The Beatles (Lennon/McCartney)
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're here to stay
Oh, I believe in yesterday
Suddenly I'm not half the man I used to be
There's a shadow hanging over me
Oh, yesterday came suddenly
Why she had to go
I don't know, she wouldn't say
I said something wrong
Now I long for yesterday
Yesterday love was such an easy game to play
Now I need a place to hide away
Oh, I believe in yesterday
Why?d she have to go?
I don't know, she wouldn't say
I said something wrong
Now I long for yesterday
Yesterday love was such an easy game to play
Now I need a place to hide away
Oh, I believe in yesterday
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The Beatles -Yesterday
"
Yesterday" is a song originally recorded by
The Beatles for their 1965 album
Help!. The song remains popular today with more than 2,200
cover versions, and is one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music.
[note 1] At the time of its first appearance the song was released by The Beatles' record company as a single in the United States but not in the United Kingdom (for further details see below). Consequently, whilst it topped the American chart in 1965 the song first hit the British top 10 three months after the release of
Help! in a cover version by
Matt Monro. "Yesterday" was voted the best song of the 20th century in a 1999
BBC Radio 2 poll of music experts and listeners and was also voted the No. 1 Pop song of all time by MTV and
Rolling Stone magazine the following year. In 1997, the song was inducted into the
Grammy Hall of Fame.
Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) asserts that it was performed over seven million times in the 20th century alone.
"Yesterday" is a melancholy
acoustic guitar ballad about a relationship break-up. It was the first official recording by The Beatles that relied upon a performance by a single member of the band,
Paul McCartney. He was
accompanied by a
string quartet. The final recording was so different from other works by The Beatles that the band members vetoed the release of the song as a single in the United Kingdom. (However, it was issued as a single there in 1976.) Although credited to "
Lennon–McCartney", the song was written solely by McCartney. In 2000 McCartney asked
Yoko Ono if she would agree to change the credit on the song to read "McCartney–Lennon" in the
The Beatles Anthology but she refused.
Origins
According to biographers of McCartney and the Beatles, McCartney composed the entire
melody in a dream one night in his room at the Wimpole Street home of his then girlfriend
Jane Asher and her family. Upon waking, he hurried to a piano and played the tune to avoid forgetting it.
McCartney's initial concern was that he had subconsciously
plagiarised someone else's work (known as
cryptomnesia). As he put it, "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."
Upon being convinced that he had not robbed anyone of his melody, McCartney began writing
lyrics to suit it. As Lennon and McCartney were known to do at the time, a substitute working lyric, titled "Scrambled Eggs" (the working opening verse was "Scrambled Eggs/Oh, my baby how I love your legs"), was used for the song until something more suitable was written. In his biography,
Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, McCartney recalled: "So first of all I checked this melody out, and people said to me, 'No, it's lovely, and I'm sure it's all yours.' It took me a little while to allow myself to claim it, but then like a prospector I finally staked my claim; stuck a little sign on it and said, 'Okay, it's mine!' It had no words. I used to call it 'Scrambled Eggs'."
During the shooting of
Help!, a piano was placed on one of the stages where filming was being conducted and McCartney would take advantage of this opportunity to tinker with the song.
Richard Lester, the director, was eventually greatly annoyed by this and lost his temper, telling McCartney to finish writing the song or he would have the piano removed. The patience of the other Beatles was also tested by McCartney's work in progress, George Harrison summing this up when he said: "Blimey, he's always talking about that song. You'd think he was Beethoven or somebody!"
McCartney originally claimed he had written "Yesterday" during the Beatles' tour of France in 1964; however, the song was not released until the summer of 1965. During the intervening time, The Beatles released two albums,
A Hard Day's Night and
Beatles for Sale, both of which could have included "Yesterday". Although McCartney has never elaborated his claims, a delay may have been due to a disagreement between McCartney and
George Martin regarding the song's
arrangement, or the opinion of the other Beatles who felt it did not suit their image.
Lennon later indicated that the song had been around for a while before:
"The song was around for months and months before we finally completed it. 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."
McCartney said the breakthrough with the lyrics came 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. 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. It's easy to rhyme those a's: say, nay, today, away, play, stay, there's a lot of rhymes and those fall in quite easily, so I gradually pieced it together from that journey. Sud-den-ly, and 'b' again, another easy rhyme: e, me, tree, flea, we, and I had the basis of it."
