The Beatles’ love song for Paul McCartney was written for no one

It was also, in many ways, their most untethered record. In 1968, the band travelled to India to study with the Maharishi, and each of them had very different experiences there. While McCartney and Starr quickly departed, John Lennon and George Harrison stayed. This one trip became a kind of microcosmic example of how the band began to evolve, straining their personal and creative relationships as they seemingly took different paths. It’s also another moment where they were detached not only from their native Liverpool, pulling them away from their origins and local histories, but also from Britain and their role as the ultimate British band.

The Beatles also took more and more drugs. What started with a few joints here and there evolved into harder stuff as the members experimented with LCD or, in Lennon’s case, even heroin. The “turn on, tune in, drop out” ethos of the late 1960s counterculture scene found its way into the band’s world, and whereas McCartney had previously been attuned to the world around him, he now switched his mental radio to simply tune into his imagination.

Thus, “Honey Pie” was born: a love song to no real person. In stark contrast to “Wild Honey Pie,” an eerie little ditty that could be considered the first dose of sending the brain into a downward spiral, “Honey Pie” is classic and lilting, as if the curtain is opening on a quieter theater of the mind.

On an album with no musical cohesion or consistent sound, “Honey Pie” is simply another stylistic shift. But while the other songs drift into the experimental, McCartney’s psyche seems to be taking him back to tradition or the old-school sounds he always loved. “Both John and I loved music hall a lot. I really liked that old crooner style – the weird fruity voice they used,” he said.

So he wrote himself a fictional counterpart in the role of the old singer. “‘Honey Pie’ was my song that I wrote to a fictional woman across the ocean who was called Honey Pie on the screen,” he explained. With the words “She was a working girl from the north of England / Now she’s made it big in the US,” the story tells of a man mourning the loss of a famous lover.

“It’s another one of my fantasy songs,” he said. There may be a grain of truth in it, though. Shortly before recording of the White Album began, McCartney split from long-time girlfriend Jane Asher, partly due to both celebrities’ chaotic schedules, with the Beatles’ US tour putting particular strain on their relationship. Perhaps that experience inspired the song in some way, as he sings, “Oh, honey pie, you drive me mad / Sail across the Atlantic / To be where you belong / Honey pie, come back to me.”

But McCartney insists it was just a story sprung from his imagination about a girl who never existed. Instead, the love story was nothing more than a fictional vehicle for an idea. He says: “It’s a nod to the music hall tradition I grew up with.”