"Yesterday" is a song by the English rock band The Beatles. It was written by Paul McCartney and credited to the Lennon–McCartney partnership. The song first appeared on the album Help! in August 1965. In the United States, it was released as a single in September 1965. It reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart. Later, it was included on the UK EP Yesterday in March 1966 and on the US album Yesterday and Today in June 1966.
Paul McCartney’s voice and acoustic guitar, along with a string quartet, marked the band’s first solo performance. The song remains popular today and has been covered by 2,200 artists, making it one of the most recorded songs in music history. In 1999, the BBC Radio 2 poll named "Yesterday" the best song of the 20th century. The following year, MTV and Rolling Stone magazine ranked it the No. 1 pop song of all time. In 1997, the song was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame. Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) reported that the song was performed over seven million times during the 20th century.
"Yesterday" is often seen as a sad song about lost love. Paul McCartney later said the line "I said something wrong" might have been inspired by a childhood memory of teasing his mother for sounding "posh." McCartney is the only Beatles member to appear on the track. The final recording was so different from other Beatles songs that the band members refused to release it as a single in the United Kingdom. However, other artists quickly recorded their own versions for single release. The Beatles’ version was later released as a single in the UK in 1976 and reached number 8 on the UK Singles Chart.
Origin
According to writers who study the lives of Paul McCartney and the Beatles, the entire melody of the song "Yesterday" came to McCartney in a dream one night while he was staying at the home of his girlfriend Jane Asher and her family in Wimpole Street. After waking, he rushed to a piano and played the tune to remember it. At first, he worried that he might have copied someone else's music without realizing it. He explained that for about a month, he asked people in the music industry if they had heard the melody before. Eventually, he felt like he was handing something over to the police. He decided that if no one claimed the melody after a few weeks, he could keep it.
Once he was sure the melody was not copied, McCartney began writing lyrics for the song. At the time, McCartney and John Lennon often used temporary lyrics for their songs until they found better ones. For "Yesterday," they used a placeholder called "Scrambled Eggs," which had lines like "Scrambled eggs / Oh my baby how I love your legs / Not as much as I love scrambled eggs."
During the filming of the movie Help!, a piano was placed on one of the sets. McCartney used this chance to work on the song. This annoyed the director, Richard Lester, who became angry and told McCartney to finish writing the song or the piano would be removed. The other Beatles also grew impatient with McCartney's progress. George Harrison joked, "Blimey, he's always talking about that song. You'd think he was Beethoven or somebody!"
McCartney first said he wrote "Yesterday" during the Beatles' tour of France in 1964. However, the song was not released until 1965. Between 1964 and 1965, the Beatles released two albums, A Hard Day's Night and Beatles for Sale, which could have included "Yesterday." McCartney never explained why the song was delayed, but it may have been because of a disagreement with the band's producer, George Martin, or because the other Beatles thought the song did not fit their image.
Later, Lennon suggested that the song had been around for some time before. McCartney said he completed the lyrics during a trip to Portugal in May 1965. On May 27, 1965, McCartney and Asher traveled to Lisbon, where he borrowed an acoustic guitar from Bruce Welch and finished writing the song. Before the Beatles recorded it, McCartney shared a demo of "Yesterday" with Chris Farlowe, but Farlowe refused to record it, calling it "too soft." In a 1967 interview, McCartney said Lennon suggested the word "Yesterday" to replace "Scrambled Eggs."
In 2001, Ian Hammond suggested that McCartney might have unconsciously based "Yesterday" on Ray Charles' version of "Georgia on My Mind" by Hoagy Carmichael. However, Hammond concluded that "Yesterday" is still an original work.
In 2003, British music experts noticed some similarities between the rhyme patterns of "Yesterday" and the song "Answer Me, My Love," originally written by Gerhard Winkler and Fred Rauch. This song was a hit for Frankie Laine in the UK in 1953. Some people thought "Answer Me, My Love" might have influenced McCartney. McCartney's team denied any connection between the two songs. The first lines of "Yesterday" are: "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they're here to stay." The song "Answer Me, My Love" includes the lines: "You were mine yesterday. I believed that love was here to stay. Won't you tell me where I've gone astray."
