Paul McCartney says Paperback Writer was inspired by a request from his aunt

The song Paperback Writer was inspired by a request from Paul McCartney‘s aunt, the Wings frontman has confirmed.

It was Auntie Lil who suggested McCartney shift from writing loved-up songs and instead focus on “something interesting” instead. The Beatles member took this advice to heart and wrote Paperback Writer as a result, an A-side song which released on May 30, 1966. It would be the last new song introduced on the Fab Four’s final tour, and one of their most interesting. McCartney not only confirmed it was his relative who inspired him to find a different angle for his songs, but an article about paperback books took him one step closer to writing a hit which had more to it than love. Paperback Writer would become The Beatles’ tenth number-one single, with its time at the top cut short by Frank Sinatra‘s Strangers in the Night.

McCartney has confirmed his Aunt Lil was a major factor in the song’s creation. He said: “The idea’s a bit different. Years ago, my Auntie Lil said to me, ‘Why do you always write songs about love all the time? Can’t you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?’

So, I thought, ‘All right, Auntie Lil.’ And recently, we’ve not been writing all our songs about love.” One of the first songs McCartney would write after this was Paperback Writer. The idea came to McCartney after flipping through The Daily Mail in John Lennon’s house. The duo had been writing when McCartney turned to the tabloid for inspiration.

He recalled: “You knew, the minute you got there, cup of tea and you’d sit and write, so it was always good if you had a theme. I’d had a thought for a song and somehow it was to do with the Daily Mail so there might have been an article in the Mail that morning about people writing paperbacks. Penguin paperbacks was what I really thought of, the archetypal paperback.”

McCartney would go on to say sitting in at Lennon’s Weybridge home and finding The Daily Mail article would be of great influence on how he wrote the song. He said: “I arrived at Weybridge and told John I had this idea of trying to write off to a publishers to become a paperback writer, and I said, ‘I think it should be written like a letter.’

“I took a bit of paper out and I said it should be something like ‘Dear Sir or Madam, as the case may be…’ and I proceeded to write it just like a letter in front of him, occasionally rhyming it.”

It’s one of many innovations in McCartney’s songwriting career, with another found in how he wrote Helter Skelter. The Beatles bassist would hit away on an acoustic guitar to create the “rough and screaming” White Album classic.