It’s not always easy to find out what songs are great and which ones are crap as a songwriter. Compared to artists who slave over their instruments for hours on end in the hopes that something brilliant will pop out, most musicians tend to write all the time and then have a hard time whittling down which tunes will do the most damage once they’re put on the album. While Paul McCartney claimed that he and John Lennon never had a dry session working in The Beatles, he knew he hit something great on ‘Here There and Everywhere’.
But if Lennon and McCartney wanted to, they could have easily just played the same kind of music for the rest of their lives and live on in rock history. Their status as ambassadors for the British Invasion put them on the cutting edge of the genre, and their bold experimentation with folk music had already put them one notch above any of their peers when making Rubber Soul.
If that was proof that experimentation worked, though, Revolver was the swan dive into strange territory that they would never return from. It might have been strange hearing ‘Norwegian Wood’, but now the lovable moptops had grown into art-rock weirdos looking to make the wildest innovations of all time with no holds barred.
They wanted to write a funk song about relevant social issues? They wrote ‘Taxman’. McCartney wanted to embrace his inner balladeer? He wrote ‘For No One’. Would people be turned off by Lennon making a psychedelic interpretation of the concept of reincarnation in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’? Answer: Who cares, just run with it.
Although there are multiple moods across the album depending on which song you’re listening to, McCartney cut right to the chase when writing ‘Here There and Everywhere’. Outside of just a handful of overdubs and the occasional guitar break, this is probably one of the most interesting melodies McCartney made, part way between a simple ballad and the kind of tune that wouldn’t feel out of place in a jazz song.
It’s that melodic sensibility that appealed to McCartney before he even finished it, saying, “Sometimes when you write a thing you think, ‘Oh, this is good’, and it’s not a modesty or an immodesty thing, you just… it’s just the same with anything; when you write a piece, you just figure, ‘Oh yeah, I’m on a roll here. This is good; I’m getting the hang of this’. Some pieces are better than others. That was a nice one for me, cos I liked the structure of it and the melody, and I thought it worked.”
Then again, the biggest accolade that ‘Here There and Everywhere’ was being one of the few McCartney tunes that did the impossible: got an actual compliment from Lennon. When working in between sessions, Lennon said that it was one of the finest melodies that McCartney had ever written, almost like he was watching his partner slowly coming into his own as a seasoned songwriter pro.
Most artists have to work to get their songs to sound this great, but the number of hours McCartney spent in front of his guitar led him here. After spending all that time refining his craft, this is when a magical song fell out of the sky for him.
