April 17, 2024 • 28 mins
Coming at the end of an intensely creative period, The Beatles’ Abbey Road features some of the most adventurous compositions in the quartet’s catalog. It's fitting then that the album concludes with one of the most inventive and famous medley committed to record. To close season two of “A Life in Lyrics” McCartney discusses The Beatles’ send off to recording: “Golden Slumbers”, “Carry That Weight” and “The End.”
“McCartney: A Life in Lyrics” is a co-production between iHeart Media, MPL and Pushkin Industries.
The series was produced by Pejk Malinovski and Sara McCrea; written by Sara McCrea; edited by Dan O’Donnell and Sophie Crane; mastered by Jason Gambrell with assistance from Jake Gorski and sound design by Pejk Malinovski. The series is executive produced by Leital Molad, Justin Richmond, Lee Eastman and Scott Rodger.
Thanks to Lee Eastman, Richard Ewbank, Scott Rodger, Aoife Corbett and Steve Ithell.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hi, everyone, it's Paul Molldoin. Before we get to this episode,
I wanted to let you know that you can binge
all twelve episodes of McCartney A Life and Lyrics right now,
add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin
Plus on the McCartney A Life and Lyrics Show, pedge
(00:41):
in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm slash Plus.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
I think it was like an operatic undertaking.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
We had this little bit and that little bit of
the song King Polatine Pam, all these little bathroom window,
all these little things that John I always would tend
to just finish the frightening into a full song. But
at this point we kind of had enough songs for
the album. We had these fragments, so we hit upon
(01:19):
this idea to put the fragments together into a madly
and then it would have its own fullness.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
How was that?
Speaker 5 (01:29):
And then I wanted an end, and I just happened
to think of this little couplet, which in school I
had learned that was often how Shakespeare ended with a
rhyming couple, and I always thought that was pretty cool
that it told his audience at the time that's it, folks.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
I'm Paul muldun For a while now, I've been fortunate
to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of
the era, and.
Speaker 5 (02:33):
Will you look at me, I'm going on to I'm
actually a performer.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
That is, Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a
book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred
and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours
of our conversations.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
It was like going back to an old snapshot album
looking back on work I hadn't ever analyzed.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir,
and an improvised journey with one of the most conic
figures in popular music. In this episode, the entire Abbey
Road Medley Golden Slumbers carry that with and the end.
(03:20):
As a poet, I tend to approach song lyrics as
if they were indeed poetry. Sometimes these readings are a stretch,
but Paul McCartney takes pride in his literary background. In fact,
he says that had his music career not taken off,
he may well have been an English.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Teacher and.
Speaker 6 (03:49):
The lot.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Busy McCartney's choice to conclude Abbey Road with a rhyming couplet,
hearkens back to a long tradition of endings.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
For never was a story of more woe than this
of Juliet and her robio.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Shakespeare often marked the end of a scene with a
rhyming couplet, which signals to the audience some degree of finality.
The couplet indicates the completion of a thought.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
If the two lines and Paul McCartney's the end function
as a concluding couplet, I have come to understand the
entire Abbey Road Medley golden slumbers carry that wit and
then the end as a sort of figurative sonnet. It's
(05:11):
not that Paul McCartney ended Abbey Road with fourteen perfect
lines in iambic pentameter. There aren't three quatrains following a
rigid rhyme scheme leading into the couplet at the end.
This is rock and roll, after all. But when we
(05:37):
zoom out, a sonnet is often a poem that wrestles
with a particular claim, approaches it from several angles indivisible
sections before coming to a sort of synthesizing conclusion. It's
a rhetorical argument. The poet plays out on the page,
and the couplet at the end serves as a resolution.
(06:00):
As McCartney put it, the ending says that's it, folks.
In other words, these two lines, the only lyrics in
(06:24):
the song, are deceptively simple to understand them. Let's return
to the first song of the medley, the first stanza,
if you will golden slumbers.
Speaker 7 (06:39):
Once there was away.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
To get back on.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Paul McCartney was raised towards the end of the golden
edge of piano music. Yes, in the mid twentieth century,
records were ubiquitous, but it was still not uncommon for
families or party guests to gather around the piano in
the living room.
Speaker 5 (07:06):
You read about Gershwin and it says, you know, in
New York at that type, every apartment, every building had
a piano.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
That was the one thing they all had.
