Nov 12, 2025
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Philippines
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from T1
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
I thought ‘He’s a snake-charmer all right,’ John’s little friend, Mr. Charming.
-Mimi Smith, Paul McCartney: The Life, Phillip Norman, 2016
Aunt Mimi used to take the mickey out of me. She’d say, ‘Your little friend’s here, John’, and l’d say (in meek and mild voice), ‘Thank you’ – that was me.
-Paul McCartney, interview with David Frost, 1997
I’m not sure if you’ve discussed this before, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on Letting Go. I’ll admit upfront that I think it’s one of his best solo songs ever, and possibly one of his most honest, as honest as it gets with Paul McCartney.
When I first heard it and really took it in, my initial interpretation was that it’s a song about Linda (given that it explicitly mentions a woman). I’ve always thought it reflects a moment a few years into Wings when Paul may have realized that, in a way, Linda was on tour and on stage for him (“I want to put her in a Broadway show” and “I want to put her on the radio”) feel like acknowledgements that she was being placed into this public, performative role, even though it was never necessarily her passion.
On a broader level, I also hear it as Paul grappling with the feeling that he might once again be becoming quote-unquote controlling of a group, especially given the turbulence Wings had gone through by that point.
That said, considering it was recorded during the same period as Love in Song, which I consider to be a stupidly mclennon song in a stupidly mclennon way, I wouldn’t be surprised if Letting Go also reflects a realization that he needed to let go of John, and of whatever lingering hopes he may have still had of collaborating with him again.
Ooooh, thank you for the ask! I don’t think I’ve ever written about this one before but I most certainly have thoughts to share.
I agree with your idea that Letting Go seems like an example of a song that is “about” Linda while John haunts the narrative, but our interpretations differ a little bit from there. The last couplet of the first verse (“Oh, she feels like sun / Mother Nature, look at what you've done”) is a bit of a doozy for me, so that’s where I’ll begin!
I previously made a little compilation about the sun in Paul’s work, and I most definitely believe it is a John motif. The sun is the orienting center; a (the ultimate!) source of warmth, yes, but more than that it is an organizing principle of the universe (and fwiw, I think this is directly representative of the intense j/p enmeshment). It exists outside of ordinary time, it’s constant, eternal— some might even think of it as the Emperor of Eternity 👁️👁️
To me, “she feels like Sun” immediately draws the correlation from Linda to John, but the (very specific) grammar is crucial. It’s not she is the sun, but she feels like sun. The line describes sensation rather than substitution. She produces feelings akin to that warmth and devotion, but the space at the center is already occupied.
In this context, the next line is super interesting bc I think it’s reasonable to infer that Paul associates Linda with Mother Nature. Mother Nature represents fertility, she is the generative figure who makes life happen in the world (I’m thinking of Golden Earth Girl, and like, all of the language Paul uses to describe Linda: “she was the most womanly woman who ever womaned,” etc). If the sun is cosmic and unreachable, Mother Nature is grounded, she’s the real life you actually live inside. One is the figure all else is inevitably organized around with a gravitational pull that is impossible to resist, there could be no life without it; the other births life and functions as the environment that sustains said life from day to day.
I think that differentiation is exactly what gives the couplet its tension. Bc after associating the subject with this warmth, Paul pivots to what feels like an accusation: “look at what you’ve done” is just loaded with blame (+ maybe some bewilderment?). There’s an implication that something has gone wrong at the level of design. Though the “problem” is with Paul himself, and the complaint isn’t addressed to Linda the person— it’s addressed to nature, to biology, to fate. But bc Linda is symbolically aligned with Mother Nature, it seems like she ends up carrying the blame anyway.
So Linda, his wife and the mother of his children, might make Paul feel that sun-like warmth, but the original template for the feeling is still John. And this couplet feels like both an acknowledgment and a complaint that even a stable and loving relationship can’t rewrite the deeper architecture of desire. But Linda isn’t *failing* to replace John; replacement was simply not possible in the first place. So I think this is Paul reconciling with that difficult fact, and with the reality that his great admiration for Linda has led to something of a misplaced resentment. Like: if Mother Nature is so powerful, why is he (Paul) still Like This? Why is John still the Emperor of Eternity? I think this is a really concise and profound representation of a much larger pattern within Paul’s relationships.
