「我起身下床，床邊就是一架鋼琴。」保羅麥卡尼回憶起” Yesterday “的創作時表示︰「我想我一定是夢見了這首歌，我起床後，雙手放在琴鍵上，腦海裡浮現出一段旋律，一首完整的曲子，令人無法置信，這首歌這麼容易就誕生了。」
但一開始，保羅麥卡尼認為這首歌並不適合披頭四，而嘗試交由其他歌手演唱。在錄音室裡，當他在披頭四其他成員面前首次介紹這首歌時，鼓手林哥史達試著加入鼓點，約翰藍儂後來也加入風琴，但經過多次排練後，總覺得不理想。製作人喬治馬丁後來做了一個反常的建議，他告訴保羅麥卡尼，不要鼓聲也不要貝斯。兩人還為了要不要加入絃樂起了爭執。
最後定稿的” Yesterday “中，沒有披頭四另外三位成員的任何聲音，只有保羅彈的鋼琴、吉他、他的歌聲和加入的絃樂四重奏，換句話說，這完全是一首保羅麥卡尼的個人作品（儘管唱片中這首歌的詞曲約翰藍儂仍有掛名），時間是一九六五年六月十四日，錄音地點是位於倫敦艾比路的EMI錄音室。
” Yesterday “後來收錄在” Help! 救命！”這張專輯，並成為四週單曲榜冠軍，根據統計，這首歌自問世以來，共有二千五百個以上的翻唱版本，包括貓王、法蘭克辛納屈、雷查爾斯、大人小孩雙拍檔等，如果將改編成演奏曲的版本計算在內，數量將更為驚人。2000年，滾石雜誌和MTV音樂台合作選出「Pop 100 百大流行單曲」，結果” Yesterday “高居榜首，雖然沒有搖滾歌曲中傳統的電吉他、貝斯和鼓，” Yesterday “卻被眾樂評人認為是搖滾史上最棒的指標性單曲。

“Yesterday” is a song originally recorded by The Beatles for their 1965 album Help!. The song remains popular today with more than 2,200 cover versions, and is one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music. At the time of its first appearance the song was released by The Beatles’ record company as a single in the United States but not in the United Kingdom (for further details see below). Consequently, whilst it topped the American chart in 1965 the song first hit the British top 10 three months after the release of Help! in a cover version by Matt Monro. “Yesterday” was voted the best song of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll of music experts and listeners and was also voted the No. 1 Pop song of all time by MTV and Rolling Stone magazine the following year. In 1997, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) asserts that it was performed over seven million times in the 20th century alone.
“Yesterday” is a melancholy acoustic guitar ballad about a relationship break-up. It was the first official recording by The Beatles that relied upon a performance by a single member of the band, Paul McCartney. He was accompanied by a string quartet. The final recording was so different from other works by The Beatles that the band members vetoed the release of the song as a single in the United Kingdom. (However, it was issued as a single there in 1976.) Although credited to “Lennon–McCartney”, the song was written solely by McCartney. In 2000 McCartney asked Yoko Ono if she would agree to change the credit on the song to read “McCartney–Lennon” in the The Beatles Anthology but she refused.
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 and played the tune to avoid forgetting it.
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 anyone 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, titled “Scrambled Eggs” (the working opening verse was “Scrambled Eggs/Oh, my baby how I love your legs”), was used for the song until something more suitable was written. In his biography, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, McCartney recalled: “So first of all I checked this melody out, and people said to me, ‘No, it’s lovely, and I’m sure it’s all yours.’ It took me a little while to allow myself to claim it, but then like a prospector I finally staked my claim; stuck a little sign on it and said, ‘Okay, it’s mine!’ It had no words. I used to call it ‘Scrambled Eggs’.”
During the shooting of Help!, a piano was placed on one of the stages where filming was being conducted and McCartney would take advantage of this opportunity to tinker with the song. Richard Lester, the director, was eventually greatly annoyed by this and lost his temper, telling McCartney to finish writing the song or he would have the piano removed. The patience of the other Beatles was also tested by McCartney’s work in progress, George Harrison summing this up when he said: “Blimey, he’s always talking about that song. You’d think he was Beethoven or somebody!”
McCartney originally claimed he had written “Yesterday” during the Beatles’ tour of France in 1964; however, the song was not released until the summer of 1965. During the intervening time, The Beatles released two albums, A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles for Sale, both of which could have included “Yesterday”. Although McCartney has never elaborated his claims, a delay may have been due to a disagreement between McCartney and George Martin regarding the song’s arrangement, or the opinion of the other Beatles who felt it did not suit their image.
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 1965:
“I remember mulling over the tune ‘Yesterday’, and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse. I started to develop the idea … da-da da, yes-ter-day, sud-den-ly, fun-il-ly, mer-il-ly and Yes-ter-day, that’s good. 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 1965, McCartney and Asher flew to Lisbon for a holiday in Albufeira, Algarve, and he borrowed an acoustic guitar from Bruce Welch, in whose house they were staying, 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”.

By The Beatles

Lyrics