Speaker 5 (07:17):
So I do think a lot of Golden era music
came out of that fact. That was the thing, that
many houses had a piano. So yeah, there were lots
(07:38):
of pianists. My dad was our warm his friend at
the Cotton Exchange. Freddie Rimmer was another one for his family,
so there was always someone who could sort of play
the piano. And then I think when records came in,
(07:59):
then that's how people started to play their music. Except
you know, whenever there was a gathering the New Year's
Eve do in our case, the boot and the piano
were wheeled out, you know, once.
Speaker 7 (08:15):
There was a way.
Speaker 8 (08:19):
To get back.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
Home, and the piano would be belting out these old
songs that everyone knew like everyone knew them, particularly the Aunties.
The Aunties had them down and knew all the verses.
But the camaraderie of people all standing around in a
(08:42):
room getting drunk singing these songs were something very special.
Speaker 7 (08:59):
Once there was a way.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
To get back home.
Speaker 5 (09:06):
And I always thought my family was just an ordinary family,
but I realized now how lucky I was to have
that kind of a family where people were decent, good,
friendly people, not rich, nobody had any money, but that
(09:26):
was almost an advantage because they had to do things themselves.
Speaker 7 (09:36):
Once those away to get back on work, once those away.
Speaker 8 (09:52):
To get back home, sneed really darnly do not cry,
and I will sing.
Speaker 6 (10:03):
Another by.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
In the final days of the Beatles, McCartney took a
trip back home to Liverpool. He was visiting his father,
who had remarried and was living with his wife, Angela
and her daughter Ruth. Even though Paul McCartney didn't know
how to read sheet music, he went riffling through his
(10:31):
stepsister's piano bench to see what he could find.
Speaker 5 (10:35):
I always look in a piano seat because people always
have sheet they always used to. Definitely now sometimes it
can be empty. But I always look to see. And
this time I think either in the piancy door, it
might have been up on the music stand.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Was his song Golden Slumbers.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
The sheet music here, performed by the Cambridge Singers, was
a Victorian piano melody accompanying a seventeenth century poem called
Cradle Song. The poem came from a play Patient Griselle,
which was written by the Elizabethan dramatists Thomas Dekker, Henry
Chettle and William Hawton.
Speaker 5 (12:06):
Golden Slumbers, fill your eyes, smiles awake when you're a
sleeping I do not cry, And I was sing a
lullaby that chorus that I've used. The churuse literally is
the lyrics to an old Victorian song.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Is thisn't we called sampling? Well, it's called stealing.
Speaker 5 (12:25):
But because I don't read music, I didn't know what
the melody that went with this was.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
So I put my own melody to it and just
took these words.
Speaker 6 (12:51):
You.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
It's turned out to be quite soulful.
Speaker 5 (12:58):
I think that's what attracted me to those lyrics in
the first place.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
It's like, you know, that sort.
Speaker 5 (13:04):
Of consoling a baby or reading kids bedtime story. I
find that something very deep in that, I mean, very
human and international.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
It strikes a chord with me.
Speaker 8 (13:20):
Stay very dary, do not cry, and.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
I will sing another buy. When I saw those lyrics,
golden slumbers fill your eyes, it just seemed like a
beautiful way to say, go to sleep, my dear smiles,
awake you when you rise. I like that too, that's
nice and very optimistic.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
You wear.
Speaker 8 (13:54):
Sleeve very dark, do not cry.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
And then I did the other bit once.
Speaker 5 (14:02):
It was a way to get back home, because I
think at that point.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
I hadn't been home for a long.
Speaker 5 (14:09):
Time to get back and here I was at my
dad's house. Now this wasn't quite home because it was
a house I'd bought him. You know, when I got
some money, so it wasn't quite home, but it was
Liverpool and it was homewood.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
It was his home once those away.
Speaker 5 (14:33):
To get back home.
Speaker 6 (14:36):
Sleep really darn, do not cry, and.
Speaker 5 (14:42):
I will sing. So you know, here I was seeing
this lovely lullaby lyric and thinking of all things warm
and wonderful. And you know what's really nice about is
(15:03):
talking about this touching a nerve in the human psyche.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
One of the things I.
Speaker 5 (15:10):
Love about writing songs is you'll be watching a film
or listen to the radio or something and it'll reappear.