All of that is to say that I suspect this song is deeply concerned with the “nature” of desire/sexuality, but I’ve been thinking a lot about Paul and performance lately and that is relevant here, too (here are some related thoughts: focusing on Paul’s use of the tea motif, and on the Sam Mendes biopics). Bc Letting Go is also explicitly about the “nature” of performance. I wonder if that’s why it feels so honest— personally, I think songs where Paul acknowledges performance feel unusually truthful, it’s like he’s breaking the fourth wall.
After the first verse, the song itself moves pretty abruptly away from the language of sensation and into the language of staging. Instead of describing how the subject feels, he starts describing what he wants to do with her: “I wanna put her in a Broadway show,” “I want to put her on the radio,” presenting her as “a brand new star” (the sun is, of course, another (older, more established?) star). These are not at all natural or romantic gestures; Paul is not deepening the intimacy, but externalizing it, putting it on display. Which maps almost one-to-one onto Linda’s role in Wings: the most domestic, “natural” figure imaginable gets pulled directly into the machinery of performance. Home life becomes the band, the band becomes the marriage. He takes “Mother Nature” and puts her under artificial stage lights as a supporting cast member in his own performance of the Paul McCartney Show, the show the whole world expects to see (and so must be convinced of).
That said, I don’t think this performance is theatrical for its own sake, it’s infrastructural. It’s the act of arranging real life into something consumable for an audience as a means of self-protection. But this comes at a cost: by attempting to protect what is natural in this way, he’s also sacrificing some of its purity. And I think this loops neatly back into some of the trouble in Paul’s relationship with John, bc whatever they shared in private, it was forever in the shadows of the spectacle that was the Beatles.
So if love is natural and involuntary then perhaps performance is constructed and exhausting, and I wonder if the refrain might be an expression of this exhaustion. If you’re always performing, turning life into a show, converting the private into the public, then “letting go” sounds like a desire to drop the pose. To exist, even briefly, without the mediation.
On that note, I am really intrigued by the connection you’ve drawn to Love in Song, bc I think this pairing makes that fatigue even more poignant (I’m sure it goes without saying, but yeah, Love in Song is absolutely one of the the most stupid of all the stupid mclennon songs we’ve been blessed with). Letting go sits squarely inside the apparatus of fame and performance, while Love in Song is an explicit expression of yearning for the before-time: for the places where they used to go, for the homeland of happiness, youth, freedom, pre-fame, pre-performance, when there was only love in song. For Paul, what could be more natural than that?
EDIT: some more thoughts on the song here!
Hey friend! I too am a fan of lyric interpretation and for that reason, there is one thing that just doesn’t leave me alone. I don’t mean anything bad by it, it’s just that it makes me uneasy.
The song I’m thinking about is FUH YOU (FOR YOU/FUCK YOU) and while I’ve seen people speculate on it in various ways, to me it reads as quite… mean?
It’s masked by the “hahah grandpa wants to fuck someone” thing, upbeat music and the cute video with the kid but…
If you look at the lyrics, they don’t read nice to me;
Come on baby now - Let me look at you - Talk about yourself - Try to tell the truth
Well, that’s just fine - you can imagine it as a conversation between a reporter and an interviewee, or two people having a chat on a date or something.
He encourages “her” (a bit ironically) to talk about herself and try to tell the truth.
I could stay up half the night trying to break your code - I could stay up half the night, but I’d rather hit the road
Here he says he could care and try to understand what she’s saying (the truth) in her coded and not super obvious way but he doesn’t really care, so he just leaves.
On the night I met you, I was on the town (he was just looking for someone to fuck)
I just want to know how you feel - Wanna love that’s so proud and real - You make me want to go out and steal - I just want to fuck you
The best way to interpret this is that while she wants a relationship (proud love and real love), he just wants to smash. There is a worse way too.
Stealing, while we may argue that it’s a coded word or something, is also not a nice thing.
Come on baby now, help me work it out - I won’t let you down - So you don’t need to shout
A quick succession of beatle songs references - help!, we can work it out, don’t let me down, twist and shout (with a bit of passive aggressive annoyance). He’s teasing her and then:
I could stay up half the night just playing with your head - I could stay up half the night but I’d rather go to bed
Well, once again - this is hardly nice, is it? Playing with someone’s head… but he doesn’t even care enough to do that - he *could* stay up half the night but he’ll just rather sleep, why bother.
