The Beatles Multiverse Album

You Can Make Me Free

Paul had had this song kicking around since 1977 when, after the unexpected success of the live version of “Maybe I'm Amazed,” he realized he needed a kick-ass piano love song to follow it up. Never satisfied with the words, he continued to shelve it until the idea to harken to other Beatles songs lit the dormant fire in his somewhat puzzler-ific mind.  

Though he could tell you others, it’s very clear that the majority of his references are to his work on the White Album, specifically “Blackbird” (“I can take to the skies/I can soar like a bird/won’t you color my eyes I’ve been waiting so long”) and “I Will” (“If I must wait a lonely lifetime”) which then probably impishly made him include the words “Little Child,” (a song from their 2nd LP, “With the Beatles”) in the beginning of the song, because they nearly suffered a ‘My Sweet Lord” lawsuit from the Disney, whose song “Whistle My Love” they may have borrowed from.  Paul said since he saw the film, the line “If I could find a singer with a love song in his throat, I’d rob the poor box to pay him his fee” always stayed with him when he was struggling to write a song and for this one, that line was especially haunting.  

She's the One

The death of Linda McCartney during the recording of the album was not just bad luck, but something that hit all of the Beatles, who had already struggled with death in their past but now publicly, too, drove John to try and do something for Paul to which would be meaningful.  

“You obviously couldn’t get him a present, since he had everything he wanted,” said John in the Rolling Stone interview that followed the LP’s release,  so John tried to write him a song a la “The Two of Us,” Paul’s song about their young love, but maybe with a lot of “Don’t Let Me Down” in it.  Try as he might, John couldn’t make it less sad, so he asked George to look at it, who insisted its tone was “just what was called for,” and suggested John actually sing it, in the same high register he sang the song “Love” from Plastic Ono Band two decades earlier.  

I was her
She was me
We were one
We were free
And if there's somebody calling me on
She's the one

Giles Martin, George’s son, who was assisting on the record, suggested that they make it a “Hey Jude” replica in at least form.  John, knowing Paul wanted it to be “Beatle’d Up” decided to try and bookend a chapter that started with “All You Need is Love.”  In that song, they sing:

Nothing you can say,
but you can learn how to play the game

so John wrote 

When you said what you want to say
and you know the way you want to play it
you’ll be so high you'll be flying. 

And in the second verse,
There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known
nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.

in this song he wrote

When you get to where you were want to go
and you know the things you want to know you’re smiling.’

Obvious references to marijuana, Paul and Linda’s favorite pastime, are frequent and self-evident.  Paul was delighted, not just because of how talented and caring his friend turned out to be, but because he had written a song with a good bit of commercial potential.

Bad Day

Paul knew that if there were another Beatles album, he was going to answer John’s taunt that he was ‘just another day,’ and did so with this much more aggressive chapter in what he called his “Day trilogy”, of Yesterday, Another Day and now “Bad Day.” In Yesterday, the singer is struck with sorrow; in Another Day the listener is struck with sympathy, and in “Bad Day” we are sharing the experience” said Paul.  Paul loved the “Hey Jude” reference, where “you sing a sad song” to turn it around.” At John’s insistence, they tried the line with “make it better” but it never worked with song structure.  

Sideways

Another song fragment John came in with which the boys called “These feelings won’t go away.”  John kept on and on singing it out loud till everyone in the studio had the earworm, which frustratingly didn’t go away even when he we came up with another line “there are no words to describe it,” to which George found himself muttering “I have some words to describe it.”  

Ringo was the savior of this particular song, twice, when in the telling the story of his own experience with stalkers, said of the experience “it knocked me sideways,” prompting Paul to suggest that was piece of the puzzle they were missing, and it was.  

The song came together rather quickly, and with its slight composition, lent itself to adding ‘Beatleology’:  The lines ‘diamonds they fade, but flowers they bloom” were a nod to “Lucy in the Sky” and when they were stuck again later in the song, Ringo suggested adding a section in another language for the “International Fans” and that his wife, fluent in Italian was working on her French he said offhandedly,  “In French or in English” which cracked up John and Paul, who insisted it be the next line. John suggested it was a “Michelle” callback, and he asked, and got, the Flux Fiddlers to reunite to give the string that “Imagine” LP feel. 

Cigarettes And Chocolate Milk

During the sessions an obvious question about whether or not Ringo would have a song hung in the room like an 800lb pound gorilla that everyone ignored for the first three weeks. Ringo didn’t have anything that made the grade, and John had been nursing a song fragment about the diet he had lived on the first few weeks after the attack which was just sushi rice and cigarettes.  He had experimented with a few substitutes, including chocolate milk, and played with the words.   One late night, he played  it for Paul, who liked it and suggested that it include a ‘music hall’ section “It isn’t very smart…tends to make one's part so broken hearted.” to keep it from being ‘a kid’s song about cigarettes.” 

The record company objected to the song when they saw it listed on the acetate but the Beatles simply said that the record would be 100% intact or Paul’s old record company would love to have it. 

Look What You've Done

When John, after getting through his Janovian screaming, tried to write a song about his feelings of the assassin, he went back to “Sexy Sadie”, one of the last times he was mad at someone other than Paul.  He put the line in “You’ve made a fool of everyone” as a placeholder, which he meant to replace, but when he sung it for Paul, he loved it and insisted he leave it in. 

Blue

The desire to feature John and Paul in harmony was not just Paul but also George (and Linda)’s wanting. John had written a song ostensibly about Yoko but really about Paul that they thought would be perfect.  With few lyrics, it was called “You,” but George already had a song with that title and didn’t want to competing in the history of the Beatles catalogue. John cattily suggested “while why don’t you have Bob Dylan come up with a title, then?” And Ringo suggested “Tangled up in Blue,” which George pointed out was the same problem.  But “Blue” stuck and they rewrote the lyrics to reflect it. 

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