It'll appear with someone else singing it, and I just
love that it's touched their nerve so much so that
they think this would be a good song for this film.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
One of the times golden Slumbers reappeared was in the
twenty sixteen children's film Sing, where the song was covered
by Jennifer Hudson portraying a glamorous and vocally talented animated sheep.
Speaker 5 (16:09):
They use golden slumbers to open the thing, and it's
very powerful, and then right at the end we've had
the whole story and everything's worked out, they use it again.
(16:29):
So you know, people have said to me do you mind
people doing versions of your song to think they're distortions
of your original meaning? And I say no, no, no,
far from it. I'd love to hear another interpretation of
one of my songs is a compliment that they thought
enough of it to cover it. So what's great about
(16:56):
it is the next generation who are watching a kid's
animation thing now know Golden Slumbers for the same reason exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
They now know Blackbird. So I'm not.
Speaker 5 (17:07):
Surprised when people come up to me, O, Little Tommy's
favorite song is Blackbird.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
What was Blackbird used in recently?
Speaker 5 (17:15):
I was used in boss Baby, which is another animation.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
Yeah, I haven't seen that either.
Speaker 5 (17:20):
Another gap in your cultural picture.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
It is.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Okay now, I would be too much to say that
this is a kind of lullaby for the Beatles.
Speaker 5 (17:47):
I think that's too much to say, right, but you
know it, We've been written around that time, and who knows,
you know that I could have been feeling.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Down.
Speaker 5 (18:00):
I actually can't tell you whether this is true or not,
but it's very possible that I was feeling down in
London went back up to see my dad. I'm feeling
better now I'm in Liverpool and thinking of the troubles
down south and thinking, you know, wouldn't it be nice
to get home, wouldn't it be nice to have that
(18:23):
comfortable feeling again once.
Speaker 9 (18:26):
There was away to get back, once there was away.
Speaker 6 (18:47):
To get back.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
There were, indeed, as bon McCartney said, troubled south of
Liverpool about which to feel bad. Down in London, the
Beatles were hashing out their business matters and the very
future of the band. This was the end of the
nineteen sixties. The Beatles were the most famous musics in
the world, but the tensions brewing in the group were
(19:14):
impossible to ignore.
Speaker 6 (19:16):
You never give.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Me John, George and Ringo wanted to sign a deal
with the businessman Alan Klein, but Paul was convinced they
would come to regret that decision. The dispute was tearing
the band apart. It was becoming a heavy burden to bear.
Speaker 5 (19:53):
So that was the heavy that was heavy the business
meeting should go in. They were just soul destroying. Would
sit around and it was a place you didn't want
to be with people you didn't want to be with.
And I could just say that this guy was calling
to steal everything we put in the bank or invested
(20:16):
in Scottish farms or whatever it was was going and
this guy was going to have it like he had
Sam Cook and he had the Stones.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
And I remember asking Mick Jacket for a new one,
said what's this guy like this?
Speaker 5 (20:31):
Because I could see the others were very enamored up
for various reasons. He was was doing a great flannel
job on them.
Speaker 6 (20:40):
You know, I gave new Man, I only said new Man,
and in the middle of the spreads, I break down.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
The band's breakup was so agonizing that McCartney even started
to see it as divine punishment. With the paradise of
the Beatles success crumbling before him, he wondered if Man's
Original Sin could be the blame.
Speaker 5 (21:26):
That whole period a year, a couple of years, was
very sort of heavy, and it seemed to me, you know,
this all tied in very unfortunately with stuff that was
out there already, like Original Sin.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Even though my moment, crystalmccathley, we weren't brought up.
Speaker 5 (21:50):
I thought it was very depressive to think that you
were born a loser.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
FU what chance have you got? You know, not freak
out is you're a sinner. I'm a very nice person.
Speaker 5 (22:08):
Bias because you said or because some priests or some
vicar says loving that.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
And if contemplating the fall of man wasn't enough, the
psychedelic trips at the end of the sixties didn't make
these existential questions any easier.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
You know, we'd started off smoking part right, and it
was just giggles. It was such fun.
Speaker 5 (22:31):
We loved it and it was great and the worst
we've happened is you'd fall asleep, and that was fine.
But once it got into sort of more serious stuff,
you know, let'st staying.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Up all night wishing it had were off. It wouldn't.
Speaker 5 (22:49):
It was a we were heavy. Then you were just
sort of doing it and there wasn't a slight relief.