Then there is a reference to Beautiful boy (and every day in every way (it’s getting better and better)) and outro.
I mean, I sincerely am not sending this to be a hater or with an ill intent but it just sounds not very kind. Of course, you have the plausible deniability with “I just want it for you” but it’s very intentionally a double entendre.
It’s also curious to me that he mentions We Can Work It Out - a song that also appears like a nice chit chat about trying to put ourselves in the other person’s place but the Paul PoV actually pretty much says “you’ll see it my way or I’ll dump you” and “you can get it wrong and still you think that it’s all right” which also applies to Fuck You/For You.
I absolutely get how people think this is about John but like... Do we really want it to be?
Is there any other interpretation outside the obvious or is he tricking people who are trying to find meaning in his lyrics (which is also not super nice) or..? What do you think?
Hello, thank you for the ask! I know people treat Fuh You as a kind of joke, and it *is* a relatively hilarious song for a 70-whatever year old man to release, but I think there’s a lot more going on than is generally acknowledged!
Yours is certainly a valid interpretation, but based both on the musical vibe and the lyrics themselves, my take differs quite a bit. I don’t think Paul is trying to trick people per se, but he IS a lyrical trickster— we’ll get into that. (And fwiw, if this song isn’t about John I’ll eat my hat!)
Here we go:
Come on baby now, let me look at you Talking bout yourself, try to tell the truth
Right away, “Let me look at you” calls to mind the j/p mirroring thing, the sense that the self (the “I”/ “eye”) is formed in the other. I think he IS teasing, but it’s playful rather than hostile. Their relationship always seems to have thrived on that tension: desire/admiration existing alongside a challenge.
Also: John and Paul are both liars (for fun and for necessity). They could not tell the whole truth publicly, so this might reflect the way they pushed each other toward honesty in private.
I could stay up half the night, trying to crack your code I could stay up half the night, but I'd rather hit the road
While the tension and misdirection between them was generative, I’m sure it was also at least a little bewildering. Even now, it seems clear that Paul doesn’t feel as though he completely understands John or what existed between them.
And I do think they had a sort of coded language that they played with in song, but I doubt even they had a “dictionary” for it. That “code” was like a set of recurring gestures and references that they could keep playing with and reshaping over time. Meaning shifts as the exchange continues— that’s part of the game.
I’ve written before about Paul’s curious, recurring use of the road motif, which often feels like a path toward connection. In this case, I almost hear it as stepping away from the puzzle rather than trying to solve it completely. Like he wants to stop playing games and get down to business.
On the night that I met you, I was on the town On the night that I met you
I do agree that this implies that Paul wasn’t looking for/expecting anything when they met, though that certainly doesn’t mean it stayed that way!
I just wanna know how you feel Want a love that's so proud and real You make me wanna go out and steal I just want it fuh you, I just want it fuh you
I think this builds upon that same idea of trying to understand what the other person feels, maybe not getting a straight answer. And I think the second line has an implicit “I” at the front— PAUL wants a love that’s proud and real. This is not a dismissal but a question: does the other person want it, too?
For the record: I think steal is a specific sex code, but overall it feels generally symbolic of rule-breaking (let’s not forget that m/m sex in the j/p golden age WAS rule-breaking!) John had a way of encouraging Paul to cross boundaries. So…he’ll commit literal crime to give John what he wants.
Come on baby now, help me work it out I won't let you down so you don't need to shout
Definitely all Beatles references, but I think it’s shorthand rather than mockery; these phrases are once again part of the language j/p built together, so invoking them is like slipping back into an old conversational rhythm.
The code here seems to acknowledge the tension and competition and miscommunication again. Paul’s definitely teasing, but he is still reassuring John that, in spite of it all, he won’t let him down, they don’t need to fight each other. This bit is giving “it’s only me,” imo 🥲
I could stay up half the night, playing with your head I could stay up half the night, but I'd rather go to bed
“Playing with your head” is for sure an innuendo; it’s about sex (there’s another head that men are wont to think with!), but it’s also about mind games. But I don’t think this was necessarily a bad thing— mind games, for John and Paul, seem like a form of intellectual foreplay. So, they could keep playing games, but he’d rather just fuck.
