Paul McCartney and Mary Hopkin: "If I was a girl"
Something about Paul’s work with Mary Hopkin feels like he found the perfect feminine vehicle to express himself in a way that he couldn’t as himself.
The first single he produced for her was “Those Were the Days,” a song that Paul heard in a cabaret club when he saw it performed by the American musician who adapted it from the original Russian folk song. It stuck with Paul so much he held onto it for four years trying to get various people to record it until he was finally able to make it into a single for Mary. If there’s one thing about Paul, it’s that when he gets his mind set on a project, he’ll make it happen, no matter how long it takes. He did it with Rupert Bear and, most notably and with the longest payoff time, with “Now and Then.” He holds onto things that are meaningful to him. The fact that he kept trying to produce this song for years implies that it meant something to him.
What would be meaningful about the song to him? Well for one, it’s very Paul. Only Paul McCartney would see the pop potential in a klezmer infused Russian folk song and we love that about him. Lyrically, though, it’s no mystery why the song connected with him:
There’s no way to read those lyrics and not imagine Paul and John, hanging around Liverpool and talking about how they were going to make it big one day.
Themes of nostalgia for days of youthful idealism are familiar territory in Paul’s songs, but they don't really make an appearance until his later years in songs like “Early Days” and “On My Way to Work.” Here’s a song he would have first heard sometime in 1964 or ‘65, at the height of Beatlemania, and he’s already resonating with a pull to this time before fame. At this time it was still pretty common for The Beatles to record cover songs, so why not this one? Maybe it's as simple as it doesn't quite sound like a Beatles song, even to Paul's eclectic ear. But this is a man who made "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into a single. If he wanted to, he would have gotten his band to record it. I think this song felt a little too personally revealing for him.
The song goes on to describe the feeling of looking in a mirror and seeing the unfamiliar face of a lonely woman looking back. Paul loves a lonely woman motif, think of “Eleanor Rigby” or “Another Day.” He uses these characters to express himself artistically while maintaining a level of distance from the listener. The women are, at least on some level, all him. Here, he’s using the actual woman Mary Hopkin to sing a song that for whatever reason, feels a little too real for him.
When Paul found Mary and matched her to this song he’d been holding onto, I think that opened up a door for him to think about, well if I were a girl what kind of a record would I make? He'd been exploring songwriting through a woman's perspective for years as a way to express vulnerability, but here he had an actual conduit to explore a more complete and indulgent body of work. If he were not only freed of his gender but also of the burden of being Great Songwriter Paul McCartney, what might he create?
He filled the album with his favorite pop standards and show tunes, songs that Mary didn’t really like and that didn’t fit her folk background. Paul’s selections on Post Card are the kind of song that show his love of “granny music” as he’s still mocked for, and they are, dare I say, a bit camp. I mean, what’s gayer than “There’s No Business Like Show Business”? Notably, these are also the sort of songs that years later he would feel comfortable using as a vehicle to perform high-camp androgyny, like with “Gotta Sing Gotta Dance”. Which is to say that this aspect of musical theater is something that intrigued him, but that in 1968 he felt belonged to the realm of girl-Paul, i.e. Mary Hopkin.
Then of course there’s “Goodbye,” the song that Paul wrote for Mary. In the demo that he recorded, he doesn’t change the pronouns when he sings “Far away, my lover sings a lonely song and calls me to his side”. But now he’s taking the character to a new level, he’s performing as Mary, singing the song in an imitation of her falsetto to make it clear that the song is for her. But the song isn’t just a generic love song, it’s about two lovers who make music, who call to each other in song but are being separated by some unknown force.
If Mary is his way of exploring girl-Paul, then this is really the ultimate expression of that, and of course it's about John. As he said in 1985 when talking about the breakup, “I mean, I couldn’t stand in the way of someone who’d fallen in love. You can’t say, “Who’s this?” You can’t really do that. If I was a girl, maybe I could go out and…” Sure, if he were a girl he could sing campy show tunes and sappy nostalgic songs about dancing with his best friend and no one would look askance. But really, if he were a girl, he could tell John he wants to be with him.
Post Card was recorded in late 1968, at the same time as the White Album, right as things with John were starting to come apart in earnest. I think Paul was trying to do what he could to hold onto John. He found a certain freedom in using Mary to explore his feminine side, to pine for his youth with John, to try to call him back and sing to him unashamedly using male pronouns. Whether consciously or not, his desperate lamentation of "if I was a girl" began here.