It was heavy. So you know, this idea, boy, you're
going to carry that weight was sort of.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
Yeah, you know, life's not all joyous.
Speaker 10 (23:07):
There's a weight to it and you're going to have
to carry it.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
When taken as two Stanzas in conversation, Golden slumbers and
carry that wet seem to be a reckoning with the
tenderness and gravity of adulthood. There's a gentle lullaby and
then the burden of conflict, longing for the way things
used to be, and knowing you can never truly return home.
(23:58):
The beginning of the end is a cycle of two
bar guitar solos traded off between John George and Paul.
Jeff Emeric, the Beatles studio engineer, observed that during the
recording session for the end, Paul and George looked like
(24:23):
they had gone back in time, like they were kids again,
determined to outdo one another. Yet there was no animosity,
no tension at all. You could tell they were simply
having fun. After the wistfulness of golden slumbers and the
(24:57):
heaviness of carry that wet, we come to what in
a sonnet would be called a volta a turn. In
this case, the turn of the song leaves behind the
longing and the burden and brings us back to love.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
And love busy.
Speaker 5 (25:34):
That was the end, and in the end, the love
you tip is equal to the love you make, which
is a nice way to end my show. Now that's
how I end my consorts, and it feels very complease. Yeah, so,
I'm kind of proud that it is a rhyming couplet,
just as I was taught all those years ago on
(25:56):
my little literature teacher. But you know the thing is,
you know, I never went on to study because I
was in the band and the band took over. But
that was the path I thought I was headed for
in my eye level in literature?
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Was this medley a lullaby for the Beatles? Was it
meant to capture the sweet, nostalgia, heavy, wet and grand
finale of the group. The End is believed to be
the last song John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and
Paul McCartney ever recorded all together. They'd grown from boys
(27:03):
writing songs in their Liverpool parlor rooms, too, arguably the
most in fluential musicians of the twentieth century, and while
this may have been the end of the group, all
form members continued to share their music with the world.
Speaker 5 (27:21):
When you think about it, it is just a little
combination of vibrations and it shouldn't affect our heart strings,
but boy it does. And music can make you cry,
it can make you laugh, and it shouldn't. It's nothing
(27:42):
more than just vibrations with some words attached. And how
that happens, I'm not sure, but I know it happens.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
I know it happens to me.
Speaker 5 (27:56):
I know it happens to other people, and I'm just
proud that my music can do that.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
I'm not quite sure how, but it can. I don't
mind it being a mystery.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
The end from the Beatles nineteen sixty nine album Abbey
wrote McCartney. A Life in Lyrics is a co production
between iHeartMedia, n p L and Pushkin Industries
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hi, everyone, it's Paul Molldoin. Before we get to this episode,
I wanted to let you know that you can binge
all twelve episodes of McCartney A Life and Lyrics right now,
add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin
Plus on the McCartney A Life and Lyrics Show, pedge
(00:41):
in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm slash Plus.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
I think it was like an operatic undertaking.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
We had this little bit and that little bit of
the song King Polatine Pam, all these little bathroom window,
all these little things that John I always would tend
to just finish the frightening into a full song. But
at this point we kind of had enough songs for
the album. We had these fragments, so we hit upon
(01:19):
this idea to put the fragments together into a madly
and then it would have its own fullness.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
How was that?
Speaker 5 (01:29):
And then I wanted an end, and I just happened
to think of this little couplet, which in school I
had learned that was often how Shakespeare ended with a
rhyming couple, and I always thought that was pretty cool
that it told his audience at the time that's it, folks.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
I'm Paul muldun For a while now, I've been fortunate
to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of
the era, and.
Speaker 5 (02:33):
Will you look at me, I'm going on to I'm
actually a performer.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
That is, Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a
book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred
and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours
of our conversations.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
It was like going back to an old snapshot album
looking back on work I hadn't ever analyzed.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir,
and an improvised journey with one of the most conic
figures in popular music. In this episode, the entire Abbey
Road Medley Golden Slumbers carry that with and the end.
(03:20):
As a poet, I tend to approach song lyrics as
if they were indeed poetry. Sometimes these readings are a stretch,
but Paul McCartney takes pride in his literary background. In fact,
he says that had his music career not taken off,
he may well have been an English.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Teacher and.
