Here Today - Remixed 2015

McCartney wrote this for John Lennon after his tragic death on December 8, 1980. He sings of the years they spent together in much detail.

With this song, McCartney was reconciling his relationship with John Lennon to himself and others. He told GQ: "After John died, there'd been a lot of talk about who did what and who liked who and did the Beatles argue. I was almost buying into this idea that me and John were fighting all the time. But I remembered it wasn't true, so I wrote the song about how, 'if you were here, you might say this or those... but I know better.' I remember well some of the things we did. It was really for me thinking about John. We had a great relationship and like any family, there's always arguments, there's always disputes, but in the end we loved each other and I wanted to make a song where I actually said "I love you" to John, so that was that song. It's quite emotional because it came from a real feeling about him, and I wanted to correct the record in my mind as much as in any one else's mind. There were some photos from that period which were really beautiful, and there's just him and me working and you could see we loved each other. So, once all these rumors go about, you almost buy into them yourself. So that song helped me set the record straight."

Paul McCartney: "The truth of the matter is when John died it was so weird for everyone and obviously for those of us that were near to him it was doubly, triply weird and then there was the obvious sort of thing is anyone going to write a song about John because obviously certainly we all felt deeply enough and normally when we felt deeply enough we committed it to song. I was wondering if I was going to do it but I thought I'm not going to sit down and try to do it but if anything comes sometime I'll do it. I was one day just sitting quietly in this little room with my guitar and these chords started coming out and I started having these thoughts as if I was talking to myself to John about our relationship and stuff and obviously one of the things that had been funny for me was this idea of when the Beatles broke up we became enemies for a time. But I knew we weren't and I know for a fact he knew we weren't too because independently of each other we'd talked nicely of each other but there was a pride thing of two men very difficult business and all that." (Transcribed from this interview.)