Skip to main content

TL;DR:

  • One of Paul McCartney’s solo songs was the result of a “happy accident.”
  • He compared the tune to The Beatles’ “I’m Only Sleeping” from the album Revolver.
  • Paul’s solo song appeared on an album that became No. 1 hit decades into his career.

One of Paul McCartney‘s solo songs starts with drums. Those drums were supposed to be in a different part of the track. Subsequently, Paul compared that solo song to The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” for a very specific reason.

1 of Paul McCartney’s solo songs has a random opening but the singer likes it anyway

During a 2021 interview with The New Yorker, Paul discussed accidents in his music. “I always think of things like these as being happy accidents,” he said. “Like when someone played the tape machine backward in Abbey Road and the four of us stopped in our tracks and went, ‘Oh! What’s that?’ So then we’d use that effect in a song, like on the backward guitar solo for ‘I’m Only Sleeping.’

“It happened more recently, too, on the song ‘Caesar Rock,’ from my album Egypt Station,” he added. “Somehow, this drum part got dragged accidentally to the start of the song on the computer, and we played it back, and it’s just there in those first few seconds and it doesn’t fit. But at the same time it does.”

Why the singer compared this solo song to The Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’

Paul compared the creation of “Caesar Rock” to the writing of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” “So my life is full of these happy accidents, and, coming back to where the name Eleanor Rigby comes from, my memory has me visiting Bristol, where Jane Asher was playing at the Old Vic,” he said. For context, Asher was Paul’s girlfriend at the time.

A sign Paul saw in Bristol inspired the name of “Eleanor Rigby.” “I was wandering around, waiting for the play to finish, and saw a shop sign that read ‘Rigby,'” Paul recalled. Before seeing the sign, Paul was planning on titling the tune “Ola Na Tungee.”

Related

The Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’ Was Inspired by Skin Cream

How Paul McCartney’s ‘Caesar Rock’ and its parent album, ‘Egypt Station’, performed

“Caesar Rock” was never a single and it did not chart on the Billboard Hot 100. The tune’s parent album, Egypt Station, was a big hit. It climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for a single week, staying on the chart for eight weeks in total. It was incredible that Paul, who became famous in the early 1960s, released a No. 1 album of new material in 2018.

According to The Official Charts Company, “Caesar Rock” did not chart in the United Kingdom either. On the other hand, Egypt Station reached No. 3 in the U.K. and stayed on the chart for one week. While Egypt Station didn’t hit No. 1 in the U.K., Paul’s subsequent album McCartney III did. The latter is a belated sequel to the records McCartney and McCartney II.

The final recording of “Caesar Rock” didn’t reflect Paul’s original vision — and he was just fine with that.

Best in Entertainment