If you are Paul McCartney Choosing favorites is a thankless task – the sheer breadth of his seven-year career as a songwriter with the Beatles would be enough to avoid the question. But he does One particular Revolver creation holds a special place in his heart, and it shows why his songwriting can be so different…yet familiar.
As he admitted with the remarkable dream state report that gave rise to the song Yesterday, the influence of the previous generation often seeped into McCartney’s creative mind. It was the music of his parents and his music-loving family that was embedded in his childhood memories.
“One of my favourite songs is ‘Cheek To Cheek’ because of its structure,” McCartney revealed on the podcast McCartney: A Life In Lyrics about the influence of 1930s American songwriter Irving Berlin. “Sung by Fred Astaire. And I really liked it before it starts, ‘Heaven, I’m in Heaven…’, then the middle part, ‘Will Carry Me Through to… Heaven…’ It’s just like that, yeah! The way it just resolves itself into its own ending, I always thought it was wonderful. And I think someone said, I’m doing this.
The To be here, there and everywhere. This is a milestone in McCartney’s rapid development as a songwriter in the 1960s and a truly breathtaking work for a musician who was just 24 years old when “Revolver” was released in 1966.
McCartney compares the song’s structure to a journey with an unexpected destination. “I like the fact that we think we’re on a path on the moorland, and we think we’re taking a walk and then suddenly we’ve arrived back where we started,” he explains in the podcast. “And it’s not like we’ve gone around in circles, it’s more magical than that – we’ve arrived at a different beginning of the path.”
“It’s that trick where you’re suddenly where you were, but it’s surprising – you’re where you were, but you’re not. Because you can look back to where you came from, and you’re definitely not there. You’re in a new place, but you’ve been tricked into the same scenery again.”
Nevertheless, the song has a defined introduction of eight bars before its verse, which is never repeated. And again it is the influence of the past that the author refers to very clearly.
John and I were fascinated by the idea that they used to do this complete mess that looked nothing like the rest of the song.
“John and I were fascinated by the idea that they used to make such a complete mess that looked nothing like (the rest of) the song,” McCartney explains his and John Lennon’s thinking. So while much is made of the Beatles’ revolution in popular music in terms of song and production approach, this was also sometimes accompanied by clear nods to the past.
It was Lennon who indirectly made “Here, There And Everywhere” possible in the first place. “I remember writing this song one day while I was waiting for John,” McCartney recalls in the podcast. “I had gone to his house in Weybridge for a writing session and he wasn’t always up, so I had 20 minutes, half an hour, while someone told him I was there and he got up.”
And that was apparently all McCartney needed to get the ball rolling, alone with an acoustic guitar. “I remember sitting out by the swimming pool at his house in Weybridge with my guitar because I was ready for the writing session. And so I sat down and started something… I just made it nice and fluid so that when I got to writing with John and he deigned to get up and have his coffee, I had something to go on with.”
Lennon is also named as the author of the song, but as far as he remembers, it is a composition by McCartney.
“It actually sounds like something I would have done by the pool and just performed for him,” he tells Muldoon during the podcast episode that focuses on the song. “Because it doesn’t sound like someone else’s work – it sounds like a head.”
So why the recognition for both musicians?
“Paul and I made a deal when we were 15,” Lennon told Playboy magazine in an interview three months before his murder. “There was never a legal deal between us, just a deal we made when we decided to write together, that we would both put our names on it, no matter what.” Most notably, Lennon also deeply admired “Here There And Everywhere.” In a 1972 interview with Hit Parader, he confirmed that the song was written solely by McCartney, calling it “a great song of his.” Unusually, he also told his bandmate similar things in person.
“I shared a room with John … in the hotel we were staying in,” McCartney told Howard Stern in 2018 about filming skiing scenes around Obertauern in the Austrian Alps in March 1965 for the film Help! with the other Beatles. “And we had – I think it was a cassette at the time – the album (demos)! And we played Here There And Everywhere and he said, ‘Wow! That’s a really great song!'”
According to the band, McCartney wrote the song when he was only 23 years old, and it’s surprising that the demo existed for over a year before the song was recorded for the album Revolvr at Abbey Road in mid-June 1966. By their own admission, this kind of direct compliment was a rarity among the band members (“Because we’re boys!”), but coming from McCartney’s main songwriting partner/rival, it was a big moment.
“It was really beautiful! I remember to this day, you know, where exactly I was when he said it! Um, it was great, yeah! It really gave me a lot of confidence in that song and in my writing.”
McCartney spoke about the incident in the 2000 Beatles Anthology book. “John and I shared a room and after a day of filming, we took off our heavy ski boots to shower and get ready for the fun part, dinner and drinks,” he recalled. “We played a cassette of our new recordings and my song ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ came on. And I remember John saying, ‘You know, I probably like that better than all my songs on the cassette.’ That was really high praise coming from John.”
Even McCartney himself is fascinated by his own work on the song, looking back. “I like the line ‘Changing my life with the wave of her hand,'” he tells Paul Muldoon on the Puskin podcast A Life In Lyrics. “I look at lyrics like that now and think: where did that come from? What was I thinking of – the Queen waving from a royal carriage, or just my love just getting by without doing much… that says a lot in one line.”
“Here, There And Everywhere” remains McCartney’s favorite song to write when under pressure to answer, with Yesterday a close second. “I’m often asked what my favorite song I’ve ever written is and I never really want to answer that,” McCartney told Muldoon. “But if I had to choose, I’d choose ‘Here, There And Everywhere.'”
