A song is a tricky thing. Musicians slave over them for months, sometimes even years in the case of people like Leonard Cohen. They take time to craft the lyrics, write the melody, figuring out exactly how it should sound both live and on record. They then record the thing, pick the artwork, and try to market it just right to get it the attention it deserves. But once it’s released, it’s out of their hands forever. For Paul McCartney, that sometimes came with regret.
It’s a bit like Roland Barthes’ idea from his essay, The Death Of The Author. He essentially argued that from the second a piece of art is created and gifted to the world, it becomes totally untethered from the person who made it. All of their biographical background or the context in which they made it becomes meaningless as the piece now belongs to the cultural collective of the population, where they will assign their own meanings and messages without the artist being able to do anything to stop it. In short, the second a musician releases a song, there’s no going back. It’s not really their’s anymore.
Sometimes, that’s a lovely thing. It’s always beautiful to see how the world takes a certain track and makes it its own or how one song can be used to soundtrack generations of moving moments. McCartney will no doubt have seen that as his songs ‘Blackbird’, ‘Let It Be’, or ‘The Long and Winding Road’ have become some of the most beloved and timeless tracks ever penned, played at countless weddings, funerals, or life moments.
But when it comes to one song, he’s also seen the flipside. He admitted to wishing he could take back one track and redo it. On his 2013 album, NEW, McCartney has an issue with his vocal performance on the track ‘Early Days’.
“When I was working with Ethan Johns on this album, I brought him a couple of acoustic songs. He said: ‘Just come down to the studio. Just go down there and play it.’ So I did that, we did a take and he says: ‘That’s great!’” he remembered. But what the producer thought was great, the singer thought was weak. “So I came back up and I said: ‘A bit of the vocal is a bit wobbly, I’m sure I can sing that a bit better’”, McCartney continued, calling the performance “dodgy” or “not the greatest”.
However, his producer convinced him to keep it. McCartney recalled, “He said: ‘But it’s you! It’s vulnerable, and it sounds really true to life.’ And we left it, and people have said to me: ‘Oh, I like that track.’”
While some might claim that the artist should have the final word on their work, and that McCartney’s view should be respected or listened to, or that we should all believe him when he claims the vocal was wrong or weak. The stripped-back, raw voice on ‘Early Days’ feels perfect in the context of the song’s content.
“It’s basically a little acoustic thing and it’s me remembering, basically me and John when we were just two kids, before we’d started The Beatles, before we’d gotten on as songwriters, so you know,” he said of the song, “I’m really going back to kind of very early days. The joy for me was: I was one of those two.”
Much like ‘In My Life’ or ‘Penny Lane’, or any number of Beatles songs where the band recounted tales of their youth in Liverpool, ‘Early Days’ serves as a beautiful memory of Lennon and McCartney’s early friendship and a reminder that even though they became two of the most famous musicians on the planet, at one point, they were just two kids. “It’s just this idea of people robbing your history from you, But in my case, it started off with the idea of ‘They can’t take it with me because I lived through those early days. I was there’,” he told Absolute Radio about the song.
After wanting to redo the vocals for a while, McCartney finally heard and understood what his producer was saying. “He said, ‘It’s ok man, that’s how this song has got to be sung’”, the musician recalled, eventually admitting, “Thankfully, I listened to him, and thankfully you like it.”