"Let It Be" may not have been the only Beatles song about Paul McCartney's late mom, who died from an embolism due to complications from breast cancer surgery when he was 14 years old.
"Yesterday," released in 1965, features McCartney singing and playing an acoustic guitar, with only a a string quartet as his backup. The Beatles' first solo performance topped the charts and has gone on to become one of the most covered songs in recorded music.
The song is also often associated with the loss of a lover. However, nearly 60 years later, McCartney has pondered whether the song has a deeper meaning for him.
On his podcast, "McCartney: A Life in Lyrics," McCartney said some of the song's lyrics may have really been about his loss of his mom as a boy.
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Noting that he had written the song ten years after losing his mother, McCartney said that the lyrics, "Why she had to go / I don't know, she wouldn't say" may be in reference to the tragic experience.
"Losing your mother to cancer, no one said anything, we didn't know what it was at all," McCartney reflected. "It may be, because there is so much tumult in your youth, and your formative years, that you can't appreciate it all. Sometimes it's only in retrospect that you can appreciate it."
"I remember very clearly one day, because I embarrassed my mom," McCartney continued. "We were out in the backyard, and she talked posh compared to us. She was of Irish origin, and she was a nurse, so she was above street level."
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McCartney said that he corrected his mother's pronunciation of "ask," causing her to be embarrassed.
"And it stuck with me," McCartney said. "You know, even after she died."
"I've got a couple of those little things," McCartney said. "I wonder, 'I said something wrong?'"
McCartney said that he, at first, did not believe that experiences with his late mom could be unconsciously planted into what he called "girl lyrics," but now he thinks there may be something to the theory
"I suspect it might be true. It sort of fits, if you look at the lyrics," McCartney said.
