Linda McCartney’s Life Philosophy Saved Paul McCartney After The Beatles’ Split 

Paul McCartney leaned heavily on Linda McCartney after The Beatles broke up. The band’s split was painful for McCartney; it didn’t help that his former bandmates turned on him in the aftermath. He said that Linda’s advice to him after the breakup helped him get through it.

The bassist said he felt depressed after The Beatles broke up

The Beatles announced their breakup in 1970. The band’s final months were full of interpersonal conflict. After the band broke up, McCartney felt his life was over.

“The Beatles had been my whole life, really,” he said in the documentary Man on the Run. “When we split up, I thought I’ll never write another note of music ever. I had fear of being a grown-up.”

He said he spent months drinking too much as a coping mechanism.

“I felt very depressed. I thought, ‘I’ll have a wee drum of scotch. Why not? I might have another one. I’ve got no where to go,’” he said. “This lasted a couple of months. I got into drinking too much. But I was very lucky, because I had Linda.”

Paul McCartney shared how Linda McCartney helped him

During this time, Linda taught McCartney a mantra that helped him navigate his deep uncertainty. 

“In a situation like that you lost your job, you can get uptight very easily,” he said. “One of my favorite expressions of hers was, you’d be saying, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’d love to do so and so, but I can’t. I can’t,’ and she’d say, ‘It’s allowed.’”

He said this helped him visualize his future without the band.

“It’s like all the weight just went off. It’s allowed. Yeah, of course it is,” he said. “So those kind of things really impressed me and I think probably made me think a lot more was allowed than was.”

Paul McCartney spoke about the songs he wrote for Linda McCartney

McCartney penned multiple romantic songs about Linda, including “Maybe I’m Amazed” and “My Love,” which he described as the “definitive” song about their romance. He admitted he faced some ridicule because of the love songs. 

“[O]ver the years people have said, ‘Aw, he sings love songs, he writes love songs, he’s so soppy at times,’” he told Billboard. “I thought, Well, I know what they mean, but, people have been doing love songs forever. I like ’em, other people like ’em, and there’s a lot of people I love — I’m lucky enough to have that in my life. So the idea was that ‘you’ may call them silly, but what’s wrong with that?”

He wrote the song “Silly Love Songs” about this reaction to his work.

The song was, in a way, to answer people who just accuse me of being soppy. The nice payoff now is that a lot of the people I meet who are at the age where they’ve just got a couple of kids and have grown up a bit, settling down, they’ll say to me, “I thought you were really soppy for years, but I get it now! I see what you were doing!”