Everyone gave Lennon the credit for depth. And Lennon deserved it — nobody is arguing otherwise. But somewhere in the decades of Lennon being canonized as the intellectual, the provocateur, the serious one, Paul McCartney got quietly filed under “melodist” — the tuneful one, the commercial one, the Beatle who wrote love songs and kept the machine running.
It is one of the great misreadings in music history. Because McCartney, underneath the charm and the accessibility and the almost supernatural gift for melody, was writing songs of philosophical and emotional complexity that still haven’t been fully reckoned with.
The misreading happened partly because McCartney made it look easy. Lennon’s pain was visible, worn on the outside, announced. McCartney’s ran underneath, concealed by craft so polished that people mistook the polish for shallowness. But polish is not shallowness. It is discipline. And these five songs are the evidence.
1. Eleanor Rigby (1966) McCartney was 23 years old when he wrote Eleanor Rigby. Twenty-three. The song is a meditation on loneliness so precise and so unsentimental that it still lands like a quiet blow. There is no resolution. Eleanor Rigby dies and nobody comes. Father McKenzie writes a sermon nobody hears. The question — “all the lonely people, where do they all come from?” — is not rhetorical optimism. It is genuine bewilderment at the human condition. Lennon contributed some lines. The architecture was McCartney’s. It has no guitar. It has no drums. It has strings arranged by George Martin and a lyric that T.S. Eliot would not have been embarrassed to write.
2. Blackbird (1968) On the surface, a gentle fingerpicked acoustic song about a bird learning to fly. Underneath — and McCartney has confirmed this — a song written for Black American women during the civil rights movement, specifically in response to the Little Rock school desegregation crisis. “You were only waiting for this moment to arise” is not a nature observation. It is a statement about the long patience of people waiting for their basic rights. McCartney wrote it in India during the Rishikesh meditation retreat. He embedded a political message inside something so musically gentle that nobody could object to it. That is a very specific kind of intelligence.
3. The Long and Winding Road (1970) The last Beatles single released before the breakup. McCartney wrote it as a reflection on a relationship reaching its end — and given the timing, it is impossible not to hear it as being about the band itself, about everything they had been to each other and were in the process of losing. Phil Spector’s orchestral overdub, added without McCartney’s permission, infuriated him — he preferred the bare piano demo version that was later released. The bare version is the better song. The production smothered something that was already complete without it.
4. Here Today (1982) McCartney wrote this after Lennon was murdered, and it is the most personal song he ever released — a direct address to Lennon about everything they never said to each other while they had the chance. “And if I say I really knew you well / What would your answer be?” It acknowledges the complexity of their relationship without pretending it was simpler than it was. It does not sentimentalize Lennon. It mourns him honestly, which is harder and more respectful. McCartney performed it at the Concert for New York City in 2001 and barely held it together. That was not performance. That was grief that had not finished.
5. Maybe I’m Amazed (1970) Written for Linda Eastman, who became Linda McCartney, during the period when the Beatles were collapsing and McCartney was in a depression so severe that he was barely functioning. Linda pulled him through it — by most accounts, simply by being present and steady when everything else was falling apart. The song is his attempt to articulate what that felt like, and it is the most emotionally unguarded thing he ever recorded. No cleverness. No craft displayed for its own sake. Just a man trying to say thank you for something too large for ordinary words. The vocal performance is the best of his career.
McCartney is 82 years old and still touring stadiums. He has been underestimated his entire career by people who confused accessibility with simplicity. These five songs are what simplicity actually looks like when it is doing the hardest possible work.