On 27 May 1965, McCartney and Asher flew to
Lisbon for a holiday in
Albufeira,
Algarve, and he borrowed an acoustic guitar from
Bruce Welch, in whose house they were staying, and completed the work on "Yesterday". The song was offered as a demo to
Chris Farlowe prior to The Beatles recording it, but he turned it down as he considered it "too soft".
Recording
Studio work
The track was recorded at
Abbey Road Studios on 14 June 1965, immediately following the taping of “
I'm Down,” and four days before McCartney’s 23rd birthday. There are conflicting accounts of how the song was recorded, the most quoted one being that McCartney recorded the song by himself, without bothering to involve the other band members. Alternative sources, however, state that McCartney and the other Beatles tried a variety of instruments, including drums and an
organ, and that
George Martin later persuaded them to allow McCartney to play his
Epiphone Texan steel-string acoustic guitar, later on editing-in a string quartet for backup. Regardless, none of the other band members was included in the final recording. However, the song was played with the other members of the band in concert during 1966, in G major instead of F major.
McCartney performed two
takes of “Yesterday” on 14 June 1965. Take 2 was deemed better and used as the
master take. On 17 June, an additional vocal track by McCartney and a string quartet were
overdubbed on take 2 and that version was released.
Take 1, without the string overdub, was later released on the
Anthology 2 compilation. On take 1, McCartney can be heard giving chord changes to
George Harrison before starting, but George does not appear to actually play. Take 2 had two lines transposed from the first take: “There’s a shadow hanging over me”/”I’m not half the man I used to be”, though it seems clear that their order in take 2 was the correct one, because McCartney can be heard, in take 1, suppressing a laugh at his mistake.
In 2006, just before the album
Love was released, George Martin elaborated on the recording set-up of the song:
Paul played his guitar and sang it live, a mike on the guitar and mike on the voice. But, of course, the voice comes on to the guitar mike and the guitar comes on to the voice mike. So there’s leakage there. Then I said I’d do a string quartet. The musicians objected to playing with headphones, so I gave them Paul’s voice and guitar on two speakers either side of their microphones. So there’s leakage of Paul’s guitar and voice on the string tracks.
Personnel
Personnel as given by
Mark Lewisohn and
Ian MacDonald:
Debate on the release of the song
Concerning the debate on how the song should be released, Martin later said:
| [Yesterday] wasn’t really a Beatles record and I discussed this with Brian Epstein: ‘You know this is Paul’s song... shall we call it Paul McCartney?’ He said ‘No, whatever we do we are not splitting up the Beatles. |
|
Surround mix for the album Love
The leakage of sound from one track to another was a concern later, when the surround version of the song was mixed for the album
Love, but it was decided to include it nevertheless. As Martin explained in the liner notes of
Love:
| We agonised over the inclusion of “Yesterday” in the show. It is such a famous song, the icon of an era, but had it been heard too much? The story of the addition of the original string quartet is well known, however, few people know how limited the recording was technically, and so the case for not including it was strong, but how could we ignore such a marvellous work? We introduced it with some of Paul’s guitar work from “Blackbird”, and hearing it now, I know it was right to include it. Its simplicity is so direct; it tugs at the heartstrings. |
|
Chart performance
| U.S. Billboard Hot 100 | 1 |
| Norwegian Singles Chart | 1 |
| Australia Singles Chart | 2 |
| German Singles Chart | 6 |
| UK Singles Chart | 8 |
| Austrian Top 40 | 10 |
| Dutch Top 40 | 26 |
| Spanish Singles Chart | 44 |
| Chart (1976) | Peak
position |
| UK Singles Chart | 8 |
| Chart (2010) | Peak
position |
| Poland (Polish Airplay Top 5) | 5 |
Composition and structure
Ostensibly simple, featuring only McCartney playing an
Epiphone Texan steel-string acoustic guitar backed by a
string quartet in one of the Beatles' first use of session musicians, "Yesterday" has two contrasting sections, differing in melody and rhythm, producing a sense of disjunction.
The first section ("Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away...") opens with an F
chord (the 3rd of the chord is omitted), then moving to Em
7 before resolving to A
7 and then to D-minor. In this sense, the opening chord is a decoy; as musicologist
Alan Pollack points out, the home key (F-major) has little time to establish itself before "heading towards the relative D-minor." He points out that this diversion is a compositional device commonly used by Lennon and McCartney, which he describes as "delayed gratification".
