18 ms·

Paul McCartney's Freakish Memory

248 points by tintinnabula 4y ago

karaterobot 4y ago
> Of course he got it from the cemetery. The idea that he coincidentally landed on the name ‘Eleanor Rigby’ - for a song about a woman who “died in the church and was buried along with her name” - is wildly implausible. ... > (Note that the gravestone in question isn’t even for Eleanor Rigby herself but her grandfather; her name is further down, a detail). So, in any case he didn't name the character after someone who died in the church, or was even buried there, but someone whose name appears there. Essentially, the connection is that the name Eleanor Rigby is engraved in a place where Paul McCartney has been before. The fact that he met Lennon there does not mean that the place is seared in his memory, it just means it's of historic importance to Beatles fans, which may be making this coincidence seem like something else.
- wingspar 4y ago
  I do not now the custom of that area or era, but I took that grave marker to be basically a family marker and they were all buried there.
  - cryptonector 4y ago
    That is clearly the case. It's almost certainly like the plot behind it and to the right -- not covered by dirt, but more like a buried mausoleum which is opened to add urns with the ashes of recently passed family members.
- cryptonector 4y ago
  The names listed on the stone are the names of people buried there. Multiple people are buried in the same plot. Eleanor Rigby was buried there. The coincidence or non-coincidence is indeed of really low importance in the grand scheme of things, and says nothing about McCartney's "freakish memory".
- budgi4 4y ago
  It's more likely that he felt it was inappropriate to link the song to the grave which the song title derived from for his own personal reasons.
sceptically 4y ago
I don't get it. Please explain. Is it the weird dollar sign on the stone?
- behaveEc0n00 4y ago
- Tao3300 4y ago
  That's an IHS with the letters imposed on one another. It's short for 'ihsous', Greek for Jesus.
  - wheels 4y ago
    Fun fact: the actual "dollar" sign is actually a P and an S superimposed, as it's actually a symbol for "peso".
  - ahazred8ta 4y ago
    The superimposed IHS: https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/ihs-ancient-medieval-christogram-christian-monogram-of-jesus-christ-the-savior-gm1186549235-334824925 https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/ihs-ancient-medieval-chri... And actually the dollar sign started out as two pillars with ribbon banners wrapped around them in an S shape, not as a P-S.
- mywittyname 4y ago
  Given the context, I think that says "IHS". There are a variety of IHS symbols, some can be confused as a dollar sign. https://cemeteries.wordpress.com/2006/08/23/ihs/ https://cemeteries.wordpress.com/2006/08/23/ihs/
jjulius 4y ago
>The idea that he coincidentally landed on the name ‘Eleanor Rigby’ - for a song about a woman who “died in the church and was buried along with her name” - is wildly implausible. ... is it, though?
- notahacker 4y ago
  An exceptionally unusual line about names and burials and a fairly unusual name associated with a burial in one of the only churches the Beatles are likely to have spent much time hanging around? (Throw in the fact that Lennon claimed to have written a lot of the song, which meant McCartney who disagreed with that claim had a lot of reason to make up an alternative story if he couldn't remember where the name or line came from...) I passed a narrowboat called Eleanor with the location it's based in (Rugby) painted below the name (it's from the Aintree Beetle range too... ) a month or two back. If the owner told me he'd named his boat Eleanor because of a film star, and coincidentally decided to moor it at Rugby some time later, I wouldn't believe him :)
  - vlunkr 4y ago
    In my opinion it's not that impressive either way. If he did remember it: Seems like it's very common for artists to take mental or physical notes of interesting things they see. He saw the name, associated it with the cemetery, then forgot that it was a real name and place. If it's a coincidence: Tons of people are buried at churches, that's not unusual. There's a chance there's more than one Eleanor Rigby buried at a church.
