“As a performer,” Paul McCartney says, “you’re often thinking, “Is this any good? Is this rubbish? Is this a cliché?”
You wouldn’t expect someone with Paul McCartney’s catalog of hits to have moments of self-doubt. But the 83-year-old former Beatle says he’s no less critical of himself today than he was in his youth, despite being one of popular music’s most successful songwriters and musicians.
While some artists at his age might decide they’ve done enough, McCartney continues to create music and perform. He just announced his Got Back fall tour of the United States, which kicks off September 29 in Palm Desert, California.
So what keeps him going? As it turns out, it’s the self-doubt. But it’s also having someone in your corner who points out the brilliant thing you didn’t see in your creation.
“Any time you write a song, you’re going, ‘This is crap. This is terrible. Come on,’” he revealed to GQ. “So I kick myself and say, ‘Get it better. If it’s terrible, get it better.’
“And sometimes someone will come along, someone who you respect, and say, ‘No, that’s great. Don’t worry about that,’ and then show you a side to it that you didn’t notice and, then you’ll go, ‘Oh, yeah.’”
For years in the 1950s and ‘60s, that person for McCartney was John Lennon. When the two met in 1957, they were both struggling guitarists and budding songwriters who would sit face to face with their acoustic guitars, writing their tunes and pushing each other toward greatness.
In 1968, some 10 years after they first sat down to build their songwriting partnership, McCartney found himself presenting a song to Lennon. And though he had doubts about one line — McCartney said it was simply a “crummy” placeholder at the time — Lennon helped him realize it was actually brilliant.
“A classic example of that was when I was playing ‘Hey Jude’ to John,” McCartney explained, “and I said, ‘The movement you need is on your shoulder.’ I turned round to him and Yoko, who was standing behind me, and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll fix that.’
“And John said, ‘No, you won’t. That’s the best line in it.’”
McCartney has said elsewhere that a little nudge of support can make him actually like what he was ready to reject all that much more.
“When someone’s that firm about a line that you’re going to junk, and he said, ‘No, keep it in,’ so, of course, you love that line twice as much because it’s a little stray, it’s a little mutt that you were about to put down and it was reprieved and so it’s more beautiful than ever,” he said.
“I love those words now,” he added, saying, “when I’m singing it, that is when I think of John, when I hear myself singing that line; it’s an emotional point in the song.”
It’s one reason why artists benefit from working together and sharing their work.
“But if you don’t have that, you can sometimes be, ‘What I’m doing is crap and my life amounts to nothing,’” McCartney told GQ. “And I say to people, ‘God, you know, if I can say that!’ Pretty weird.”
As he explains, it’s all part of creating.
“I suppose in the end you have to go, ‘You know what? This is the process.’
“I mean, one thing that’s good is that I care. I’m not just pumping out bullshit all the time. I am trying to do good stuff. Maybe you can’t succeed all the time, but I love it. That’s why I keep going.”
