Paul McCartney Thinks It’s Interesting Singing ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ Because It Has a ‘Naïveté’ You ‘Can’t Invent’
Paul McCartney thinks it’s interesting singing The Beatles‘ “I Saw Her Standing There” because it has a “naïveté” that you “can’t invent.” The singer-songwriter recognizes that he was a completely different person when he wrote the song.
Paul McCartney loves ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ but it had tough beginnings
In The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul wrote that he’d include The Beates’ “I Saw Her Standing There” in the group of songs he considers his best work. He remembers playing the song for John Lennon for the first time. They smoked tea in Paul’s father’s pipe.
Despite his love for the tune, Paul explained that it had tough beginnings. There was an issue with one of the lyrics. Paul wrote, “I said, ‘She was just seventeen. She’d never been a beauty queen.’ And John said, ‘I’m not sure about that.’ So our main task was to get rid of the beauty queen. We struggled with it, but then it came.”
Paul McCartney thinks its interesting singing ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ because it has a ‘naïveté’ you ‘can’t invent’
In The Lyrics, Paul wrote that singing “I Saw Her Standing There” now-and this happens to him with all The Beatles songs he sings, particularly from the early days-he realizes he’s “reviewing the work of an eighteen-to-twenty-year-old boy.”
“I think this is very interesting because it’s got a naïveté – a kind of innocence – that you can’t invent,” Paul wrote. You can hear Paul’s naïveté about love, and he was at that age.
Writing about “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” Paul said a similar thing. The Beatles early songs had innocence about them. However, there was an eroticism behind every lyric. Paul said eroticism was a driving force in everything he did back then. He wrote, “‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ open brackets, [and probably do a lot more!].”
Later, at a White House event, Jerry Seinfeld joked, “Paul, you know, I’ve been looking at ‘She was just seventeen/ You know what I mean’; I’m not sure we do know what you mean, Paul!”
Shakespeare and Irish songs inspired another lyric
Paul and John wrote “I Saw Her Standing There” at Paul’s father’s house. “She was just seventeen / You know what I mean / And the way she looked was way beyond compare.”
According to Paul, the song’s rhythm “echoes” Stanley Holloway’s version of “The Lion and Albert,” a comic poem by Marriott Edgar. It has a similar meter.
As a kid, Paul had heard tons of artists that inspired many Beatles songs, including Hoagy Carmichael, Harold Arlen, George Gershwin, and Johnny Mercer. Then, Paul’s English teacher, Alan Durband, taught him even more. He learned about the rhyming couplet at the end of a Shakespeare sonnet.
He doesn’t know where “beyond compare” came from, but he thinks it must have come out of Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” As a child, he also may have been conscious of the Irish song tradition – of a woman being described as “beyond compare.”
Bottomline, when The Beatles released “I Saw Her Standing There,” everyone knew it was not the average rock ‘n’ roll song. “I don’t know where I dredged it from, but in the great trawling net of my youth, it just got caught up like a dolphin,” Paul said.