nicoburns 4y ago
> In 1999, McCartney recorded a haunting cover version of an obscure song called No Other Baby. He’d had the song in his head for years without knowing who recorded it or who it was written by. Whenever he sang it to people, nobody knew it. Only after recording it did he discover that the song, or at least the version of it, was by a skiffle group called The Vipers, who released it as a single in 1958, the year after John met Paul (as it turns out, the record was, rather remarkably, produced by George Martin). Paul said he never owned the record, which means he would have heard it on the radio, or in a record store listening booth, what - once, twice? Yet forty years later, he remembered all the verses, as well as the refrain, which goes, I don’t want no other baby but you….I don’t want no other baby but you… This kind of memory is certainly possible. And from what I've seen of McCartney - he has a vast repertoire of songs he knows (not just his own) - it seems almost certain that he has this talent. I suspect it's actually a relatively common ability though. I have family members who can remember both the tune and the lyrics of songs after 1 or 2 listens through. This just isn't so noticeable because they're not musicians. In general, I find what people find easy to remember a fascinating topic. my personal ability to remember song lyrics (and in general auditory information) is awful - I actually can't remember the entire lyrics to single song. I'm sure I could memorise some if I really tried, but it would take me hours of conscious. effort. On the other hand I often recall visual or written information from a single glance, and am very good at book learning and retaining an understanding of system and concepts.
- cardiffspaceman 4y ago
  The power of ad jingles is often attributed to songs being easy to memorize. According to legend that was the core idea for Sesame Street teaching things with songs and music. But I am sure I don’t remember nearly as many songs as musicians do, never mind McCartney
- coliveira 4y ago
  Yes, this is not so surprising. I remember songs I heard in my infancy and never again. I also didn't have a record. I guess people find this surprising because they live in an era where you can find any song you want (the already common thought of "how people did this before smart phones...").
borski 4y ago
So much of what is described matches perfectly my experience with having ADHD. It’s less about having an insanely good memory and more about being able to find connections where others don’t normally see them, completely subconsciously. Plus the “homework while doing TV and remembering both perfectly,” etc. I would bet many dollars Paul McCartney has ADHD. :)
- schnevets 4y ago
  Observe a trivia night focused on a specific TV Show (like Simpsons or Seinfeld trivia) and you'll see this phenomena en masse. People make connections based on plotlines, celebrity guest stars, or even head writers on episodes and then can drill down to a precise line of dialogue or gag. The same thing happens with die-hard sports fans. You ask "Who was the rookie points leader on the 05-06 Toronto Maple Leafs?" and a sports nut can start piecing together how the team did that year, who was on their roster, and finally derive an educated guess.
  - borski 4y ago
    For sure! One of the hallmarks in how ADHD often presents is also hyperfocus on things they’re particularly interested in, which also exists in non-ADHD folks sometimes of course. Paul was clearly curious about everything, and hyperfocused on a few things (music). Get Back is a great thing to watch to see this in action; his brain flies from idea to idea, until he lands on one he is imminently curious about and then that’s all he talks or thinks about for hours.
    - Bakary 4y ago
      It's not so much hyperfocus as the inability of the executive function to unswitch
spoonjim 4y ago
Almost everyone "smart" has a really good memory. Turns out it's a lot easier to think of things when you have everything in RAM instead of tape storage.
- johnwalkr 4y ago
  Ironically beatles famously used an analog tape-based predecessor to synthesizers in "Strawberry Fields".
alexpotato 4y ago
I actually had a Ask HN question that went nowhere about how senior folks in tech with bad memories got to their positions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18309597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18309597 I ask b/c it seems that most (if not all) of the senior folks I've worked with in the past somehow managed to have incredibly detailed memories around: - the tech stack - the people that worked for them etc If they didn't, they did the "if you are a fighter pilot with bad vision, get a wingman with good vision" and hired a number 2 or team lead who did.
- sibeliuss 4y ago
  This is def me. Interestingly, I have a terrible memory when it comes to facts and names and things I read in books and so on and so forth. But I have a way-above-average situational memory. Interactions with people (or code), conversations and reasons why decisions were made tend to stick forever. It's bizarre. Granted I'm not Paul McCartney interacting with innumerable people across time and space over a whole lifetime, but this story felt familiar because I can imagine something like this happening to me.