See also: “in bed”
And everyday, in every way And everyday, in every way
Hello. Everyone. Attention, please. This is the best part!!!!!
The actual originator of this phrase is the French pharmacist Émile Coué. He believed that repeated verbal suggestion could influence the unconscious mind, which in turn could affect behavior and mood and even physical health. The method was very simple: repeat an affirmation 20 times in the morning and 20 times at night: Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux— “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”
Curiously, this method was its own sort of mind game. Coué’s core philosophy was that the imagination dominates the will: if you try to force yourself to improve, you often fail, but if you plant an idea in the mind through repetition, the unconscious begins to reorganize behavior around it. Mantras associated with Transcendental Meditation are meant to function in this very same way. And in the late 60s, just as the Beatles are beginning to explore TM, their songs begin to actively treat consciousness almost like a landscape that can be explored or adjusted.
However, by 1967, Coué’s theory was considered kind of half-serious and half-ironic, which is exactly the tone of Getting Better: It's getting so much better all the time / couldn't get much worse! And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that John contributed the latter line— this is obviously a shared reference.
But instead of merely a nostalgic reference, I think the line works in Fuh You as a kind of mantra of continuity— almost as if repeating this phrase associated with improvement and connection is a way of psychologically stabilizing a relationship.
All of that said, it is almost certainly a reference to Beautiful Boy as well, which ofc itself references Getting Better. (I’ve theorized before that Beautiful Boy is a kind of dual address to both Paul and Sean, and imo Fuh You is good evidence for the Paul half of that claim!)
Soooooo. This line represents the themes of mind games AND self-referential coded language AND a desire to get to the truth of (and therefore preserve) the relational dynamic. When I say Paul is doing So Much At All Times, I really, really, *really* mean it!
Overall: I don’t think the song is mean, just very mischievous! The teasing, the double meanings, the deliberate ambiguity— all of that is very in character for Paul, *especially* when he’s writing about John. Their flirtation always involved a bit of pigtail pulling, and Fuh You leans into that in a major way. But beneath all the coded language and innuendo and mental sparring, there is an enduring sense of genuine affection and desire <3
Would you mind sharing some of your thoughts on John's Paris story published in "Skywriting By Word of Mouth"?
Sure! Much has been said about the obvious homoeroticsm in The Importance of Being Erstwhile and Never Cross a Horse With a Loose Woman. Of course, the j/p of it all is rampant, but as far as in-text interpretations are concerned, idk if I have anything new to add. Instead, I want to approach this from a slightly different angle.
The thing is, obfuscated homoeroticism is definitely essential to the story, but not only (or even mainly!) at the level of content. At the moment, I am primarily interested in its stylistic impact.
Though John expresses desire pretty explicitly, he scrambles it to hide the object of said desire. His prose is all pun, derailment, substitution, tonal lurch. This technique allows him to say The Thing without saying it, but imo it’s far more sophisticated than that. John’s jokes are not just jokes for the sake of a laugh or even for the sake of the scene; I think they are the scene’s real method.
The same way the in-text meaning is slippery, so is the ACTUAL “meaning” of the ACTUAL relationship he is writing about. Cliche turns obscene and romance is ridiculous and passion collapses into bodily mess, bc that is the nature of the dynamic— cliche and obscene and romantic and ridiculous and passionate and messy. The prose is oblique bc the relationship is oblique. John says too much and he also says nothing at all, just as the *relationship* is both too much and nothing at all. Do you see what I mean?
The form isn’t just funny, it’s true to life. It reproduces the instability and excess and humor and deniability of the relationship it renders.
Now, I want to pivot for a sec, bc this is not an isolated example of the technique I’m describing. I’ve written about Paul using it in The Pound Is Sinking— the song is about lived confusion, and so the lyrics are confusing (see also: However Absurd, a song that uses absurdism to talk about experienced absurdity. I think he also alludes to this technique when discussing Nobody Knows).
I draw this parallel between John and Paul bc I wonder about how it all might tie into the idea of a shared code. Let’s all thank Paul for his Big Reveal in The Days We Left Behind— we can now say definitively that John and Paul not only had a code, but were intentionally using it and playing with it. It has NEVER been gibberish. Yippee!
