Paul McCartney Said His Best Songs Have 1 Thing in Common

Paul McCartney named several songs he considers to be the best in his catalog. Comparing two interviews from two decades, he was consistent in his choices for The Beatles’ greatest songs. Shockingly, he also picked out a notoriously bad Beatles single as a favorite.

Paul McCartney said his best songs all ‘roll out’

During a 2010 interview with The Respiratory, Paul was asked to name the most important aspect of a song. “The most important ingredient to making a song work is the magic,” he said. “You’ve got a melody, you’ve got words, but on the more successful songs, there’s a sort of magic glow that just happens and you can feel it happening. It just makes the songs sort of roll out.

“So something like ‘Yesterday,’ which I dreamed, that was the magic — the mere fact that I had the whole thing in a dream,” he added. “And in other songs like ‘Let it Be,’ that actually came from a dream where I saw my mother in the dream.” It’s easy to see how the “Silly Love Songs” star would have seen both of those experiences as magical.

The “Band on the Run” singer went on to name other Beatles songs that felt magical to him. “‘Hey Jude’ just rolls out — ‘The Long and Winding Road,'” he added. “But the ones that have become the most successful — ‘Eleanor Rigby’ — something about them just felt kind of magical.

“So I suppose I’d say the one ingredient that was special to all of them was the magic in them,” he said. “Does that make sense?” Considering he was part of a band that infamously proclaimed themselves “more popular than Jesus,” it might be surprising to some that Paul is willing to talk about songwriting in such supernatural terms.

An earlier list of Paul McCartney’s favorite songs was a lot longer

In a 1989 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Paul was asked to name his favorites among his own songs. He had a lot to choose from! His answers included “Yesterday,” “Let It Be,” Hey Jude,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Here, There and Everywhere,” “The Fool on the Hill,” “All My Loving,” “Penny Lane,” “Maybe I’m Amazed,” “Put It There,” and “This One.”

All of the songs he mentioned in the 2010 interview were present in this list, with the exception of “The Long and Winding Road.” That omission is not too surprising, considering “The Long and Winding Road” is often considered one of the Fab Four’s weakest singles. It’s also notable that most of the songs Paul listed were from his days with The Beatles, not his solo career. Apparently, he must have felt his time with the Fab Four was more magical than his time without them. That might be accurate or it could just be nostalgia at play.

What John Lennon said about magic

Paul wasn’t the only Beatles to discuss magic. The book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono features an interview from 1980. In it, the “Imagine” singer backed off from some of the anti-religious statements he made in the past. In addition, he discussed magic. He said magic was simply science that humanity did not understand yet.

Whether you believe in literal magic or not, there was definitely something magical about The Beatles’ musical chemistry.