Composition and structure
The song "Yesterday" appears simple but includes unique musical elements. Paul McCartney plays an Epiphone Texan steel-string acoustic guitar, accompanied by a string quartet, one of the Beatles' first uses of hired musicians. The song has two different sections with distinct melodies and rhythms, creating variety and contrast. The main melody is seven bars long, which is unusual in popular music, while the bridge, or "middle eight," follows a more common structure of eight bars, often made up of two four-bar phrases.
The first section ("Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away …") begins with an F chord (the third note of the chord is not played), then moves to Em, followed by A and D minor. This opening chord is misleading, as the song quickly shifts to the key of D minor, a technique musicologist Alan Pollack notes as a common method used by Lennon and McCartney, described as "deferred gratification."
The song's success is due to its strong qualities, including a unique arrangement, an appealing melody, and unusual musical elements like asymmetrical phrasing and unexpected chord progressions.
The second section ("Why she had to go I don't know …") starts with Em and moves through A major, D minor, and B♭ before returning to F major. At the end, McCartney holds an F chord while the strings play descending notes to return to the home key, leading back to the first section and a final hummed phrase.
Pollack praised the song's scoring, calling it "truly inspired" and an example of Lennon and McCartney's ability to blend musical styles. He highlighted the contrast between the emotional, sentimental music played by the quartet and the simple, restrained way it was performed.
The song's main key is F major, though McCartney tuned his guitar down a whole step, making it sound as if it were in G. The piece shifts to D minor, and the use of minor keys and specific chord progressions (like Em and A leading to D minor) creates a sad mood. The A chord is a type of secondary dominant, and the G chord in the bridge is another, but McCartney resolves it to a B♭ instead of the expected chord, creating a descending chromatic line.
The string arrangement adds to the song's sorrowful tone, especially the cello line in the bridge, the "blue" seventh note (E♭) in the second bridge section, and the viola's descending run that transitions back to the verses. These elements, including the high A sustained by the violin and limited vibrato, were McCartney's choices, not George Martin's.
When "Yesterday" was performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, it was in F major, with McCartney as the sole performer and a studio orchestra providing the strings. Later, in 1965 and 1966, all the Beatles performed the song in G major during tours.
McCartney mentioned that he wrote the original lyrics for "Yesterday" on the back of an envelope. He later performed an early version called "Scrambled Eggs" with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. When asked if the song's lyrics referenced his mother's early death, he said, "I didn't mean it to be, but … it could be."
Recording
The song was recorded at Abbey Road Studios on June 14, 1965, right after the recording of "I'm Down" and four days before McCartney turned 23. Different stories exist about how the song was made. Some say McCartney and the other Beatles tried many instruments, such as drums and an organ, and that George Martin later encouraged McCartney to use his Epiphone Texan steel-string acoustic guitar. He also added a string quartet later. However, no other band members were included in the final version.
McCartney recorded two versions of "Yesterday" on June 14, 1965. The second version was chosen as the main recording. On June 17, McCartney and a string quartet added another vocal track to the second version, and that version was released.
The first version, without the string addition, was later released on the Anthology 2 collection. In the first version, McCartney can be heard telling Harrison about the chord changes before starting. Although Harrison does not play an instrument, his voice is clearly heard on the session recordings. Two lines in the second version were changed from the first: "There's a shadow hanging over me"/"I'm not half the man I used to be." It appears the order in the second version was correct because McCartney laughed at his mistake in the first version.
In 2006, before the album Love was released, George Martin explained the recording setup of the song:
The sound from one track mixing into another caused problems when the surround version of the song was made for Love. However, the track was still included. As Martin wrote in the liner notes for Love:
Release
Concerning the debate over how the song "Yesterday" should be released, Martin later explained: "['Yesterday'] wasn't really a Beatles record, and I discussed this with Brian Epstein: 'You know this is Paul's song… shall we call it Paul McCartney?' He said, 'No, whatever we do, we are not splitting up the Beatles.'" Since "Yesterday" was different from the Beatles' previous work and did not match their usual style, the group refused to allow the release of a single in the United Kingdom. This did not stop Matt Monro from recording a cover version of "Yesterday." His version reached the top ten in the UK charts soon after its release in the autumn of 1965.
The Beatles had less influence over their US record label, Capitol, compared to their control over EMI's Parlophone label in Britain. A single was released in the US, pairing "Yesterday" with "Act Naturally," a song featuring vocals by Ringo Starr. The single was released on 13 September 1965 and reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart for four weeks, starting on 9 October. The song remained on the chart for 11 weeks total, selling a million copies within five weeks. It also reached number one for three weeks on the US Cash Box pop singles chart the same year.