  - olddustytrail 4y ago
    I'm the opposite. I can remember all sorts of weird facts and numbers. I can remember the IP address of the DNS servers of a job I worked 20 years ago. And lyrics to songs I learned as a child. But I will forget someone's name minutes after meeting them even if I try all the tricks of repeating it 3 times or associating it with a particular action. As a side note, after I got COVID, for a few weeks I couldn't retain anything. I'd read some documentation and afterwards couldn't remember a single thing. I remember discussing it with my sister and her response was "welcome to the world of ordinary people!" It has made me more patient with people not getting what I've explained on the first hearing, so at least I've learned from my experience.
    - sibeliuss 4y ago
      How interesting -- and then after COVID resolved your memory gradually improved? I've heard anecdotal evidence about this. How frustrating! And sorry you had to experience it!
joe_the_user 4y ago
That the Beatles were astoundingly, uniquely talented actually became fodder for right wing conspiracy theories [1]. I remember a relative in 1974 asking rhetorically how four uneducated working class men could produce music of musical genius. The actual story is the Beatles had a remarkable series of musical opportunities, from the background described here to studying with some of the Greatest American Rock and Rolls to endless performance in their first gigs. [1] https://publicseminar.org/essays/was-theodor-adorno-the-fifth-beatle/ https://publicseminar.org/essays/was-theodor-adorno-the-fift...
- blacksqr 4y ago
  The topic of the Beatles is one of those where the more you learn about it, the more uncanny and mysterious it becomes.
  - jleyank 4y ago
    Yeah, but survivorship bias is a big thing as well. There are a number of "relatively uneducated folks" who generated significant catalogues: the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, ... The writers at the Brill Building generated gobs of hits and none of them were musicologists as I recall. In the case of the Beatles, they were coupled to a producer who was musically trained, had an ear for comedy and was willing with his engineers to push the technology quite hard. We don't remember or even hear about the also rans and nearly made it's, so we can't really judge how rare the Beatles talent was vs. how rare their opportunity was (and how they jumped on it). Certainly did the 10K hours of training and continually advanced. They also had the advantage of doing it first so there was (far?) less of a minimum-standard they had to exceed.
    - blacksqr 4y ago
      https://youtu.be/Sd4NstnaEk8 https://youtu.be/Sd4NstnaEk8 https://youtu.be/ZQS91wVdvYc https://youtu.be/ZQS91wVdvYc https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/39381 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/39381
kaiwen1 4y ago
In counterpoint, a recent 60 Minutes piece on Paul MacCartney showed him playing an impromptu concert in his local pub. While playing one of his old hits – I can't recall which one – he suddenly started to stumble and couldn't remember the lyrics. Fortunately the audience was signing along and knew every word.
- macshome 4y ago
  I saw him on tour in 1990 and he got lost in a Beatles song on stage and had a laugh about it. That’s said, everything I’ve read or seen about him points to him having an encyclopedic memory of songs.
  - 2-718-281-828 4y ago
    Those slips - I'd assume - tend to occur with people who have very high trust in memory. Sometimes something gets messed up. Doesn't even have to be due to forgetting something but rather overmemorizing versions of a song getting entangled upon accessing them. People who don't trust their memory will rehearse more thoroughly.
  - lowercased 4y ago
    He's done this multiple times - We Can Work It Out from Unplugged, for example. I think in some cases, it's semi-rehearsed. But not in all cases, certainly, and he can just roll with it apparently.
- arinlen 4y ago
  > In counterpoint, a recent 60 Minutes piece on Paul MacCartney showed him playing an impromptu concert in his local pub. While playing one of his old hits – I can't recall which one – he suddenly started to stumble and couldn't remember the lyrics. Fortunately the audience was signing along and knew every word. I'm sure that the 80-year old Paul McCartney deserves a free pass when he misses a line or two from an impromptu song.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
nathias 4y ago
rhyme and rhythm are linguistic information compression mechanisms
madrox 4y ago
I enjoyed reading this, but what a strange article that's projecting a lot onto McCartney. Every anecdote has some plausible, other reason for these situations, but the article seems insistent on putting McCartney's memory on a pedestal. Paul himself never acknowledges these anecdotes are due to memory, and he's never mentioned his memory is particularly noteworthy. If I got anything out of this article, it's the mystique of celebrity when they don't answer your every question.