The second section ("Why she had to go I don't know...") is, according to Pollack, less musically surprising on paper than it sounds. Starting with Em
7, the harmonic progression quickly moves through the A-major, D-minor, and (closer to F-major) B
♭, before resolving back to F-major, and at the end of this, McCartney holds F while the strings descend to resolve to the home key to introduce the restatement of the first section, before a brief hummed closing phrase.
Pollack described the scoring as "truly inspired", citing it as an example of "[Lennon & McCartney's] flair for creating stylistic hybrids"; in particular, he praises the "ironic tension drawn between the schmaltzy content of what is played by the quartet and the restrained, spare nature of the medium in which it is played."
The
tonic key of the song is F major (although, since McCartney tuned his guitar down a whole step, he was playing the chords as if it were in G), where the song begins before veering off into the key of D minor. It is this frequent use of the minor, and the ii-V7
chord progression (Em and A
7 chords in this case) leading into it, that gives the song its melancholy aura. The A
7 chord is an example of a
secondary dominant, specifically a V/vi chord. The G
7 chord in the bridge is another secondary dominant, in this case a V/V chord, but rather than
resolve it to the expected chord, as with the A
7 to Dm in the verse, McCartney instead follows it with the IV chord, a B
♭. This motion creates a descending
chromatic line of C–B–B
♭–A to accompany the title lyric.
The string arrangement reinforces the song's air of sadness, in the groaning cello line that connects the two halves of the
bridge, notably the "
blue" seventh in the second bridge pass (the E
♭ played after the vocal line, "I don't know / she wouldn't say") and in the descending run by the
viola that segues the bridge back into the verses, mimicked by McCartney's vocal on the second pass of the bridge. This viola line and the high A sustained by the violin over the final verse are the only elements of the string arrangement attributable to McCartney rather than George Martin.
When the song was performed on
The Ed Sullivan Show, it was done in the above-mentioned key of F, with McCartney as the only Beatle to perform, and the studio orchestra providing the string accompaniment. However, all of The Beatles played in a G-major version which was used in the Tokyo concerts during their 1966 tours.
When McCartney appeared on
The Howard Stern Show, he stated that he owns the original lyrics to "Yesterday" written on the back of an
envelope. McCartney later performed the original "Scrambled Eggs" version of the song, plus additional new lyrics, with
Jimmy Fallon and
The Roots on
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
Resemblance to other songs
In 2001,
Ian Hammond speculated that McCartney subconsciously based "Yesterday" on
Ray Charles' version of "
Georgia on My Mind", but closed his article by saying that despite the similarities "Yesterday" is a "completely original and individual [work]."
In July 2003, British
musicologists stumbled upon superficial similarities between the lyric and rhyming schemes of "Yesterday" and
Nat King Cole's "
Answer Me, My Love" (originally a German song by Gerhard Winkler and Fred Rauch called
Mütterlein), leading to speculation that McCartney had been influenced by the song. McCartney's publicists denied any resemblance between "Answer Me, My Love" and "Yesterday".
"Yesterday" begins with the lines: "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they're here to stay." In its second stanza, "Answer Me, My Love" has the lines: "You were mine yesterday. I believed that love was here to stay. Won't you tell me where I've gone astray".
Release
 |
| Eleven years after the US release, EMI released "Yesterday" on a single in the UK |
Since "Yesterday" was unlike the Beatles' previous work and did not fit in with their image, and was essentially a solo recording, the Beatles refused to permit the release of a single in the United Kingdom. This did not prevent
Matt Monro from recording the first of many cover versions of "Yesterday". His version made it into the top ten in the UK charts soon after its release in the autumn of 1965.
The Beatles' influence over their US record label,
Capitol, was not as strong as it was over
EMI's
Parlophone in Britain. A single was released in the US, pairing "Yesterday" with "
Act Naturally", a track which featured vocals by Starr. The single was released on 13 September 1965 and topped the
Billboard Hot 100 chart for four weeks, beginning on 9 October. The song spent a total of 11 weeks on the chart, selling a million copies within five weeks.