While I’m certain there *are* recurring themes/specific words in said code, I don’t think it’s made up entirely of direct word-to-word translations. It’s not only a matter of hidden reference, but also of shared method: a way of saying something through indirection AND using form to enact the thing you are indirectly saying. They're not just playing with words, they're playing with structure.
In essence: the coded message is embedded in the form.
A secret relationship between John and Paul is what makes a code necessary in the first place, so of course the code itself takes on the shape of the relationship it is designed to conceal. Form mirrors function. They’re not just secretive, they’re stylish! My special geniuses <333
Anyway! Fascinating stuff! MUCH to consider! Thank you for the ask!
Hello! I absolutely adore your blog, your analyses are so interesting, you always manage to bring a new perspective to songs I've been listening to for ages so thank you! I would be very curious about hearing your thoughts on the song mind games, I feel like there's more there than meets the eye but I can't quite grasp what that is
Hi anon, thank you for your kindness and for the ask <3 Many apologies for the looooooong reply time. It looks like you sent this on May 20th — are you still around? Do you still care?
Either way, I think there is most *definitely* more to Mind Games than meets the eye...or ear? I do not, however, think that I (or any one of us) have all of the necessary context to make total sense of the song, as we are not (necessarily) “players” in this game. Although…we might be! I have Many Thoughts about all of this. Put on your tin hats, everybody!
I’ve written a lot about John and Paul’s shared game of songwriting — I’m thinking about their invented language, the back-and-forth of it all, the way ideas are passed between them, sometimes for years and years and years. I wonder if Mind Games might provide an interesting framework for considering that theory more seriously.
John borrowed the title of the song from Robert Masters and Jean Houston’s Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space, in which “mind games” are quite literally exercises in shared consciousness/imagination/symbolic thinking/altered states/etc. (the people who take part are called “players”). Masters and Houston are especially interested in what can be created through shared imagination, through experiences that don’t exactly belong to either individual, bc they only emerge through the act of players participating together. And………..well! I assume you see where I’m going with this.
Here’s a curiously useful quote from Lennon Remembers: “They [businessmen] play the game the way we play music… first they have a ritual, then they create.” So, John is explicitly connecting music with a game, and the game with ritual and creation. Ritual is not separate from the creative process, but essential to it.
This feels awfully close to the way J and P talk about their songwriting process. Two people enter one imaginative space, passing words and images back and forth, repeating them and rearranging them to create a secret third thing that doesn’t belong completely to either one of them alone. (In fact, one might argue that Lennon-McCartney *itself* is a product of that ritual, but I digress!)
One of the exercises in Masters and Houston’s Mind Games makes this structure especially explicit. Two players enter a shared imaginative state to undertake a quest. Together, in that space, they seek something neither possess on their own: the Holy Grail. Ofc, that brings us back to John: “Some call it magic / the search for the grail.” Here, ‘magic’ is the possibility that this process can actually produce access to something beyond the ordinary limits of either participant.
Now, bear with me, bc I’m going to pivot to an excerpt from my very favorite entry from The Lyrics (The Kiss of Venus). I promise it’s relevant!
“Speaking of magical, when I played the Glastonbury Festival in 2004, I loved the idea that we were probably on the confluence of ley lines, the lines that crisscross the globe and along which our ancestors are thought to have set up significant sites. I like that kind of history. Glastonbury is also said to be the place where King Arthur is buried. So, one way or another, it's a very special place and it has a very definite vibe. There's simply no denying that it has a distinct aura.”
(A brief aside: The Guardian described Paul’s 2004 set as “an all-encompassing sing-along with the sense that the audience were part of a genuine event rather than mere spectators.” Paul doesn’t just produce something and hand it over to the audience for consumption, but performer and crowd occupy the same space and make the magic together. What is that, if not a ritual?)
Anyway, even beyond the obvious Grail/Arthur connection, Arthurian mythology is itself a product of the kind of process I’ve been describing. There is no single, fixed Arthurian story transmitted (intact) across time. Its mythology is collective, accretive…different writers inherited the same characters and images and objects and places from one another, altered them, made new associations, and passed them forward. The Grail is part of that tradition and changes within it, the mythology exists through this continual process of repetition and transformation, therefore “the search” is eternal.
