Your Mother Should Know was written by Paul McCartney as an attempt to bridge the gap between generations.
The Beatles would release Your Mother Should Know on the Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack, and McCartney had intended it as a “production number”. But his hate for the generational divide was clear too, with the band releasing the song as a chance to bring people together. Speaking on the song in 1994, McCartney said: “I dreamed up Your Mother Should Know as a production number. I’ve always hated generation gaps. I always feel sorry for a parent or a child that doesn’t understand each other.
“A mother not being understood by her child is particularly sad because the mother went through pain to have that child, and so there is this incredible bond of motherly love, like an animal bond between them. But because we mess things up so readily they have one argument and hate each other for the rest of their lives.
“So I was advocating peace between the generations. In Your Mother Should Know, I was basically trying to say your mother might know more than you think she does. Give her credit.”
It was a moment of clarity from McCartney who would slip into surrealist writing in the years to follow The Beatles’ break-up. Speaking in a Q&A session on his website in 2021, McCartney confirmed there was a desire to create surrealist art at the core of his Ram work, which came out clearest of all on Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey. He would also note Monkberry Moon Delight as a surrealist piece of music, which was influenced by his children.
Speaking of the song, he said: “I’d always liked writing love songs, ballads, and rock ‘n’ roll songs, but then one of my other little side interests was to invent surrealist stuff. Admiral Halsey was someone I’d read about – he’s a character from American history – and I just liked the name.
“I was very into surrealism at that particular time, so I wrote songs like Monkberry Moon Delight which is again totally surreal. The word ‘monkberry’ actually came from our kids! That was how they said milk when they were little – ‘can I have some monk?’ – you know, in the way that kids get funny names for things. So, Monkberry Moon Delight to me was like a milkshake!”
McCartney would also single out the “butter pie” lyric of Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey as an example of writing with surrealism in mind. He said: “No, there’s no meaning behind it. Because I like surrealist art, I also like surrealist words.
“A great example of this is Lewis Carroll writing Alice in Wonderland – it’s a crazy thing, you’ve got a cat sitting in a tree that grins and talks, and you’ve got Alice falling down a hole and meeting the red queen, and so on. That whole tradition was something that I loved, and when I met John I learned that he loved it to. So, it was something that became a bond between us.
“I was playing around with that and making up a fictional story, and I just ran into the words ‘and butter pie’. Well, there’s no such thing as a butter pie, that I’ve ever heard of anyway. So, it was a surrealist image, like in surreal art where you have a thing called a ‘hair cup’, which is just a cup that’s made out of fur.”
