‘I said something wrong’: Paul McCartney reveals origin of Yesterday lyric
Paul McCartney has revealed the inspiration behind the lyric “I said something wrong” in the Beatles hit Yesterday.
McCartney said the line may have been subconsciously inspired by a moment when he mocked his mother for sounding “posh”.
Many assume the lyric, “I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday”, is about the break-up of a relationship.
McCartney, however, explained on his A Life in Lyrics podcast that the lyric may actually relate to a conversation in which he embarrassed his mother.
He said: “Sometimes it’s only in retrospect you can appreciate it. I remember very clearly one day feeling very embarrassed because I embarrassed my mum.
“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. And it was a little bit Welshy as well – she had connections, her auntie Dilys was Welsh.
“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 fuck, I really wish … ’”
McCartney wrote the song when he was 24, almost a decade after his mother, Mary, died of cancer.
Yesterday was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1997 and voted the number one pop song of all time by Rolling Stone magazine and MTV in 2000.
The song is also one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music with 2,200 versions.
McCartney has previously said the death of his mother helped him express his sense of loss.
He said: “It may be that there is so much tumbled into your youth and your formative years that you can’t appreciate it all.
“I’ve got a couple of those little things that I know that people would forgive me, because they’re not big things – they’re little things – but they’re little things that I just think, ‘If I could just take a rubber, just rub that moment out it would be better’.
“And when she died, I wonder, ‘I said something wrong’, are we harking back to that crazy little thing.
“So I don’t know. Does this happen? Do you find yourself unconsciously putting songs into girl lyrics [about a lost lover] that are really your dead mother? I suspect it might be true. It sort of fits, if you look at the lyrics.”
McCartney’s podcast explores the inspiration behind the singer’s songwriting with the poet Paul Muldoon over two seasons and 24 episodes.