"Yesterday" was the fifth of six number one singles in a row on the American charts, a record at the time. The other singles were "
I Feel Fine", "
Eight Days a Week", "
Ticket to Ride", "
Help!", and "
We Can Work It Out". The record was equalled by
The Bee Gees in the 1970s and surpassed by
Whitney Houston in the 1980s. "Yesterday" also marked a turning point in who wrote number one singles for the group. Lennon wrote five through "Help!", whereas afterwards McCartney wrote eight starting with "Yesterday". On 4 March 1966, "Yesterday" was released as an
EP in the UK, joined by "
Act Naturally" on the
A-side with "
You Like Me Too Much" and "
It's Only Love" on the
B-side. By 12 March, it had begun its run on the charts. On 26 March 1966, the EP went to number one, a position it held for two months. Later that same year, "Yesterday" was included as the title track for the US-only
Yesterday and Today album, which was originally packaged in the "butcher sleeve".
Ten years later on 8 March 1976, "Yesterday" was released by
Parlophone as a single in the UK, featuring "
I Should Have Known Better" on the B-side. Entering the charts on 13 March, the single stayed there for seven weeks, but it never rose higher than number 8 (however, by this time the song had been featured on no less than three top 5 albums and an EP which topped the charts). The release came about due to the expiration of the Beatles' contract with
EMI, Parlophone's parent. EMI released as many singles by The Beatles as they could on the same day, leading to 23 of them hitting the top 100 in the United Kingdom charts, including six in the top 50.
In 2006, a version of the song was included on the album
Love. The version begins with the
acoustic guitar intro from the song "
Blackbird" only with "Blackbird" transposed down a whole step to F major from its original key G in order to transition smoothly into "Yesterday".
Reception
"Yesterday" is one of the most recorded songs in the history of popular music; its entry in
Guinness World Records states that, by January 1986, 1,600 cover versions had been made, by an eclectic mix of artists including
Cilla Black,
Marianne Faithfull,
Tose Proeski,
The Mamas and the Papas and
Barry McGuire,
The Seekers,
Joan Baez,
Donny Hathaway,
Michael Bolton,
Bob Dylan,
Liberace,
Frank Sinatra,
Matt Monro,
Elvis Presley,
Ray Charles (1967),
Marvin Gaye,
Daffy Duck,
Jan & Dean,
The Sylvers,
Wet Wet Wet,
P. P. Arnold,
Plácido Domingo,
The Head Shop,
Billy Dean,
En Vogue,
LeAnn Rimes,
Muslim Magomayev and
Boyz II Men. In 1976,
David Essex did a cover version of the song for the ephemeral musical documentary
All This and World War II. After
Muzak switched in the 1990s to programs based on commercial recordings, Muzak's inventory grew to include about 500 "Yesterday" covers. At the 2006 Grammy Awards, McCartney performed the song live as a mash-up with
Linkin Park and
Jay-Z's "
Numb/Encore". It is
Vladimir Putin's favourite Beatles song.
"Yesterday" won the
Ivor Novello Award for 'Outstanding Song of 1965', and came second for 'Most Performed Work of the Year', losing out to another McCartney composition, "
Michelle". The song has received its fair share of acclaim in recent times as well, ranking 13th on
Rolling Stone's 2004 list "
The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" and fourth on the magazine's list "The Beatles 100 Greatest Songs" (compiled in 2010). In 1999,
Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) placed "Yesterday" third on their list of songs of the 20th century most performed on American radio and television, with approximately seven million performances. "Yesterday" was surpassed only by
The Association's "
Never My Love" and the
Righteous Brothers' "
You've Lost That Loving Feeling". "Yesterday" was voted Best Song of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll.
"Yesterday", however, has also been criticised for being mundane and mawkish;
Bob Dylan had a marked dislike for the song, stating that "If you go into the
Library of Congress, you can find a lot better than that. There are millions of songs like 'Michelle' and 'Yesterday' written in
Tin Pan Alley". Ironically, Dylan ultimately recorded his own version of "Yesterday" four years later, but it was never released.
Shortly before his death in 1980, Lennon explained that he thought the lyrics did not "resolve into any sense... They're good – but if you read the whole song, it doesn't say anything; you don't know what happened. She left and he wishes it were yesterday – that much you get – but it doesn't really resolve. ... Beautiful – and I never wished I'd written it." "Paul wrote this great song, 'Yesterday.' It's a beautiful song. I never wished I'd written it, and I don't believe in yesterday... Life begins at 40, so they promise and I believe it. What's going to come?" Lennon made reference to the song on his album
Imagine with the song "
How Do You Sleep?". The song appears to attack Paul with the line "The only thing you done was Yesterday, but since you've gone you're just another day", Lennon later admitted in an interview with
Playboy that the song was actually an attack on himself as opposed to McCartney.
Notes
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