Paul McCartney Wrote a Song That Sounded Like Something George Harrison Would’ve Written, and George’s Spirit Helped Him

Paul McCartney wrote a song that sounded like something his former bandmate, George Harrison, would’ve written. It’s surprising considering how long Paul pushed George’s songwriting aside while they were bandmates. Paul didn’t appreciate George’s musical contributions and claimed only he and John Lennon were The Beatles’ songwriters.

However, Paul eventually gave George an overdue apology. He realized he’d underestimated George’s songwriting talents. Later, George heavily influenced one of Paul’s songs.

Paul McCartney wrote a song called ‘Friends To Go,’ which sounded like a George Harrison song

A couple of years after George died in 2001, Paul wrote “Friends To Go.” It appeared on his 2005 album, Chaos And Creation In The Backyard. Paul later confessed to Gary Crowley (per The Paul McCartney Project) that when he started writing the song, it morphed into something George would’ve written.

“Funny thing about some songs is when you’re writing them you can think you’re someone else,” Paul said. “I mean when I was doing ‘Long and Winding Road’ I thought I was Ray Charles. In actual fact my record of it, the Beatles’ record of it, is nothing like Ray Charles at all. But in my mind, I was being him. I was playing Ray.

“And on ‘Friends to Go,’ I realised I was playing George Harrison. So to me, it just started to sound like a George Harrison song. So I was writing with that in the back of my mind, so it was kind of like (sings) ‘I’ve been waiting on the other side for your friends to leave so I don’t have to hide.’

“You know that whole sequence I can see George doing it  (Sings) ‘I’ve been waiting on the other side for your friends to go.’  So that was it. You know I was just sat down to write and the feeling of George came over me and I just kept writing it thinking ‘George could have written this’ it was nice.

“It was like a sort of friendly song to write. And I just kept imagining I was just over by some sort of housing estate, where these people lived, in a sort of block of flats, and I was like over the other side over here just watching them and waiting for them to go so I could go in. I don’t know why, a psychiatrist could probably again have a whale of a time with that one.”

Paul said he wrote the song with George

According to Far Out, Paul didn’t just write a song that sounded like a George tune; he wrote it with his former bandmate.

“The funny thing about it was I felt as if I was almost George Harrison during the writing of that song,” Paul said. “I just got this feeling, this is George. So it was like I was writing – I was like George – writing one of his songs. So I just wrote it, it just wrote itself very easily ’cause it wasn’t even me writing it.”

Writing “Friends To Go” wasn’t the last time Paul wrote a song with the spirit of a former bandmate. Paul said he “summons” John Lennon’s spirit when writing some songs and imagines they’re back in a room working on lyrics together.

In an interview with Uncut (per NME), Paul said he “consults” John during the songwriting process. Paul said it’s more like an instinct than anything else because they’d worked together for so long.

“We collaborated for so long, I think, ‘OK, what would he think of this? What would he say now?’ We’d both agree that this new song I’m talking about is going nowhere,” Paul explained. “So instead of sitting around, we’d destroy it and remake it. I started that process yesterday in the studio, I took the vocal off it and decided to write a new vocal. I think it’s heading in a better direction now.”

Paul also claimed that John’s spirit was with him and the rest of The Beatles during the making of the Anthology project.

George said he couldn’t write songs like Paul

Paul wrote a song to sound like a George tune, but George was never able to recreate Paul’s work. He didn’t know where his former bandmate got his melodies and confessed he couldn’t replicate them.

In a 1969 radio interview, George told David Wigg, “You know, Paul always writes nice melodies. In fact, I don’t know where he finds them half the time. He’s amazing for doing that.”

In 1979, George also told Rolling Stone that he liked Paul’s melodies. “I’ve always preferred Paul’s good melodies to his screaming rock ‘n’ roll tunes.”

“Martha My Dear” was one of Paul’s songs George admitted he couldn’t copy. He even told Paul that he couldn’t write similar songs.

Paul told Barry Miles in Many Years From Now, “I remember George Harrison once said to me, ‘I could never write songs like that. You just make ’em up, they don’t mean anything to you.’ I think on a deep level they do mean something to me but on a surface level they are often fantasy like Desmond and Molly or Martha my dear.”

Whether Paul or George could replicate each others’ songs, they had tremendous respect for one another.