January 17, 1964. London, England. 7:30 AM
Paul McCartney has just woken up from a vivid dream. He has a melody in his head that he can’t shake. Not wanting to forget it, he hurries to the piano in his girlfriend Jane Asher’s house to play it.
It’s a winner in his mind. But he wonders if the melody was something he heard someplace else. More than anything, McCartney doesn’t want to plagiarize the work of someone else. He says as much in an interview done years later.
“For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it.”
Once he made peace with the idea the melody was his, he set about putting lyrics to it. Initially, the working title was Scrambled Eggs. The first line went:
“Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs/Not as much as I love scrambled eggs”
Later, McCartney reworked the lyrics, and the song was release on the album Help! in August, 1965 as Yesterday. It’s now one of The Beatles most iconic songs.
Don’t you wish the answers to life’s most perplexing problems could be revealed in your dreams? I know I do.
Now I’m not sure how Yesterday slipped into McCartney’s Mind’s Ear in his sleep, but I can imagine it’s because his brain was laser-focused on making good music. Before The Beatles made it big on the world stage, they played for years in Hamburg, Germany’s strip clubs. These were marathon sessions which required them to perform for hours at a time. Their music explored different genres, probably used as ways to keep the music coming. I wonder if that’s what trained McCartney’s brain to create great music, spontaneously in his subconscious?
If that’s true, then what are you programing your brain with? Is it positive, useful things or harmful, negative thoughts? Are you hanging around with positive people who look out for your best interests or negative people who want to bring you down to their level?
A few thousand years ago, Buddha declared that “The mind is everything. What you think you become.” A modern twist on this is garbage in, garbage out.
This week, look at what you’re feeding your mind. It also may mean looking at who you surround yourself with.
Negativity is all around us these days. Don’t let it find its way into your subconscious too.