Happy Birthday, Macca!

Many of you went about your Saturday entirely unaware that today was Paul McCartney's birthday, but I didn't. Due to my combination of Beatles fandom and ability to store really useless information in my brain I was well aware that today was the 69th birthday of the "cute" Beatle.

I didn't do anything too nutso and fangirl, but I did come home, put on one of my many Beatles shirts, drank out of my Beatles pint glass, and played some of my favourite Paul songs on my guitar. You know, normal stuff.

As I've developed as a songwriter and a person, I've grown to respect Macca. You see, when I was younger I venerated John Lennon as the troubled, brilliant, genius whose eccentricies I longed to emulate. Paul, on the other hand, seemed like the sappy, boring Beatle who wrote standards like "Yesterday". Paul was never my favourite Beatle, but that was when I was young and my heart was an open book.

Nowdays, I gravitate toward Paul's music. For example, the one song I was always just a little bored with in the Beatles catalog was "The Long and Winding Road". When I was 13 or 14 there hadn't been much of a road at in my life, much less one long and windy. That all changed at the end of undergrad. I was driving back to my apartment from a friends place the afternoon that I was moving out. I knew then that it was the last time that this commute would be in my life. Sure, I may visit, but it would be a temporary stop in a former life. And that's when I heard it. This song that I always passed over. It was in this moment that life and music completely synchronized and I realized that for all the strange and fractured artists I long to be like, I'm a Paul. Although songs by John like "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Yer Blues" may have spoken to my melancholy, it's Paul's music that makes me feel better. There's something emphathetic about the way he writes that makes me feel encouraged. He inspires me to take a sad song and make it better. To take my broken wings and learn to fly.

On that I'll close by including a song. I've chosen this one because it's from Paul's first solo album McCartney. If you don't have this album then go get it now. It's super easy to get your hands on because it was recently re-released.


I'm also including "Mull of Kintyre" because there is nothing better than coming home from a long day of work and watching Paul in boots wandering around a field with a guitar. Also, bagpipes.