- meowface 4y ago
  Yes, I found this one of the oddest articles I've read in a while. It's just the author projecting all of these things onto McCartney, without ever having any clear evidence of what really happened in any of these cases or evidence that he has a particularly good memory.
- seneca 4y ago
  Yeah, exactly this. This is an unwitting article about how people are desperate to deify celebrities. I've always been a bit bewildered by the phenomenon. It almost seems like internalized marketing.
- vallanceroad 4y ago
  In fact, he alludes to just the opposite with the title of his 14th solo album, "Memory Almost Full", which itself is an anagram of "for my soulmate LLM" (Linda Louise McCartney). Paul insists this was not intentional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Almost_Full https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Almost_Full
  - 72deluxe 4y ago
    I had the first version of that album and it's mastered and mixed horrendously. One of the worse albums I have ever heard - I emailed the mastering engineer and he said "McCartney wanted it like that..." and that he think he had learned from it because he rereleased it some years later with a much less brickwall compression.
    - 4y ago
yuan43 4y ago
> I find this fascinating. The exact sequence of his writing process for the song [Eleanor Rigby] is probably irrecoverable now but I’d love to know precisely when he decided on the song’s theme of loneliness, death, and worship, and when the name ‘Eleanor Rigby’ bubbled up into his conscious mind [from a gravestone in a graveyard he and John used to walk through]. It’s almost as if his unconscious mind had been giving him prompts, first ‘Eleanor’, then ‘Rigby’ (hey, check that sign out!), like a stage magician guiding their mark towards a card while creating the illusion of a free choice. It's not uncommon for writers to put things into their novels even they don't see. Readers and editors note what's there, and the writers can be surprised that it happened. Sean Coyne talks about this several times on the Story Grid podcast, and it's on display in several of the episodes in which a writer's draft is examined. Maybe the real story here is how the process of creating art taps into a part of the mind that it keeps hidden from itself, or at least doesn't expose without persuasion.
stevage 4y ago
Boy the evidence in this article is pretty thin.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lowercased 4y ago
In 2007, he told us his memory was almost full.... Yet in 2022, here we are, it's still seemingly got room for a bit more.
lacrosse_tannin 4y ago
Does he drink?
- schrodinger 4y ago
  It sounds like he had a short stint with over-drinking but got it in control before it got out of hand: https://www.nova.ie/paul-mccartney-cuts-booze-beating-alcoholism-1970s-116450/ https://www.nova.ie/paul-mccartney-cuts-booze-beating-alcoho...
jjtheblunt 4y ago
where is freakish memory evident? (and i did read it)
smm11 4y ago
I often come up with numerical sequences also involving letters. Like RLT237-b, something like that. Sometimes I'll track down what those mean, and very frequently turn up a toy I had when I was 4, or a window code in the back of an International Harvester. Stuff is down there for all of us, it's just a matter of how to summon it.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
If you examine anybody's life, you will probably come up with 'coincidences' like that. Because we all have associations we're not aware of, or at least not aware where they came from.
w0mbat 4y ago
That's a weird article. The anecdote at the beginning has a big buildup then goes absolutely nowhere and the pattern keeps repeating.
squarefoot 4y ago
This is impressive, especially remembering all the exact lyrics after all those years, but hey, he's Paul McCartney!:) I usually have decent memory for tunes: some I can sorta play at the 1st listen, others need a lot more time, not necessarily related to their difficulty, but nothing special. However the most accurate memory I have is for sounds, or actually how a song sounds in its whole: I have on some occasions guessed a song, artist and title, just by listening just one second of it, probably less, while for example a friend was quickly changing stations on the car radio. I have never been able to give an explanation of this, but happened a few times. Sometimes I guessed the wrong song but got correctly the artist and album, which reinforces the idea that I could have memorized the sounding (that album sound) rather than the song structure itself, which probably would have been meaningless when mentally decoding such a short sample.