Speaker 6 (03:49):
The lot.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Busy McCartney's choice to conclude Abbey Road with a rhyming couplet,
hearkens back to a long tradition of endings.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
For never was a story of more woe than this
of Juliet and her robio.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Shakespeare often marked the end of a scene with a
rhyming couplet, which signals to the audience some degree of finality.
The couplet indicates the completion of a thought.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
If the two lines and Paul McCartney's the end function
as a concluding couplet, I have come to understand the
entire Abbey Road Medley golden slumbers carry that wit and
then the end as a sort of figurative sonnet. It's
(05:11):
not that Paul McCartney ended Abbey Road with fourteen perfect
lines in iambic pentameter. There aren't three quatrains following a
rigid rhyme scheme leading into the couplet at the end.
This is rock and roll, after all. But when we
(05:37):
zoom out, a sonnet is often a poem that wrestles
with a particular claim, approaches it from several angles indivisible
sections before coming to a sort of synthesizing conclusion. It's
a rhetorical argument. The poet plays out on the page,
and the couplet at the end serves as a resolution.
(06:00):
As McCartney put it, the ending says that's it, folks.
In other words, these two lines, the only lyrics in
(06:24):
the song, are deceptively simple to understand them. Let's return
to the first song of the medley, the first stanza,
if you will golden slumbers.
Speaker 7 (06:39):
Once there was away.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
To get back on.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Paul McCartney was raised towards the end of the golden
edge of piano music. Yes, in the mid twentieth century,
records were ubiquitous, but it was still not uncommon for
families or party guests to gather around the piano in
the living room.
Speaker 5 (07:06):
You read about Gershwin and it says, you know, in
New York at that type, every apartment, every building had
a piano.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
That was the one thing they all had.
Speaker 5 (07:17):
So I do think a lot of Golden era music
came out of that fact. That was the thing, that
many houses had a piano. So yeah, there were lots
(07:38):
of pianists. My dad was our warm his friend at
the Cotton Exchange. Freddie Rimmer was another one for his family,
so there was always someone who could sort of play
the piano. And then I think when records came in,
(07:59):
then that's how people started to play their music. Except
you know, whenever there was a gathering the New Year's
Eve do in our case, the boot and the piano
were wheeled out, you know, once.
Speaker 7 (08:15):
There was a way.
Speaker 8 (08:19):
To get back.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
Home, and the piano would be belting out these old
songs that everyone knew like everyone knew them, particularly the Aunties.
The Aunties had them down and knew all the verses.
But the camaraderie of people all standing around in a
(08:42):
room getting drunk singing these songs were something very special.
Speaker 7 (08:59):
Once there was a way.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
To get back home.
Speaker 5 (09:06):
And I always thought my family was just an ordinary family,
but I realized now how lucky I was to have
that kind of a family where people were decent, good,
friendly people, not rich, nobody had any money, but that
(09:26):
was almost an advantage because they had to do things themselves.
Speaker 7 (09:36):
Once those away to get back on work, once those away.
Speaker 8 (09:52):
To get back home, sneed really darnly do not cry,
and I will sing.
Speaker 6 (10:03):
Another by.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
In the final days of the Beatles, McCartney took a
trip back home to Liverpool. He was visiting his father,
who had remarried and was living with his wife, Angela
and her daughter Ruth. Even though Paul McCartney didn't know
how to read sheet music, he went riffling through his
(10:31):
stepsister's piano bench to see what he could find.
Speaker 5 (10:35):
I always look in a piano seat because people always
have sheet they always used to. Definitely now sometimes it
can be empty. But I always look to see. And
this time I think either in the piancy door, it
might have been up on the music stand.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Was his song Golden Slumbers.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
The sheet music here, performed by the Cambridge Singers, was
a Victorian piano melody accompanying a seventeenth century poem called
Cradle Song. The poem came from a play Patient Griselle,
which was written by the Elizabethan dramatists Thomas Dekker, Henry
Chettle and William Hawton.
Speaker 5 (12:06):
Golden Slumbers, fill your eyes, smiles awake when you're a
sleeping I do not cry, And I was sing a
lullaby that chorus that I've used. The churuse literally is
the lyrics to an old Victorian song.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Is thisn't we called sampling? Well, it's called stealing.
Speaker 5 (12:25):
But because I don't read music, I didn't know what
the melody that went with this was.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
So I put my own melody to it and just
took these words.
