Paul McCartney’s Regretful Moment With His Mother That Inspired “Yesterday”

Nothing sticks to the heart quite like regrets about parents and close family—a lesson Paul McCartney was well aware of as he penned the Beatles hit track “Yesterday” about a regretful moment with his mother. The painful memory was fleeting, seconds at best, but nevertheless, the feelings stayed. Thanks to McCartney’s award-winning song, those emotions are now immortalized in the great musical canon.

The former Beatle shared the inspiration behind “Yesterday” on an episode of McCartney: A Life in Lyrics with poet Paul Muldoon.

Paul McCartney’s Regretful Moment With His Mother

Paul McCartney was only 24 when he wrote “Yesterday,” and although he didn’t originally believe the song to be about his mother, he later realized it likely was. The young musician had lost his mother ten years earlier due to an embolism following breast cancer surgery. Without this context, life-weary lyrics like I’m not half the man I used to be might fall flat from someone just barely into their 20s.

But imagine these lyrics in the heart and mind of a boy missing his mom, and suddenly, Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say, cuts like a knife. McCartney recalled a painful story memory he had of his mother in McCartney: A Life in Lyrics. “I remember very clearly one day feeling very embarrassed because I embarrassed my mom. We’re out in the backyard, and she talked posh. She was of Irish origin, and she was a nurse. So, she was above street level. She would talk a little bit posh.”

“She said something like this,” McCartney said, imitating his mother’s light, Welsh-adjacent accent. “‘Paul, will you go arsk him tomorrow.’ ‘Arsk! Arsk! It’s ask, Mom,’” McCartney recalled replying. “She just got a little embarrassed. I remember later thinking, ‘God, I wish I’d never said that.’ It stuck with me.” After his mother died, McCartney regretted the interaction even more. I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday.

When The Beatle Realized Who The Song Was Really About

During the “Yesterday” installment of McCartney: A Life in Lyrics, Paul McCartney lightheartedly teased his younger self for writing such somber lyrics at an arguably easygoing time in his life. “God,” McCartney scoffed. “It’s been a hard life. But mind you, it had. I’d lost my mother ten years before that, and somebody did suggest to me that this was a ‘losing my mother’ song. I always said, ‘Nah, I don’t think so.’”

The more McCartney thought about it, however, the more he realized this was likely the case. The feelings of confusion he artfully imbues in the lyrics of “Yesterday” seem to reflect how he felt as a young boy watching his mother succumb to cancer during a time when families didn’t discuss those types of hard truths with the younger children. When McCartney sings, There’s a shadow hanging over me, it doesn’t take much convincing to believe that “shadow” is grief.

“Does this happen?” McCartney mused. “Do you find yourself unconsciously putting songs into ‘girl’ lyrics that are really your dead mother? I suspect it might be true. It fits if you look at the lyrics.”

Photo by Fiona Adams/Redferns