PAUL McCARTNEY RECALLS ‘WRITING FAST’ WITH JOHN LENNON

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PAUL McCARTNEY RECALLS ‘WRITING FAST’ WITH JOHN LENNON
MARTIN KIELTY
October 23, 2018


Fox Photos, Getty Images

Paul McCartney recalled how he and John Lennon used to get excited at the prospect of being given a whole week to write a Beatles album.
The duo notched more than 180 co-credits in a period of just a little more than seven years, meaning they wrote an average of 26 songs each year. But they didn’t think there was anything unusual in their prolific output, as McCartney told Uncle Joe Benson on the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show.
“We were used to writing fast,” he said. “You do what you’re used to. You do what, like, they tell you. The way we worked was, we’d be touring, like, all the year – maybe, I don’t know, 300 days out of 365. I think it was more than that. Every night -- you never had a night off.



“And all that happened would be, Brian Epstein, our manager – great manager – would just ring us up and he’s say, ‘Oh, by the way, boys, you’re in the studio in, um, a month’s time, and you can have the week off before it to write the album.’ And me and John would go, ‘Yeah! Great!’ Instead, people now are going, ‘A week?’”
McCartney added that neither of them ever questioned if they’d been given enough time. “It was just the time we were given,” he said. “So I’d go, ‘Oh wow, fantastic, I’ll see you at your place!’ I’d drive out to his place each day of that week, and we’d write a song. Every single session we ever did, we came out with a song.”

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