Speaker 6 (12:51):
You.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
It's turned out to be quite soulful.
Speaker 5 (12:58):
I think that's what attracted me to those lyrics in
the first place.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
It's like, you know, that sort.
Speaker 5 (13:04):
Of consoling a baby or reading kids bedtime story. I
find that something very deep in that, I mean, very
human and international.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
It strikes a chord with me.
Speaker 8 (13:20):
Stay very dary, do not cry, and.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
I will sing another buy. When I saw those lyrics,
golden slumbers fill your eyes, it just seemed like a
beautiful way to say, go to sleep, my dear smiles,
awake you when you rise. I like that too, that's
nice and very optimistic.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
You wear.
Speaker 8 (13:54):
Sleeve very dark, do not cry.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
And then I did the other bit once.
Speaker 5 (14:02):
It was a way to get back home, because I
think at that point.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
I hadn't been home for a long.
Speaker 5 (14:09):
Time to get back and here I was at my
dad's house. Now this wasn't quite home because it was
a house I'd bought him. You know, when I got
some money, so it wasn't quite home, but it was
Liverpool and it was homewood.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
It was his home once those away.
Speaker 5 (14:33):
To get back home.
Speaker 6 (14:36):
Sleep really darn, do not cry, and.
Speaker 5 (14:42):
I will sing. So you know, here I was seeing
this lovely lullaby lyric and thinking of all things warm
and wonderful. And you know what's really nice about is
(15:03):
talking about this touching a nerve in the human psyche.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
One of the things I.
Speaker 5 (15:10):
Love about writing songs is you'll be watching a film
or listen to the radio or something and it'll reappear.
It'll appear with someone else singing it, and I just
love that it's touched their nerve so much so that
they think this would be a good song for this film.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
One of the times golden Slumbers reappeared was in the
twenty sixteen children's film Sing, where the song was covered
by Jennifer Hudson portraying a glamorous and vocally talented animated sheep.
Speaker 5 (16:09):
They use golden slumbers to open the thing, and it's
very powerful, and then right at the end we've had
the whole story and everything's worked out, they use it again.
(16:29):
So you know, people have said to me do you mind
people doing versions of your song to think they're distortions
of your original meaning? And I say no, no, no,
far from it. I'd love to hear another interpretation of
one of my songs is a compliment that they thought
enough of it to cover it. So what's great about
(16:56):
it is the next generation who are watching a kid's
animation thing now know Golden Slumbers for the same reason exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
They now know Blackbird. So I'm not.
Speaker 5 (17:07):
Surprised when people come up to me, O, Little Tommy's
favorite song is Blackbird.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
What was Blackbird used in recently?
Speaker 5 (17:15):
I was used in boss Baby, which is another animation.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
Yeah, I haven't seen that either.
Speaker 5 (17:20):
Another gap in your cultural picture.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
It is.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Okay now, I would be too much to say that
this is a kind of lullaby for the Beatles.
Speaker 5 (17:47):
I think that's too much to say, right, but you
know it, We've been written around that time, and who knows,
you know that I could have been feeling.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Down.
Speaker 5 (18:00):
I actually can't tell you whether this is true or not,
but it's very possible that I was feeling down in
London went back up to see my dad. I'm feeling
better now I'm in Liverpool and thinking of the troubles
down south and thinking, you know, wouldn't it be nice
to get home, wouldn't it be nice to have that
(18:23):
comfortable feeling again once.
Speaker 9 (18:26):
There was away to get back, once there was away.
Speaker 6 (18:47):
To get back.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
There were, indeed, as bon McCartney said, troubled south of
Liverpool about which to feel bad. Down in London, the
Beatles were hashing out their business matters and the very
future of the band. This was the end of the
nineteen sixties. The Beatles were the most famous musics in
the world, but the tensions brewing in the group were
(19:14):
impossible to ignore.
Speaker 6 (19:16):
You never give.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Me John, George and Ringo wanted to sign a deal
with the businessman Alan Klein, but Paul was convinced they
would come to regret that decision. The dispute was tearing
the band apart. It was becoming a heavy burden to bear.
Speaker 5 (19:53):
So that was the heavy that was heavy the business
meeting should go in. They were just soul destroying. Would
sit around and it was a place you didn't want
to be with people you didn't want to be with.
