The Beatles song John Lennon considered Paul McCartney’s ‘first Yesterday’

A song written by musician Paul McCartney is the songwriter’s “first Yesterday” according to bandmate John Lennon.

Though he and McCartney would share writing credits on most of their Beatles efforts, it’s one of McCartney’s earliest works that stands out still. Lennon would suggest one early work from the Wings frontman would be his “first Yesterday“. Yesterday would feature on The Beatles‘ Help!, an album made for the movie of the same name. One “big ballad” from McCartney would receive heavy praise from Lennon after The Beatles split up. Though it would receive lots of praise from Lennon, he also claims to have helped write part of the song, which featured on A Hard Day’s Night. McCartney confirmed Lennon had helped him write the song, even remembering the time he wrote it.

He recalled: “Most of the songs that John and I wrote together were kinda pulled out of thin air. That was the thing about John and me that I still marvel at… because we had been 16-year-olds together. He’d come over to my house and we’d smoke Ty-Phoo tea in my dad’s pipe.

“And because we’d done all that, by the time we got around to A Hard Day’s Night, we sort of expected that we sat down together to write a song and have a little bit of fun— simply because we were used to doing it. That was how we did what we did.”

The A Hard Day’s Night track Lennon called McCartney’s “first Yesterday” is And I Love Her. Lennon, speaking in 1980, considered it a classic from McCartney. Though he would claim to be the majority writer a few years after The Beatles broke up, he softened somewhat by 1980.

He told Playboy: “And I Love Her is Paul again. I consider it his first Yesterday. You know, the big ballad in A Hard Day’s Night.” While it may have been a favourite of Lennon, McCartney has played down the effectiveness of the song, and says it wasn’t written for anyone in particular.

McCartney said in 1984: “It’s just a love song. It wasn’t for anyone. Having the title start in mid-sentence, I thought that was clever. Well, Perry Como did And I Love You So many years later. Tried to nick the idea. I like that… it was a nice tune, that one. I still like it.

“The ‘And’ in the title was an important thing – And I Love Her, it came right out of left field, you were right up to speed the minute you heard it. The title comes in the second verse and it doesn’t repeat. You would often go to town on the title, but this was almost an aside: ‘Oh … and I love you.'”