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December 22, 2009

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steve mcqueen

Funnily enough, Paul McCartney has said the same thing in an interview this week!

If you take the view that kabbalistic insights are very revealing psychologically, this is an interesting insight into the creative process:

QUOTE FROM THE INTERVIEW at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6944197.ece

"Is it harder to write songs now than way back when, 45 years ago, when he and John Lennon seemed to be able — were able, pretty much — to knock out an all-time classic melody in their tea break? “It actually doesn’t feel any harder, but it’s different. I’m not the same guy.”
He once said he couldn’t write Paperback Writer now because back then, in 1965, he was (sort of) the young guy in the song. “Yeah, you can’t. You try, you think, ‘Oh, it’d be nice to do another Eleanor Rigby, that was a good idea, taking a character, getting into a mini-play’. But you can’t really.”
A lot of artists, I say, and intellectuals, too, seem to have this burst of creativity very young . . ? “I can believe it. Because I do the [Beatles] songs now, so many of them, I look back and think ‘clever kid!’ Writing songs like a 90-year-old would sing, at what age? 24.” McCartney breaks into Yesterday in a parody of a shaky old man’s voice. He giggles. “Yes, it was quite a mature perspective.”
Now, he says, he likes writing songs so much that “it’s like an addiction. And occasionally I’ll come up with something and I’ll think, ‘Oh, that’s good’. It’s not harder, it’s maybe more difficult to come up with something as original when you’ve done loads and loads of stuff.”
Does he think his Beatles songs were better than his current output, or just different? I fully expect him to say different. But no. “Oh, some of the songs from then were better. As you say, there’s this spurt, you don’t even know that you’re doing it until you look back later and think, ‘Bloody hell’.”
Every last scrap from his early life in Liverpool, you would have thought, has been picked over so often, in his own lyrics, in other people’s books and films and PhD theses no doubt, that he’d have no energy for or interest in going back over it again. Yet he does, voluntarily, as if he’s talking about it for the first time.
“I was always wandering around Liverpool, looking at old buildings, seeing people at bus stops, drinking it all in. There was this old lady lived near us, and I would go round, not as a goody-goody thing, but because it was interesting, and I’d say: ‘I’m going to the shops, do you want anything?’ And she was a fascinating old lady, I remember seeing a crystal radio set she had, and then I’d get her a pound of potatoes or whatever. All those little visits, the lonely old lady thing, that found its way into Eleanor Rigby. That’s hard to re-create. I haven’t helped any little old ladies with their shopping recently. Maybe I should.”

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