And I could just say that this guy was calling
to steal everything we put in the bank or invested
(20:16):
in Scottish farms or whatever it was was going and
this guy was going to have it like he had
Sam Cook and he had the Stones.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
And I remember asking Mick Jacket for a new one,
said what's this guy like this?
Speaker 5 (20:31):
Because I could see the others were very enamored up
for various reasons. He was was doing a great flannel
job on them.
Speaker 6 (20:40):
You know, I gave new Man, I only said new Man,
and in the middle of the spreads, I break down.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
The band's breakup was so agonizing that McCartney even started
to see it as divine punishment. With the paradise of
the Beatles success crumbling before him, he wondered if Man's
Original Sin could be the blame.
Speaker 5 (21:26):
That whole period a year, a couple of years, was
very sort of heavy, and it seemed to me, you know,
this all tied in very unfortunately with stuff that was
out there already, like Original Sin.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Even though my moment, crystalmccathley, we weren't brought up.
Speaker 5 (21:50):
I thought it was very depressive to think that you
were born a loser.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
FU what chance have you got? You know, not freak
out is you're a sinner. I'm a very nice person.
Speaker 5 (22:08):
Bias because you said or because some priests or some
vicar says loving that.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
And if contemplating the fall of man wasn't enough, the
psychedelic trips at the end of the sixties didn't make
these existential questions any easier.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
You know, we'd started off smoking part right, and it
was just giggles. It was such fun.
Speaker 5 (22:31):
We loved it and it was great and the worst
we've happened is you'd fall asleep, and that was fine.
But once it got into sort of more serious stuff,
you know, let'st staying.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Up all night wishing it had were off. It wouldn't.
Speaker 5 (22:49):
It was a we were heavy. Then you were just
sort of doing it and there wasn't a slight relief.
It was heavy. So you know, this idea, boy, you're
going to carry that weight was sort of.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
Yeah, you know, life's not all joyous.
Speaker 10 (23:07):
There's a weight to it and you're going to have
to carry it.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
When taken as two Stanzas in conversation, Golden slumbers and
carry that wet seem to be a reckoning with the
tenderness and gravity of adulthood. There's a gentle lullaby and
then the burden of conflict, longing for the way things
used to be, and knowing you can never truly return home.
(23:58):
The beginning of the end is a cycle of two
bar guitar solos traded off between John George and Paul.
Jeff Emeric, the Beatles studio engineer, observed that during the
recording session for the end, Paul and George looked like
(24:23):
they had gone back in time, like they were kids again,
determined to outdo one another. Yet there was no animosity,
no tension at all. You could tell they were simply
having fun. After the wistfulness of golden slumbers and the
(24:57):
heaviness of carry that wet, we come to what in
a sonnet would be called a volta a turn. In
this case, the turn of the song leaves behind the
longing and the burden and brings us back to love.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
And love busy.
Speaker 5 (25:34):
That was the end, and in the end, the love
you tip is equal to the love you make, which
is a nice way to end my show. Now that's
how I end my consorts, and it feels very complease. Yeah, so,
I'm kind of proud that it is a rhyming couplet,
just as I was taught all those years ago on
(25:56):
my little literature teacher. But you know the thing is,
you know, I never went on to study because I
was in the band and the band took over. But
that was the path I thought I was headed for
in my eye level in literature?
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Was this medley a lullaby for the Beatles? Was it
meant to capture the sweet, nostalgia, heavy, wet and grand
finale of the group. The End is believed to be
the last song John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and
Paul McCartney ever recorded all together. They'd grown from boys
(27:03):
writing songs in their Liverpool parlor rooms, too, arguably the
most in fluential musicians of the twentieth century, and while
this may have been the end of the group, all
form members continued to share their music with the world.
Speaker 5 (27:21):
When you think about it, it is just a little
combination of vibrations and it shouldn't affect our heart strings,
but boy it does. And music can make you cry,
it can make you laugh, and it shouldn't. It's nothing
(27:42):
more than just vibrations with some words attached. And how
that happens, I'm not sure, but I know it happens.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
I know it happens to me.
Speaker 5 (27:56):
I know it happens to other people, and I'm just
proud that my music can do that.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
I'm not quite sure how, but it can. I don't
mind it being a mystery.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
The end from the Beatles nineteen sixty nine album Abbey
wrote McCartney. A Life in Lyrics is a co production
between iHeartMedia, n p L and Pushkin Industries
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