"Yesterday" was the fifth of six consecutive number-one Beatles singles on the American charts, a record at the time. The other singles were "I Feel Fine," "Eight Days a Week," "Ticket to Ride," "Help!," and "We Can Work It Out." On 4 March 1966, the song was released as the title track of the British EP Yesterday. On 26 March, the EP reached number one, a position it held for two months. Later that year, "Yesterday" was included as the title track of the North American album Yesterday and Today.
"Yesterday" was also released on the album A Collection of Beatles Oldies, a compilation album in the United Kingdom in December 1966, featuring hit singles and other songs from 1963 to 1966.
On 8 March 1976, "Yesterday" was released as a single in the UK by Parlophone, with "I Should Have Known Better" on the B-side. The single reached number 8 on the UK Singles Chart. This release happened because the Beatles' contract with EMI had ended, allowing the company to reissue the group's recordings as they wished. EMI reissued all 22 of the Beatles' UK singles, plus "Yesterday," on the same day, leading to six of them appearing on the UK chart.
In 2006, a version of the song was included on the album Love. This version begins with the acoustic guitar intro from "Blackbird," transposed down a whole step to F major from its original key of G, to transition smoothly into "Yesterday."
Reception and legacy
"Yesterday" is one of the most recorded songs in the history of popular music. Guinness World Records notes that by January 1986, there were 1,600 cover versions of the song. After Muzak changed its programs in the 1990s to use commercial recordings, its collection included about 500 versions of "Yesterday." In a 1972 article about rock music development, Joel Vance of Stereo Review magazine said the song started a trend for classical and baroque rock music, influencing songs like the Rolling Stones' "As Tears Go By" and works by the Moody Blues and the Classics IV.
"Yesterday" won the Ivor Novello Award for "Outstanding Song of 1965" and was second in the "Most Performed Work of the Year" category, behind the Lennon–McCartney song "Michelle." In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked "Yesterday" number 13 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time," and fourth on its 2010 list of "The Beatles' 100 Greatest Songs." In 1999, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) ranked "Yesterday" third on its list of the 20th century's most performed songs on American radio and television, with about seven million performances. Only "Never My Love" by the Association and "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" by the Righteous Brothers were ranked higher. In a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll, "Yesterday" was voted the Best Song of the 20th century.
The song was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1997. Though it was nominated for Song of the Year at the 1966 Grammy Awards, it lost to Tony Bennett's "The Shadow of Your Smile." "Yesterday" was nominated for six Grammys that year, and "Help!" was also nominated in four categories. After The Beatles did not win any of the ten awards, Alan Livingston, head of Capitol Records, protested the results, saying that not winning Song of the Year "makes a mockery of the whole event."
Chuck Berry said he wished he had written "Yesterday." The song has also been criticized for being ordinary and overly emotional. Bob Dylan disliked the song, saying there are better songs in the Library of Congress than "Yesterday" or "Michelle." Dylan recorded his own version of "Yesterday" in 1970 with George Harrison, but it was never released.
Before he died in 1980, John Lennon said the song's lyrics do not form a clear message but are still good lines. He called the song "beautiful" and said he never wished he had written it. Lennon referenced "Yesterday" in his 1971 song "How Do You Sleep?" on the album Imagine, with a line that seems to criticize Paul McCartney: "The only thing you done was yesterday, but since you've gone you're just another day."
In 2001, McCartney said he asked Yoko Ono to change the writing credit for "Yesterday" from "Lennon/McCartney" to "McCartney/Lennon." Ono refused, which contributed to their difficult relationship at the time.
At the 2006 Grammy Awards, McCartney performed "Yesterday" live as a mash-up with Linkin Park and Jay Z's "Numb/Encore."
In 2012, the BBC reported that "Yesterday" remained the fourth-most-successful song of all time in terms of royalties, with £19.5 million in payments.
Personnel
As noted by Mark Lewisohn and Ian MacDonald:
- Paul McCartney – vocalist and acoustic guitarist
Additional musicians and production roles:
- Tony Gilbert – violin
- Sidney Sax – violin
- Kenneth Essex – viola
- Peter Halling/Francisco Gabarró – cello
- George Martin – producer and string arrangement
- Norman Smith – engineer