Interview after interview, Paul McCartney is asked ‘how did you write X, Y, Z [song]’.
Take this WIRED interview from 2018, the first question he was asked is ‘How did Paul McCartney write Let It Be?’. This is a well-known story but here is the gist of it - McCartney had a dream where his mom told him to just ‘let it be’, he thought it was a great idea for a song, so he went ahead and wrote ‘Let It Be’.
What is interesting about McCartney’s explanation for how he wrote the song, is that it is not an explanation at all!
The dream planted the idea, but as he says ‘…and so I thought that was a great idea for a song, so I went to the piano and wrote it.’ So, he had a dream, then went over to his piano and simply wrote one of the greatest songs of all time - the end.
Apparently, it is just that easy. No, it’s not, but in truth, if McCartney knew how he came to write ‘Let It Be’, he would be able to replicate the process again and again. In fact, he would’ve made a fortune writing similarly great songs for artists of every stripe and bank account. Now that would’ve been something!
When I hear these kinds of ‘why’ questions asked to musicians, my face winces in pain. The only comfort I have is knowing musicians like McCartney tend to stay away from the why of it all.
The truth is that many songwriters don’t know where their songs come from.
They have an idea, but nothing more than that.
To drive my point further, listen to this Bob Dylan interview with 60 Minutes. During the interview he says, ‘I don’t know how I got to write those songs…those early songs were almost magically written’. Later in the interview he says, ‘you can’t do something forever; I did it once…but I can’t do that [again/anymore].’
Over time, I feel many songwriters at the top come to the same realization as Dylan here. They can’t re-create the series of mental states that led them to writing their biggest hits or slickest lyrics. And, as personally satisfying as it much be to have written a song like ‘All Along the Watchtower’, I think Dylan would find it more satisfying to be able to write it all again.
All of this reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law. The third law says, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ If we had to apply it apply it to songwriting, I think it would say ‘any sufficiently advanced song is indistinguishable from magic by those who wrote it’.
I don’t know if McCartney or Dylan would agree with me here, but I think that just about sums up my thinking on this.
If you take anything from this piece, I hope it’s to know that the magician, much like an audience, can be amazed by tricks too.
Now what could be better than that?