Paul McCartney has claimed that “dozens” of potential Beatles songs were lost as he and John Lennon would frequently forget their work before getting the opportunity to record it.
The bassist was talking to The Evening Standard about how new recording devices have fundamentally changed the songwriting process, revealing that songs he co-wrote with Lennon in the 1960s were often forgotten the morning after.
“Things have changed quite a bit,” said Sir Paul. “You’ve got recording devices now which change the songwriting process. For instance, John and I didn’t have them when we first started writing, we would write a song and just have to remember it.
“And there was always the risk that we’d just forget it. If the next morning you couldn’t remember it – it was gone. In actual fact you had to write songs that were memorable, because you had to remember them or they were lost! There must have been dozens lost this way.
“We didn’t have tape recorders. Now you can do it on your phone. So you would have to form the thing, have it all finished, remember it all, go in pretty quickly and record it. Now, because you can get things down on a device, I’ve got millions of things I want to record and do.”
McCartney has recently been collaborating with Kanye West, describing himself as feeling “lucky” and “flattered” to be working with the rap star. “It’s good to connect with different artists,” he said. “The secret is I keep myself very open to suggestions – I still feel like I’m about 30…. I’m lucky that someone like Kanye would go, ‘Yes I would like to work with Paul McCartney’. I was quite flattered.”
McCartney previously compared collaborating with West to working with Lennon. He told The Sun, “When I wrote with John, he would sit down with a guitar… We’d ping-pong till we had a song. [Working with West] was like that.”
