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The Beatles song that Paul dreamed up

Yesterday
Is two days before tomorrow
The day after two days ago

That’s how Kitaru, the narrator’s friend sings the Beatles song in Haruki Murakami’s story “Yesterday.” Kitaru is singing aloud in the bathroom. The narrator is sitting on a stool outside, mildly annoyed that his friend is butchering such a sad and beautiful song. But years later, he regrets not remembering what Kitaru sang.1

With over 2,200 cover versions, Yesterday is one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music. It’s also my favorite Beatles song. It’s different from their other songs because it was their first one2 that used a string quartet (2 violins, a viola, and a cello). The strings give the song a melancholy vibe.

Apparently, Paul McCartney got the idea for the song in a dream. He woke up with the melody for Yesterday fully formed in his head when he was staying at his then girlfriend Jane Asher’s place, and he played it on the piano to not forget it. He was worried that this was a tune he had heard before and was plagiarizing:

“For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it.”

Like in the Murakami story, Paul initially wrote nonsense lyrics to remember the melody: “Scrambled eggs… Oh, my baby, how I love your legs” till he settled on the final lyrics lamenting his lost love. The rest of the band considered the song a joke at first, and vetoed its release in the UK because it was so different from their other work; but after its wild popularity, they changed their mind.

In Danny Boyle’s film “Yesterday,” a musician practicing his guitar for the first time after an accident plays Yesterday and his friends are mindblown. He then realizes that he’s woken up in a parallel universe where the Beatles never existed. Unlike Paul who imagined it, he did actually hear the song somewhere. The rest of the film is about him becoming a musical idol using the songs of The Beatles while wrestling with his conscience about the ethics of ripping off his favorite band.

Suffering from success

Sometimes people make things that they regret later. It could be movie lines that end up being memes, jokes that get them canceled, or songs which end up being the only thing they’re remembered for.

Creep was that albatross around the neck for the band Radiohead.

The lead singer Thom Yorke wrote the song after he had an awkward experience with a girl he liked. He was smitten by her and couldn’t really express what he was feeling, struggling to behave with sensitivity while also coming across as masculine. He turned that feeling inward and wrote the lines:

“I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here…”

The song was part of their debut album. It tapped into something in the zeitgeist and became wildly popular.

Radiohead played their signature song at every venue for the next two years before they eventually tired of it. They felt they were being judged narrowly based on a single song, and one member said: “We seemed to be living out the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again. It was incredibly stultifying.” The band got hostile when audiences requested the song and refused to play it for a number of years, before recovering and finally being okay with its fame.

As an aside, comedian Patrice O’Neill analyzed why the song Creep is incredibly important to understanding the “soul of white people.” It’s hilarious:

Beethoven’s proposals

Für Elise is one of the most recognizable tunes in the world: From ringtones and garbage trucks in Taiwan, to children’s toys and a music box that my friend got for me from Prague, the song is literally everywhere. You need to hear only the first few seconds to recognize it even if you don’t know its name:

Beethoven composed this tune. We don’t know if he ever got to hear it – not just because he lost his hearing towards the end of his life, but because this music wasn’t published or performed in his lifetime. 40 years after his death, a scholar named Ludwig Nohl discovered the piece among Beethoven’s letters and published it. There are disputes about whether he transcribed the piece correctly. Some say that Nohl’s original manuscript doesn’t exist at all.

The piece’s name, translates to “For Elise” and nobody knows who Elise is. One theory is that Beethoven actually dedicated it to Therese Malfetti, a friend of his to whom he proposed marriage and was turned down by, or Countess Thérèse von Brunsvik, a patron to whom he had dedicated another composition. Beethoven’s handwriting was sloppy, and Therese might have been interpreted as Elise. Elise could have also been a nickname for an opera singer named Elisabeth Röckel whom Beethoven was friends with for a long time, and might have proposed to. She married his friend Johann Hummel.

Für Elise didn’t yield any more answers, but I discovered that my favorite, the Moonlight Sonata, was dedicated to Julie Guicciardi, an Austrian countess and student of his who turned down his marriage proposal because she had to marry someone of noble birth (her picture was discovered in his belongings). Beethoven’s romances might not have lasted, but his music sure did.

Open a book to a random page

Serj Tankian of the Armenian-American band System of a Down was working on a song, when he was stuck at one point. The lyrics went like this:

I don’t think you trust, in my self-righteous su1c1de
I cry when angels deserve to die

He didn’t know what to write for the bridge that connected to the next verse. Their producer Rick Rubin suggested Serj go over to his bookshelf, pick any book, open it to any page, and read the first line that showed up. Serj chose a book, which turned out to be The Bible, and the lines he read out were:

Father into your hands, I commend my spirit
Father into your hands… why have you forsaken me?
In your eyes, forsaken me?
In your thoughts, forsaken me?
In your heart, forsaken me?

It’s what Jesus Christ said when he was crucified and it fits perfectly with the previous line (“I cry when angels deserve to die”). It’s spooky how that played out. Rick Rubin used it as an example of synchronicity:

My experience is, when you’re open and looking for these clues in the world, they’re happening all the time and they’re happening right when you need them.

(The relevant part starts at 2:18)

The song itself is a dark one that has nothing to do with the dish Chop Suey. It was originally titled “Su1c1de” and describes the thought process of someone who is planning to unalive themselves. The title is just the first half of the original title – Sui. Because it’s cut in half, it became “Chop” Suey. If you play the original version on Spotify, you can hear a voice say, “Rolling, su1c1de” before the music kicks in.

Lost time

Miki Matsubara recorded the song Stay with me (Mayonaka na door) in 1979. The song is about a woman trying to persuade her love to stay. The song did well, reaching number 28 on the billboards and selling around 400,000 copies before fading away. But 41 years later, the song made a comeback in 2020, along with other songs of the “City Pop” genre, like Plastic Love.

Part of this revival was because of nostalgia for the Showa Era that lasted from 1926 to 1989. By 2017, three-fourths of the Japanese population were people born in the Showa Era and longed for “the good old days.” But also, people from the Millennial and Gen-Z generations were digging around retro music shops and exploring niche music on platforms like YouTube, experiencing anemoia: A nostalgia for a time they had never known. It might have been a drastic response against information overload by turning to simpler times. Miki herself never got to see the revival.

She had started pursuing music right out of high school, opting not to pursue college, and becoming a successful singer like she had planned. But in 2000, she sent a message to her friends and colleagues:

"Actually, I can no longer continue with my music for a certain reason. I am cancelling my phone, cell phone, and email. So please do not reply. Please live your life without regrets."

She disappeared from the music scene, and burned her music collection. It was later revealed that she had been diagnosed with uterine cancer and had very little time to live – she regretted devoting her life to music at the expense of other life experiences she would never get to have. Miki died in 2004 at the age of 44.

Gibberish

Bonus slice today because this is too good to pass up. Italian singer Adriano Celentano was inspired by the story of the Tower of Babel to explore communication barriers between different languages. He was heavily inspired by American pop culture, so he made a song that sounded like American English – but the lyrics were actually nonsense that didn’t mean anything.

The song was titled Prisencolinensinainciusol. Despite not meaning anything, it sounds uncannily like an American Elvis Presley song. The song was a big hit in 1970s Italy and Adriano is the second best-selling Italian artist of all time.

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