That is *SO* similar to what I mean by a “shared game” between John and Paul. An image begins in one song, reappears in another context (and another, and another…), connecting to new associations which have histories of their own. The image is part of the same game, though its meaning isn’t fixed at its origin. Meaning grows through repetition and transformation.
And, actually, on the podcast Song Exploder a few months ago, Paul described songwriting as “a sort of quest.” One embarks on a quest without ever fully knowing what they might find, bc the meaning is only produced through the journey toward it. (“Nobody knows this song ‘til I’ve written it.”)
“Faith in the future, outta the now” carries that idea quite well, I think. The present is generative rather than self-contained. What the players do now produces meaning, or maybe an effect, that belongs (at least in part) to a future they can’t yet occupy. And, in that context, “projecting our images in space and in time” is almost ridiculously literal. The Grail and Arthur and Avalon and Glastonbury and the Beatles and JohnandYoko and Lennon-McCartney — all of these images and mythologies persist bc they are projected from one imagination into another, then projected again, and again and again and again, constantly changing. “Absolute elsewhere / in the stones of your mind” contains that same paradox, ‘elsewhere’ is also within; it’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere. It’s a tradition we’re participating in at this very moment. “So keep on playing those mind games forever”!!
In the English cultural imagination, tea occupies a peculiar place. More than a beverage, it is a social script, a sanctioned pause in the day: a set of expectations at once average and overdetermined, a domestic arrangement that appears trivial precisely because it is ubiquitous. lt’s therefore unsurprising that English literature returns, time and again, to setting the tea table (alongside the broader rituals of hospitality) as a site for exploring the staging of the “ordinary.” And within this tradition, Paul’s references to tea in his own lyrics become all the more curious.
Charles Dickens, in Our Mutual Friend, renders domestic normalcy as a construct rather than an inherent condition: it’s something achieved through ritualized repetition. The Boffins — an elderly, newly wealthy couple who make a point of playing host — embody the norm, the polished surface of English social life. Visitors are folded into the room, chairs are drawn up, the afternoon settles into its customary interlude as tea is offered as a matter of course. That said, normalcy is a managed illusion— not an inherent “truth,” but a careful choreography so familiar it escapes notice.
Through Jenny Wren, Dickens makes this act explicit. A disabled young woman living in cramped, precarious conditions, Jenny performs the gestures of domestic normalcy with meticulous care: small rituals of tending and order that strive to produce stability where it is structurally impossible. But she does so with an acuity that suggests she knows the terms of the performance. This is a rehearsal of the script in full awareness of her own exclusion from it, and of its artifice.
Lewis Carroll pushes the whole domestic tableau into parody. In Alice, the tea table and all its props remain, yet the scene no longer produces any sense of belonging, let alone coherence. Invitations are issued and withdrawn, etiquette multiplies and meaning evaporates. Gestures of genteel sociability persist long after their function has collapsed, and time itself becomes as meaningless as the performance. What remains is a scene everyone recognizes but no one can convincingly inhabit.
So if Dickens uses the rituals of hospitality to examine the “nature” of domestic performance, Carroll identifies the performance itself as nonsensical. But the form remains available as theater, and Paul, in his turn, treats it as such. Intimacy is repeatedly routed through an invitation to tea— an invitation to step outside linear time, into mutual imagination and collaboration, into an absurd pastiche of domesticity staged just for two. Closeness is created not in spite of the artifice, but through it: a game of pretend, played together.
The lyrics say ‘Very twee, very me’ and I think it is very me, that stuff. The Beatles made a sort of Englishy sort of music, once they got past their American influences. […] And so I really went to town on that whole fruity way of talking, that whole fruity language that I like. It’s, I think, it’s very endearing, very English, and I even managed to work in the word ‘peradventure’ which I was very proud of. […] I think, as I say, I read it in Dickens. […] So it was nice, it was that croquet, very English, lawns, hollyhocks, roses, very Alice in Wonderland, that was also in the back of my mind, which influenced a lot of me and John’s writing. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, that’s Alice to us, you know (sings): ‘Picture yourself…’ The whole idea of ‘picture yourself,’ you know, in a boat on a river, it’s very Alice, very Lewis Carroll, it’s just the way I like to write that, so a fruity little song.
Paul McCartney, interview by Gary Crowley, 2005