Although Paul McCartney and George Martin have claimed this was written during the Beatles' 1964 tour of France, which would have made it a year and a half old when it was recorded, Paul's later claim of the song coming to him in a dream at girlfriend Jane Asher's house, along with other anecdotal evidence, would seem to suggest that it was written sometime in January 1965, when Paul awoke with the full melody intact and played it on the piano in Asher's attic (playing the tune immediately and constantly, to avoid forgetting it).
The odd (but not unheard of) nature of the song's "creation" caused a concerned McCartney to take the melody around to industry vets for about a month, asking them if he'd unconsciously stolen someone else's song (tidbit: this is known as 'Cryptomnesia'). As he put it, "For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no-one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it." ...
In order to keep the melody in his mind, Paul wrote a comedic first verse that went, in part, "Scrambled eggs / Oh how I really really love your legs..." Having shown it to the band in the spring of 1965, the group began to refer to the uncompleted song as "Scrambled Eggs," perhaps ensuring that the finished version would start with its title.
Paul kept working at the melody in off hours, leading Help! director Richard Lester to jokingkly threaten to throw the piano off the soundstage if McCartney didn't stop playing it. The patience of the other Beatles was also tested by McCartney's work in progress, George Harrison summing this up when he said: "
Blimey, he's always talking about that song. You'd think he was Beethoven or somebody!"
Lennon states:
"The song was around for months and months before we finally completed it. Every time we got together to write songs for a recording session, this one would come up. We almost had it finished. Paul wrote nearly all of it, but we just couldn't find the right title. We called it 'Scrambled Eggs' and it became a joke between us. We made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit, we just couldn't find the right one. Then one morning Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way, we'd had so many laughs about it."
Finally, on May 27, 1965, Paul flew to Lisbon, Portugal, to vacation at the villa of Shadows member Bruce Welch. On the car ride in, Paul began to compose lyrics on the back of an envelope, based around a title (and theme) of "Yesterday."
McCartney says this of 'the breakthrough':
"I remember mulling over the tune 'Yesterday', and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse. I started to develop the idea ... da-da da, yes-ter-day, sud-den-ly, fun-il-ly, mer-il-ly and Yes-ter-day, that's good. All my troubles seemed so far away. It's easy to rhyme those a's: say, nay, today, away, play, stay, there's a lot of rhymes and those fall in quite easily, so I gradually pieced it together from that journey. Sud-den-ly, and 'b' again, another easy rhyme: e, me, tree, flea, we, and I had the basis of it."
Although the other group members liked "Yesterday" well enough, they didn't consider it Beatles material -- especially not after George Martin, the band's producer, suggested scoring it with nothing but acoustic guitar and a string section. Martin thought of releasing it as a solo Paul single, but even McCartney balked at that; his own main concern was that the result not sound too much like easy-listening music. Finally, compromises were reached: Martin used a classier string quartet for the arrangement, and McCartney agreed not to release the song as a single in England. (Though it was released there on an EP of the same name, and as a single in 1976.)
Capitol made the decisions on which songs were released as singles in the US, however, but "Yesterday" was not even considered for a-side single release there; it was relegated only to the flip of "Act Naturally," sung by Ringo, the group's most popular member in the US. However, fan reaction was immediate, and the song was quickly repositioned as the a-side.
The vague lyrics have been rumored to deal with the very sudden death of McCartney's mother, and the resultant guilt he felt over his selfish and somewhat cold reaction to it. If this is true, it would appear to be subconscious on the singer's part. The performance of the song on the British TV show
Blackpool Night Out (August 1965, and the very first performance of this song on television) reportedly shows Paul dedicating this song to ex-girlfriend Iris Caldwell. Other reports have him phoning Iris, who supposedly found him too unemotional, and playing the song for her to prove otherwise.
John Lennon, who liked the song, was bothered by the lyrics' lack of resolution; he was also bothered for the rest of his life by fans who thought he'd cowritten it (as the credits insist) and would sing it whenever they saw him. He was known to mock the song in the studio during his solo years. (
"I'm not half the man I used to be... now I'm an amputee.") The irony of this is that although the song has always been credited as a "Lennon/McCartney" composition, the song was written solely by McCartney. In 2002, McCartney asked Yoko Ono if she would consider reversing the songwriting credits on the song to read "McCartney/Lennon". Ono refused.
Last bit of almost world-changing history: The song was offered as a demo to
Chris Farlowe prior to The Beatles recording it, but he turned it down as he considered it "too soft."