Paul McCartney confesses personal regrets hidden in much-loved Beatles song lyrics

On the latest episode of his A Life in Lyrics podcast, Sir Paul McCartney has looked back on one of his most famous songs with The Beatles.

Released back in 1965, Yesterday has gone on to have over 2200 covers and was the band’s first solo performance. 

Macca famously composed the melody in a dream, initially being concerned he had plagiarised someone else’s work.

He hadn’t consciously intended “Mother Mary” in the song to be about the death of his mother when he was 14, but later admitted: “I didn’t mean it to be, but… it could be.”

Nevertheless, the star now feels that the following lyrics were about when he regretfully embarrassed his mother before she died from cancer in 1956: “I said something wrong/ Now I long for yesterday…”

McCartney shared on the podcast that these lyrics were about when he made fun of his mother Mary for sounding posh. The 81-year-old confessed: “Sometimes it’s only in retrospect you can appreciate it. I remember very clearly one day feeling very embarrassed because I embarrassed my mum.” Mary McCartney had been a nurse of Irish origin who “talked posh” compared with the rest of the Liverpudlian family and he mocked her for it.

Macca recalled: “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 f***, I really wish … ’ 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’.”

On Yesterday being about Mary, McCartney said: “I always said ‘No, I don’t think so’, but the more you think about it…” It may be that there is so much tumbled into your youth and your formative years that you can’t appreciate it all. Sometimes it’s only in retrospect that you can appreciate it.”

“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: A Life in Lyrics is an iHeartPodcast and can be listened to here.