case. Interestingly, some of the “Hound Dog” singer’s contemporaries are on the album cover.
The cover of Sgt. Pepper pays tribute to people from all fields, including non-fiction writers, fiction writers, actors, athletes, political leaders, and religious leaders. Surprisingly, only a handful of these figures are musicians. Headshots of 1960s icons Bob Dylan and Dion DiMucci are visible on the record, and a doll wears a shirt reading “Welcome The Rolling Stones Good Guys.” Singer-actors like Shirley Temple, Diana Dors, and Marilyn Monroe are part of the artwork as well. Despite this, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll is nowhere to be seen.
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
Paul McCartney's death rumor lasted years, and just wouldn't go away.
Paul McCartney decided not to address the rumor of his death and saw it as good publicity.
The rumor got out of hand with media members tracking down McCartney on his farm.
John Lennon angrily called out the Detroit radio station for making up the rumor and denied any coded messages in Beatles records.
During the '60s, The Beatles faced lots of stresses. One of them was completely unexpected, and it was the rumored death of Paul McCartney. The rumor blew up in the US after it was reported by a radio station in Detroit. The result was absolute chaos, as media members went out to find Paul McCartney, trying to confirm his identity.
As we'll reveal in the following, McCarntey didn't panic over the rumor. We'll reveal how he initially reacted, and how he was eventually fed up with the entire story. We'll also reveal John Lennon's reaction, who was just as frustrated with the story that lasted years.
Let's take a look back at how it all went down.
Source: Alex Passa/thethings.com
I am writing with reference to the letter published on December 2, ‘In my life ... an ode to Christmas’. Regarding John Lennon’s song In My Life – from The Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul – Bernie Smith said, “Lennon was a supreme wordsmith writing about his friends and lovers whom he would never forget...”
Steve Turner, in his book A Hard Day’s Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles’ Song (Revised Edition, 1999), discovered that Lennon’s lyrics share the style and sentiment of Charles Lamb’s 18th-century poem, The Old Familiar Faces. The first and last stanzas go like this:
“I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces ...
“How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.”
Paul McCartney said Lennon wrote the lyrics for In My Life, based his melody on the previously covered Smokey Robinson song, You Really Got a Hold on Me.
Source: jamaica-gleaner.com
The day the Julian Lennon album Valotte was released in 1984, my older brother and I pooled our lawn-mowing money and rode our bikes to Record Express in West Hartford, Connecticut. Our local top-40 station, 96.5 WTIC FM, was playing “Too Late for Goodbyes” every other song—MTV too—and we had to have it.
I still have the album. He’s on the cover, black-and-white, sitting backward on a chair, staring out at you, unsmiling. I know now, though I didn’t know then, how much he looks like his father in that shot. I was 9 years old. The album was probably my gateway to the Beatles, the first lesson in an education.
Lennon surrounded by reporters in 1984, the year his album Valotte was released. It earned him a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and "Too Late For Goodbyes" became a number-one hit. Some speculated that the song was about his father.A year ago, I interviewed Lennon. The Beatles documentary Get Back had just come out, and Lennon had seen it with his half-brother, Sean. (Sean’s mother is Yoko Ono; Julian’s was Cynthia Powell, John Lennon’s first wife.) The interview was meant to be part of a larger project about what it’s like to have a song written about you. “Hey Jude” was written by Paul McCartney about Julian and Cynthia; a friend of mine, Chadwick Stokes of the band Dispatch, had recently written a song about me and my family and some hard times. That project is for another day; here, now, is my interview with Lennon. In it, he told me about his new record that was coming out. The title: Jude.
Source: Ryan D'Agostino/esquire.com
The Chrysler Museum of Art will present Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm from December 5, 2023 – April 7, 2024. Traveling from the National Portrait Gallery in London to Norfolk, the Chrysler Museum of Art will be the first venue in the United States to host this major exhibition, burnishing the Chrysler’s reputation as an institution committed to the presentation of the diverse histories of photography through exhibitions and the permanent collection.
Captured by McCartney using his own Pentax Camera, the exhibition features more than 250 photographs taken between November 1963 and February 1964, illuminating the period in which The Beatles became international superstars. The photographs were rediscovered in McCartney’s personal archive in 2020. McCartney describes this collection as “the eyes of the storm,” chronologically documenting the experiences of the band on their travels beginning in November 1963 at the height of Beatlemania and culminating with photographs taken in February 1964 during the final days of the band’s first triumphant trip to America. Most of these photographs have never been made into prints, existing as negatives and contact sheets for 60 years until now. The exhibition is accompanied by a best-selling book of the same name.
“What struck me about these images, beyond their obvious historical value, was McCartney’s sensitivity to his subjects,” said Erik Neil, Macon and Joan Brock Director of the Chrysler Museum of Art. “The empathy that is at the center of his music is equally evident in his photographs.”
Source: visitnorfolk.com
