The single was released on 13 September and topped the Billboard Hot chart for four weeks, beginning on 9 October. The song spent a total of 11 weeks on the chart, selling a million copies within five weeks. The single was also number one for three weeks on the U. Cashbox pop singles chart the same year. By 12 March, it had begun its run on the charts. On 26 March , the EP went to number one, a position it held for two months.
Entering the charts on 13 March, the single stayed there for seven weeks, but it never rose higher than number 8 however, by this time the song had been featured on no less than three top 5 albums and an EP which topped the charts. EMI released as many singles by the Beatles as they could on the same day, leading to 23 of them hitting the top in the UK charts, including six in the top In , a version of the song was included on the album Love.
The song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in Lennon later said to Playboy that the song reflected a struggle with his own feelings rather than an attack on the apparent target, McCartney. We Brits are not that big on success, especially when someone else is having it [laughs]. I agreed to this and went round to his house the next day to work on the arrangement. He took my chords that I showed him and spread the notes out across the piano, putting the cello in the low octave and the first violin in a high octave and gave me my first lesson in how strings were voiced for a quartet.
When we recorded the string quartet at Abbey Road, it was so thrilling to know his idea was so correct that I went round telling people about it for weeks.
His idea obviously worked because the song subsequently became one of the most recorded songs ever with versions by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye and thousands more. George Martin has said this song has no doubletracking but does have leakage from studio speakers at an unspecified point.
A squeak—a bow accidentally touching a violin? A second accident, a plink during the decay at the very end, is heard in [a] and [b] but not [d]. A very small attic room with one window. A garret. Perfect for an artist. They had to be kept on the landing. But somehow I had a piano in there — a small, sawn-off piano that stood by my bed.
Somewhere in a dream, I heard this tune. What is it? Is it Fred Astaire? Is it Cole Porter? I fell out of bed and the piano was right there, just to the side.
I just had this tune, and I now had some chords. It was a rare thing. So, I had this tune, and I think the first person I saw that morning outside the house was John. So I claimed it and spent time playing around with it, adding to it and perfecting it.
Not long after the song came to me, we were working on the film Help!. I think we had rejected so many versions that by the time we came to say yes to one, we had only really just browsed it, rather than taking it very seriously. Jumping from one place to the next might not have helped the film much, but that bit was fun.
Can you work that into the story, please? All this was going on during the incubation of Yesterday, and when there was a chance I would ask for a piano to be near by so I could work on the song.
During a break in the filming, Jane Asher and I went to Portugal for a little holiday. We were heading down to Albufeira, and I was in the back of the car, doing nothing. It was very hot and very dusty, and I was sort of half-asleep. What can that be? I think you should just do it by yourself. There are different accounts of how the song was recorded, with many biographers stating that McCartney recorded the song by himself, without involving the other band members.
Others claim that McCartney and the other Beatles tried different instruments, such as drums and an organ, and that George Martin later persuaded them to have McCartney play his Epiphone Texan steel-string acoustic guitar, and overdubbing a string quartet on top. Either way, none of the other Beatles were included in the final recording. Lennon and McCartney would often give their compositions for other artists to record and score hits with, such as Peter and Gordon's 'A World Without Love'.
Amazingly, 'Yesterday' was actually offered first to singer Chris Farlowe before The Beatles recorded it. However, he turned it down as he considered it "too soft" for him. As 'Yesterday' wasn't the Beatles' previous output, and didn't fit in with their image, the Beatles chose not to release it as a single in the UK.
However, singer Matt Monro recorded the first of many cover versions, reaching the UK top ten soon after its release in autumn In the States, it was released as a single alongside 'Act Naturally' in September , topping the charts for four weeks. In , the song was finally released as a single in the UK, reaching number eight.
This was due to the expiration of the Beatles' contract with EMI, allowing the company to repackage the Beatles' recordings. It is known as the most covered song in history, with over 3, versions out there to date. See more More Stories of According to the Guinness Book of Records , "Yesterday" has the most cover versions of any song ever written. The song remains popular today with more than recorded cover versions, the first hitting the United Kingdom top 10 three months after the release of Help!
BMI asserts that it was performed over seven million times in the 20th century alone, probably cementing the song as the most performed composition of all time.
It was the first official recording by The Beatles that relied upon a performance by a single member of the band: McCartney was accompanied solely by a string quartet. The final recording differed so greatly from other works by The Beatles that the other three members of the band vetoed the release of the song as a single in the United Kingdom. According to biographers of McCartney and The Beatles, McCartney composed the entire melody in a dream one night in his room at the Wimpole Street home of his then girlfriend Jane Asher and her family.
Upon waking, he hurried to a piano, turned on a tape recorder, and played the tune to avoid letting it slip into the recesses of his mind. McCartney's initial concern was that he had subconsciously plagiarised someone else's work known as cryptomnesia. As he put it, "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. Upon being convinced that he had not robbed anybody of his melody, McCartney began writing lyrics to suit it.
As Lennon and McCartney were known to do at the time, a substitute working lyric, entitled "Scrambled Eggs", was used for the song until something more suitable was written. I used to call it 'Scrambled Eggs'. During the shooting of Help! McCartney would take advantage of this opportunity to perform "Scrambled Eggs" accompanied by the piano. Richard Lester , the director, was greatly annoyed by this, and eventually lost his temper, telling McCartney to finish writing the song, or he would have the piano removed.
McCartney originally claimed he had written "Yesterday" during The Beatles' tour of France in ; however, the song was not released until the summer of Although McCartney has never elaborated his claims, it is likely that the reason for such a long delay, if it existed, was a disagreement between McCartney and George Martin regarding the song's arrangement, or, equally likely, the distaste of the other Beatles for the song.
Lennon later indicated that the song had been around for a while before: "The song was around for months and months before we finally completed it.
Every time we got together to write songs for a recording session, this one would come up. We almost had it finished. Paul wrote nearly all of it, but we just couldn't find the right title. We called it 'Scrambled Eggs' and it became a joke between us. We made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit, we just couldn't find the right one.
Then one morning Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way, we'd had so many laughs about it.
McCartney said the breakthrough with the lyrics came during a trip to Portugal in May "I remember mulling over the tune 'Yesterday', and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse.
I started to develop the idea All my troubles seemed so far away. It's easy to rhyme those a's: say, nay, today, away, play, stay, there's a lot of rhymes and those fall in quite easily, so I gradually pieced it together from that journey.
Sud-den-ly, and 'b' again, another easy rhyme: e, me, tree, flea, we, and I had the basis of it. On 27 May , McCartney and Asher flew to Lisbon for a holiday in the Algarve, and he borrowed an acoustic guitar from Bruce Welch—whose house they were staying in—and completed the work on "Yesterday". The song was offered as a demo to Chris Farlowe prior to The Beatles recording it, but he turned it down as he considered it "too soft.
The main character in the song said something stupid "I said something wrong" , and it aggravated his lady love to the point that she dumped him "she had to go" , and he became sad "I long for yesterday". That is the essence of "Yesterday.
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