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