In the mid-1990s, Paul McCartney was in a Beatles mode. He had been deeply involved in The Bealtes Anthology project, which included a ten-part documentary on the history of the Beatles as well as an archive album series with outtakes and alternate versions of Beatles tracks. It was very likely his deepest immersion into his old band since he’d left it in 1970.
While the Anthology albums were released in 1995-96, EMI did not want McCartney to release a solo album. McCartney told Billboard magazine, “I was almost insulted at first, but realised that it would be silly to go out against yourself in the form of the Beatles. So I fell in with the idea and thought, ‘Great, I don’t even have to think about an album.’”
In the interim, McCartney kept himself busy with his second classical album Standing Stone, but as the Anthology series was drawing to a near, he had also written and recorded most of the material for his next proper solo album. That would be Flaming Pie, released on 5 May 1997, half a year after the last Anthology collection. As soon as a new solo album was welcomed from him again, he was ready.
The album McCartney had prepared turned out to be heavily inspired by his work on Anthology – not just musically, but especially the work ethos. In Flaming Pie’s liner notes, he said: ”The Anthology was very good for me because it reminded me of the Beatles’ standards and the standards that we reached with the songs. So in a way it was a refresher course that set the framework for this album. Watching The Anthology also reminded me of the time that we didn’t take to make an album, and of the fun we had when we did one. The Beatles were not a serious group.”
Somedays is one of the secret weapons of the Flaming Pie album. It was not one of the singles, is not a track that has been performed much live, and is almost unassuming in its inclusion. But if you look closer, you’ll find one of the best tracks McCartney ever wrote and recorded. It is a more mature Yesterday, a song with genuine sentiment, feeling almost naked in its message and arrangement, and it is all the better for it.
The song is a tender expression of how precious and fragile love can be. The lyrics would soon seem like a terrible premonition when a few months later, McCartney’s wife Linda would be diagnosed with breast cancer; a fact that would cast a shadow of hopelessness and anguish over them.
No matter how many songs a composer may have created, mental mind-games are often employed to light the fuse, one of which is imposing arbitrary deadlines on completing a song. Somedays was written under such a deadline. The date was 18 March 1994. Paul was driving Linda to a house in a village near their own, where she would be photographed for a cookery assignment. He had made plans, though. While his wife was being snapped, Paul had plans to spend the time writing an entirely new song, totally from scratch.
In issue 82 of Club Sandwich (fan club magazine), Paul said: “This was written the day Linda was doing one of her cooking assignments. I went along too, taking an acoustic guitar, and asked the lady in the house we were using if she had a little room where I could go and sit quietly. She offered me her son’s room and I went in there. In these situations I tend to make up a little fantasy, thinking: well, they’re going to be two or three hours, and when it’s all done they’ll say to me: “What did you do?” And I’ll be able to reply, “Oh, I wrote a song!” So I just started writing, with my guitar, and came up with Somedays.”
Knowing that he had only 90 minutes, and the desire to have something to show for when he was asked what he’d been doing, was all the prompting Paul needed to create. The melody and lyric arrived wholly intact. The house-owner’s son made his mark on the song, too, his football ephemera on the wall unconsciously prompting Paul to make footballing analogies in the lyric. Writing with John Lennon was often the same: they wrote quickly, and were often directly inspired by everyday events and objects around them.
McCartney continues: “The first verse came quite well – ‘Somedays I look, I look at you with eyes that shine, somedays I look into your soul.” Then the second and the middle, and whereas, at another time, I might have thought, ‘I’ll leave the words there and finish them next week,’ I finished them there and then. John and I used to do this too, occasionally: I don’t think we ever really took more than three or four hours on a song. I’d go to visit him, he’d come to visit me, and we’d sit down and write.”
Somedays I look
I look at you with eyes that shine
Somedays I don’t
I don’t believe that you are mineIt’s no good asking me what time of day it is
Who won the match or scored the goal
Somedays I look
Somedays I look into your soul
McCartney wrote about the track in his coffee-table set of books titled The Lyrics: 1956 to Present, which in spite of their sheer size and weight, and its title, only covers a fraction of the songs in his catalogue (154 in total). Making the selection would imply that a song is considered significant enough in some way.
In that book, he says: “The title came from that first line, ‘Somedays I look,’ which is followed by the repetition of ‘I look.’ ‘Somedays I look / I look at you with eyes that shine / Somedays I don’t / I don’t believe that you are mine.’ It’s that little trick of repeating the phrase, of reinforcing it, that makes the lyric work. It drives it like a little dynamo. My grammar school education taught me that it’s a rhetorical device apparently known as anadiplosis, but essentially, it’s repetition. You think you’re going one way, and then there’s a little surprise and it takes you another. I like playing with phrases, dancing round words, shuffling them like a deck of cards.”
