Paul McCartney Admitted He Made a Mistake in the Lyrics to a Beatles Song

When Paul McCartney was a teenager, he wrote a song that looked decades into his future. “When I’m Sixty-Four” appeared on The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. Years after writing the song, McCartney joked that updated lyrics might be appropriate given his age. He also said that he technically shouldn’t have written the song about turning 64 in the first place.

Paul McCartney said the lyrics to the song ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ should have been different

McCartney wrote the song “When I’m Sixty-Four” before The Beatles formed. When looking back at the lyrics, he thinks a marginally older age would have been a better fit.

“It was really an arbitrary number when I wrote the song. I probably should have called it ‘When I’m 65,’ which is the retirement age in England,” he told the LA Times in 2006. “And the rhyme would have been easy, ‘something, something alive when I’m 65.’”

Still, he liked that his version of the song wasn’t that obvious.

“But it felt too predictable,” he said. “It sounded better to say 64.”

Paul McCartney joked that he should update the song 

The song McCartney wrote so many years ago continues to have life and listeners long after its composition. He recalled talking to a performer who often tweaked the lyrics for his audience.

“I met someone who plays piano in an old persons’ home, and he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I play some of your songs, and the most popular one is “When I’m Sixty-four,” but I have to change the title to “When I’m 84” because 64 seems young to those people. They don’t get it.’”

McCartney joked that he’d have to use a considerably older age if he were to write the song now.

“If I were to write it now,” he said, “I’d probably call it ‘When I’m 94.’”

John Lennon said he never would have written something like ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’

McCartney and John Lennon wrote together in the early days of The Beatles, but they began to work on separate material over the years. Lennon was often critical of McCartney’s writing. He said that “When I’m Sixty-Four” is a song he never would have imagined writing.

“Paul’s [song] completely,” he in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono by David Sheff. “I would never even dream of writing a song like that. There’s some things I never think about, and that’s one of them.” 

Nearly a decade earlier, however, Lennon told Rolling Stone that he had hopes for what life would look like when he turned 64.

“I hope we’re a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland or something like that,” he said,  “looking at our scrapbook of madness.”

Tragically, Lennon died in 1980, over two decades before he reached the age in the song.