Paul McCartney May Have Lost Dozens of Beatles Songs
In a career of more than 50 years, Paul McCartney has released hundreds of songs. And it turns out there are plenty more that he wrote but can't recall. In a new interview, he talks about how technology has made it easier to remember musical ideas these days.
"Things have changed quite a bit," McCartney told the Evening Standard (via NME). "You've got recording devices now which change the songwriting process. For instance, John [Lennon] and I didn't have them when we first started writing, we would write a song and just have to remember it."
He's recalling the days when he and Lennon would sit "like mirrors" with their guitars in McCartney's house, which had a piano, and write songs in the early days of their partnership in the Beatles. But as creative as they were, he said "there was always the risk that we'd just forget it. If the next morning you couldn't remember it, it was gone. In actual fact, you had to write songs that were memorable, because you had to remember them or they were lost! There must have been dozens lost this way. ... So you would have to form the thing, have it all finished, remember it all, go in pretty quickly and record it."
Instead of complaining about how young whippersnappers have it easy, McCartney has embraced modernity and found that it has aided his creative process. "Now, because you can get things down on a device, I've got millions of things I want to record and do," he said.
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