Personnel:
Cliff Wilson: Vocal, Baritone Guitar, Cello
Savannah Hatcher: Violins
Ilana Stroke: Viola
Why this song is on the album:
I have played this song since I learned to play guitar in junior high school. It’s one of my all-time favorites, and reflects my partiality toward the McCartney ballads. And it suits my voice.
Performance notes:
This was the first song recorded for the project; i actually recorded it before I had decided to do the whole project. Warm feedback from friends and associates encouraged me to go ahead with the entire album.
Savannah Hatcher is a Virginia-based musician and educator whom I met on an airplane a few years ago. She recorded the violin parts in her studio, and sent the recordings to me for the mix. These are among the very few tracks on the album that were not produced in my Princeton studio.
Ilana Stoke plays with me in the Westminster Community orchestra. Her viola part was the last recorded for the song.
How it’s different from the Beatles’ version:
As with most of the songs on this album, the performance is, overall, very similar to what the Beatles did. However, I made several choices that add a distinctly different flavor.
I chose a slower tempo, one I feel is better suited to the lyrics, especially as sung by a 62-year-old looking back on many yesterdays. For my performance, the young McCartney’s tempo felt just a tad too jaunty. He wrote the music before the lyrics; his placeholder lyrics were “Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs/Not as much as I love scrambled eggs.” So it’s safe to say the tune wasn’t originally conceived as a melancholy ballad.
A second conscience difference is the choice of guitars and picking style. I chose a baritone guitar, with capo on the third fret, and played with light finger-picking. The smooth, chocolatey sound this produced could hardly be more different than McCartney’s sound. He played an Epiphone Texan acoustic guitar tuned down a step, and used an aggressive picking style, particularly on the bass notes, which yielded a much more trebly, percussive sound. Again, I made the choice that felt right for me.
While the cello part here is identical to the original, the rest of the string arrangement varies somewhat. This was simply my impatience with the process of transcribing someone else’s work when I was capable of writing a decent arrangement of my own. I kept all the important stuff.
A fourth difference is that I chose not to double the vocal anywhere. The Beatles used vocal doubling extensively and creatively, to great effect. (See my notes for Julia.) In keeping with the concept of a simple lament, I decided to forego that element on this song.
Fun fact:
Although this is a McCartney song through and through, John Lennon gave him the word “Yesterday” to substitute for “Scrambled eggs”. That was the seed from which the entire lyric grew.