Yesterday by The Beatles
Released on Mon, September 13, 1965
“Yesterday” is the most covered song in history, with over 2,000 versions having been recorded. A spare, haunting song of lost love from the early Beatles catalog, it was sung perfectly by a young Paul McCartney.
McCartney dreamed the entire melody before he arranged the music with George Martin. According to Rolling Stone:
‘It fell out of bed,’ Paul McCartney once said about the origins of ‘Yesterday.’ ‘I had a piano by my bedside, and I must have dreamed it, because I tumbled out of bed and put my hands on the piano keys and I had a tune in my head. It was just all there, a complete thing. I couldn’t believe it. It came too easy.’
The working lyrics Paul used to fit the tune before he wrote the actual words started with “Scrambled eggs / Oh my baby how I love your legs / Not as much as I love scrambled eggs.” Picking up on that famous trivia, Jimmy Fallon eventually developed the rest of “Scrambled eggs” and recorded it with Paul.
Paul would later admit that this song was about the death of his mother, with lyrics like “Why did she have to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say” subconsciously referring to his mother’s sudden and untimely death which caused a deep psychological wound in the young artist’s psyche.