The core of the song is very basic, only containing an acoustic guitar, a Spanish guitar, bass guitar, and vocals. Paul played all of this himself, and sang his lyrics eloquently. The magic of love, the poignancy of nostalgia for one’s youth that escapes into the distance – only with vocals and acoustic guitar – was captured in a single take. Paul overdubbed his 5-string Wal bass and a short solo on Spanish guitar (bought in Australia on suggestion by guitarist John Williams) playing call-and-response notes that sound like falling tears and leave a lump in our throats. The word ‘mine’ as sung by Paul during the last verse is one of the most touching moments of McCartney’s career.
Some days I don’t
I don’t believe that you are mine
“I’m not a great reader into moods,” McCartney goes on to say in The Lyrics. “I don’t naturally say that if I wrote a sad song then I was sad that day, or if I wrote a happy song I was happy. I wrote Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I know a Desmond or a Molly. I compose songs like playwrights write a play. They don’t have to know everyone in the play, they don’t have to know anyone in the play, it’s just a product of their imagination. I remember George Harrison saying to me once: “I always have to write from something that’s happened to me, something in my experience.” Well, that’s certainly a good way to write but I’m more fluid, more flexible than that. Sometimes.”
That’s the core of the song right there. A straightforward sentiment, performed with vocals, guitar, bass, and a little Spanish guitar. All of this performed by Paul during a studio session on 1 November 1995. It was kept simple and very direct. But was it finished? Not quite. Paul had a feeling it could benefit from some subtle orchestration.
At this time McCartney was occasionally meeting with George Martin at Abbey Road, sifting through unissued archive Beatles recordings for the Anthology project. During one such session, he asked Martin if he would listen to Somedays and consider scoring it for an orchestra. Martin gave it a listen, and the response was “I see you haven’t lost your touch!” Martin proceeded to prepare a magnificent orchestral score in an eighteenth-century fashion, reminiscent of Beatles tracks like For No One or Yesterday.
“When I heard Somedays, it immediately reminded me of the vintage Paul,” said George Martin in the Flaming Pie radio special. “It’s quite difficult to keep writing hits. Even when you know the greatest hitmaker of all. It was nice to see that Paul was getting back to his roots because I think Somedays is a classic song. I think it’s one of those simple ones, deceivingly simple, but so difficult to write. I loved it, I thought it was terrific. When I listen[ed] to it and then Paul said “what do you think we should do then,” I thought it needed small forces, I needed a chamber group again. So when I scored it, it was very simple instrumentation and I gave a kind of idea of what it would be. He liked it.”
“George Martin called this song ‘deceivingly simple’,” McCartney wrote in his Lyrics books. “He would have known, because he was one of the best at making the complex seem simple. That’s why he was always my arranger of choice. I’d known him a long time – most of my professional life, in fact – since The Beatles did our artist test with him for EMI when I was a few days shy of my twentieth birthday. I’d worked with him so much that I knew if I wanted a nice arrangement on something, it would be a delight to ring him up and say, ‘Hey George, are you interested in doing a thing together?’ He was a true gentleman, and like a second father to me, and always the grown-up in the room, with that delightfully plummy English accent of his.”
A 14-piece ensemble overdubbed their contribution on 10 June 1996. The orchestra was conducted by David Snell, and contained four violins, two cellos, two violas, two flutes, and one each of alto flute, oboe, harp, and percussion (in the shape of a military drum).
Said percussion/military drum was played by Gary Kettel. “George Martin contacted me,” Kettel said. “Over the years I had done a few things with him and Paul… I had previously played tympani on We All Stand Together. McCartney in a way was in awe of George Martin but Paul always knew what he wanted. He made suggestions like ‘more crescendo’ even though he’s not an academically trained musician. He would let the musicians have their say and was very open to suggestions. I played a military drum together with a small chamber orchestra. I remember that it came out really nice… We played some nice music which, as free-lance players, is not always the case!”
Kettel has a good story to tell about McCartney: “I was walking out from Abbey Road Studios after a recording and I was waiting to cross. A car stopped to let me go, and the passenger window in the front went down and a voice said, ‘What are you doing on my crossing?’ It was Paul!”
The song also features a lovely harpsicord part, which likely showed up around the time the orchestral arrangement was added. It is however not credited to anyone, and could well have been played by Paul himself.
A rough mix of Somedays containing an extra verse was included in a Flaming Pie promotional tape, circulated on 30 January 1997. His 1999 album Working Classical features a version of the song for strings only.
“Somedays is a good little song,” McCartney modestly concludes in his Lyrics books. “For me, it’s very meaningful. Looking into a soul; it’s what you try to do in a relationship, yet don’t often succeed at. The lyric contains some contradictory ideas, but its purpose is to support the song rather than be a lyric on its own, so it’s quite liberating. I know this might sound odd, but the lyric and the song are two slightly different things.”
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