The Beatles Song Paul McCartney Wrote When He Was Just 16 Years Old
Paul McCartney has been writing and performing songs for almost seven decades. Whether it was with The Beatles or as a solo act, he continues to write songs that speak to every generation. When Paul McCartney was 16, he wrote a song that would later become a Beatles hit.
Paul McCartney inherited his musical talent from his dad
McCartney grew up in a working-class family in Liverpool, England. While they couldn’t afford the latest and state-of-the-art instruments, his family had a piano in his house, which his dad played often. McCartney learned how to play the piano and used it to help and write many of his earliest compositions. In an interview with the Smartless podcast, McCartney recalled his childhood with the piano in the house.
“My dad was the family pianist,” McCartney said. “I was reading about people like Gershwin, and they said every house had a piano. That was the way things were. We had a piano. And he played it. He played great…I’d ask him to teach me, and he’d say, ‘You gotta learn properly.’ But I didn’t like the little, smelly, old lady.”
Paul McCartney wrote a famous Beatles song when he was 16
McCartney told Smartless that he was 16 when he wrote “When I’m Sixty-Four.” While The Beatles didn’t exist then, the song later appeared on 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The song is about a man addressing his lover, talking about growing old together. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, McCartney said he chose that age because it’s one year before the age of retirement in England.
“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. And the rhyme would have been easy, ‘something, something alive when I’m 65.’ But it felt too predictable. It sounded better to say 64.”
McCartney said that some people change the title based on the crowd they’re playing for. He joked and said he would change it to “When I’m 94.”
“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,” McCartney shared. “They don’t get it.’”
McCartney was inspired by Frank Sinatra while writing the song
Upon release, “When I’m Sixty-Four” received mixed reactions, with many critics regarding what audience Mccartney was trying to release. In Anthology, Paul Mccartney explained that he wrote The Beatles track with Frank Sinatra on his mind. Sinatra was an old-school king of love songs, and the theme of McCartney’s song sounds like something Sinatra would express.
“When I wrote ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ I thought I was writing a song for Sinatra,” McCartney stated. “I wrote [that] when I was sixteen — it was rather tongue-in-cheek — and I never forgot it.”
