john lennon hated the ‘greatest’ beatles song paul mccartney wrote |

The Beatles is not just the name of a band, but a true representation of magical music. The artists of the band made sure to give one after another hits that captivated the generations. Though every member of the group was an essential component of the band, Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s partnership on songwriting stood out. Their collab brought phenomenal success; however, their partnership wasn’t without its disagreements.
The Mirror recently explored the narratives behind various Beatles songs mainly written by Paul that didn’t fully appeal to John. He openly expressed his criticisms and pushed back against his creative partner regarding songs such as ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, ‘Let It Be’, and the final medley from ‘Abbey Road’.
Further, Paul in a 2018 interview with CBS revealed that ‘Here, There and Everywhere‘ was the only song that helped him garner a compliment from John. However, there’s this one song -‘Yesterday,’ which among the audience is one of the greatest songs of the band, but it failed to impress John Lennon.
According to various media reports shortly before his untimely death, in 1980, John talked about ‘Yesterday’ and said, “Although the lyrics don’t resolve into any sense, they’re good lines. They certainly work … but if you read the whole song, it doesn’t say anything”.
“Beautiful – and I never wished I’d written it,” confessed John.

The story behind ‘Yesterday’

Paul McCartney who was encouraged by John and other band members as well to release ‘Yesterday’ as a solo track, recounted the song in an old interview. He said the whole idea came to him in a dream.
“I was living in a little flat at the top of a house and I had a piano by my bed. I woke up one morning with a tune in my head and I thought, ‘Hey, I don’t know this tune – or do I? It was like a jazz melody. My dad used to know a lot of old jazz tunes; I thought maybe I’d just remembered it from the past. I went to the piano and found the chords to it, made sure I remembered it and then hawked it round to all my friends, asking what it was: ‘Do you know this? It’s a good little tune, but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it,” he said.
This song took months to get completed, even the title of the song has its own tale. No one was able to come to one title and just then during a trip to Portugal in May 1965, Paul’s search came to an end. He recounted: “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.”
As the song became popular, it got praise from the critics and won the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song of 1965.