I am doing a story of a historical piece for my TOastmaster's Speech ATM-B #8 from the Story Telling Manual. Here it goes.
I believe that the one of the most brilliant song ever is: "Yesterday" written and performed by Paul McCartney.
How can you say these lyrics and not feel sad?
"Why she had to go,
I don't know she wouldn't say
I said something wrong?
Now I long for yesterday."
Now I will tell you a story of about how the song "Yesterday" was written.
It all happened because of a dream. Paul McCartney composed the entire melody in a dream one night in his flat in London, England which belong to his girlfriend (Jane Asher). He woke up, turned on a recorder, and went to his piano and played the piece so that he wouldn't forget the tune and avoid letting the melody slip in to the recesses of his mind.
His first concern what that he was plagiarizing someone else's work subconsciously. So he went to different musician friends for about a month to make sure that they have never heard the piece before or anything like the piece before. Paul said, "
it was like handing something in to the police. I thought if no-one had claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it."
After nobody had claimed the song as their own, Paul went and worked on writing lyrics for the song. His working title for "Yesterday" was "Scrambled Eggs."
This is a quote from Paul's Biography: "Many Years from Now":
"So first of all I checked this lovely melody out, and people said to me, 'NO, it's lovely, and I'm sure it's all yours.' It took me a little while to allow myself to claim it, but then like a prospector I finally staked my claim; struck a little sign on it and said, 'Okay, it's mine!' It had no words. I used to call it 'Scrambled Eggs'."Paul ususally played "Scrambled Eggs", on the set of
Help! until the director though the song was very annoying and threatened for Paul to finish writing the song or he will take away the piano.
Paul had claimed that the song was written during the Beatles' tour in France in 1964; however,the Beatles released two albums that "Yesterday" could have been on. It is said that the other members didn't like the song very much and got rejected during those two albums or a disagreement between George Martin and Paul over the arrangement of the song.
Finally, the break through of the lyrics came in May 1965 during a trip to Portugal. Paul started off with three sylable words: da-da-da, Yes-ter-day, Fun-il-ly, Sud-den-ly, mer-ril-y. And then rhymed the last syllable with the end of each line of the verse. It was easy to write the rest of the piece because so many words end with an "a" sound or a "ee" sound.
Musicologist in 2003 found remarkable lyric and rhyming schemes resemblance between "Yesterday" and Nat King Cole's "Answer Me". However, Paul McCartney's publicists deny this.
Some facts about the song "Yesterday"
Guiness book of World records suggests that there are over 3000 different cover versions of "Yesterday" Including: Boyz II Men, Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles.
Yesterday was played on the Radio more than 7 million times in the 20th century alone.
Muzak has 500 different cover versions of "Yesterday"
Bob Dylan and John Lennon didn't think that the song was good even though Bob Dylan recorded the song 4 years later.
MTV and Rolling Stone declared "Yesterday" to be the best written song since 1963.
The song was written in the key of Fmaj.
This song is not a typical Paul McCartney song, being sad and reflective.
When you hear a song on the radio, do you think about how a song is written, why it is written and what is the purpose? Or because that songwriter heard the melody in a dream saw the vision to write it and made it happen with unbelievable results.
I got this information from Wikipedia.org/wiki/Yesterday_(song).
