One morning in 1964, Paul McCartney awoke in the small attic bedroom of his girlfriend Jane Asher’s home at 57 Wimpole Street in London, with a melody drifting through his mind—haunting, elegant, and complete. It had come to him in a dream, so effortlessly beautiful that he was certain it must already exist. Still half-asleep, he rushed to the piano at the foot of his bed and began playing the tune over and over, desperate to capture it before it vanished.
The melody felt so natural that Paul feared he had subconsciously stolen it. For weeks, he played it for friends and fellow musicians, asking, “Have you ever heard this before?” But no one recognized it. It seemed the song was his own after all.
To anchor the melody, Paul inserted placeholder lyrics—nonsense lines that scanned with the rhythm and phrasing of the music. The opening line became, “Scrambled eggs, oh my baby how I love your legs.” The absurd words served their purpose: they gave shape to the tune until he could find a theme worthy of its beauty.
Eventually, the melody would evolve into “Yesterday,” one of the most beloved and covered songs in music history. But its beginnings were humble—a sleepy morning, a makeshift lyric about breakfast, and the flicker of inspiration in a quiet London attic. Paul’s dreamlike encounter with the melody, coupled with his instinctive need to preserve it, speaks to the mysterious and sometimes unconscious nature of creativity. “Yesterday” arrived not with fanfare, but like a whisper from the ether—so fully formed that it felt less composed than discovered. What began as a song about eggs became a timeless reflection on loss and longing, rooted in one of the most serendipitous moments in pop culture hi
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