mgkimsal 4y ago
Related to his vegetarian lifestyle?
inopinatus 4y ago
MARWOOD: Even a stopped clock gives the right time, twice a day.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
A curiosity I’ve seldom seen noted in all the rich lore of the Beatles generally: they recorded their entire catalogue of studio albums over just slightly more than seven years. From their first album release, only a bit more than 2.5 years passed while they released four more albums, two of which were soundtracks for iconic films released in tandem. The fifth album is the one many fans mark as their creative breakout. It was only a year and a half til Sgt Pepper with another creative breakout milestone in between, then only a year and a half til the White Album, then less than a year til Abbey Road (which I personally find preposterous because I sincerely believe it’s objectively the best album by any artist ever), and just over half a year til their final full studio release Let It Be. Oh and Yellow Submarine was in there too, of course. I don’t know how much Paul’s “freakish” memory made that possible. I do know that it astonishes me every time I remember the fact that the whole Beatles recording career lasted about as long as the time I had a locker in grade school.
Maursault 4y ago
I knew guy that could just listen to an engine running, and hear that it had a timing problem! I knew a guy that understood what this other guy was saying in a foreign language! That is crazy. I knew someone that could just look at the curve on a bridge and immediately write down the equation for the curve, right there in front of everybody! * * I have no doubt Paul McCartney can just listen to a song once and immediately play it. Did the author even realize that McCartney is a musician? I hate to be negative, bring on the downvotes, but this is nothing less than being fascination with the ordinary. I also have zero doubt there are dozens and dozens of HN readers that also are musicians and can do the same. Not everyone who begins to study and play music can do it, but they will be able to eventually 1) recognize notes just by hearing them and 2) recognize chord changes just by hearing them. Some people have perfect pitch, and that makes it all the easier, but perfect pitch is not necessary, and it isn't an amazing trick any more than understanding someone speaking French. David Byrne is freakishly smart. Tom Scholz of Boston has an MME from MIT. Both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel have genius level IQs. Geniuses simply are not that novel. What sets Paul McCartney apart is not whether he has a good memory or can pick up a tune, but rather that he was a Beatle.
- gooseyard 4y ago
  I play a lot of sub gigs, often on short notice, usually I get a set list in advance, but often I don't. I've been doing that for, maybe 25-30 years. In the event I get a set list, I've found that what works best for me is to start listening to them about 24-48 hours in advance, and not to play through them more than maybe 2-4 times. Obviously, this is popular short form music, and so I'm mostly getting a picture in my head of the form and the sound of the changes in my ear. The gigs where I get no set list are interesting- after playing for a long time, I just know a lot of songs, or have heard a popular song enough that I know the form and the changes already, and if I can hear the changes in my head, playing them is not a problem. The really interesting bit though is if its a song I've never heard at all. Then, its a game of asking a few questions (what's the key, what's the feel), maybe someone will say it starts on scale degree IV, so you know there's going to be an intro and into the first verse, and you know thats scale degree I probably. Then, you just have to kind of guess your way through the first verse, but you're memorizing the verse at the same time, and usually the second one there's no guessing. And so on. There's also a great deal of watching peoples hands and bodies because there are tells when something is about to happen, and you just get a sense of what they mean. So there's obviously rote knowledge of music, but there's also this subtext of guessing and watching and listening and mimicry that are a huge part of what is actually going on. The older I get, the more I enjoy thinking about that aspect of making live music.
the_black_hand 4y ago
No doubt that Paul has an amazing memory, above ordinary but I would put it at freakish level. There's quite a few people who remember events, people and music really well. Anybody whose a frequent writer would def report similar recalled names and events leaking from their subconscious into their work. Probably happens to all of us at some point. Another issue is that there's an obviously selection bias. The article only picks up the amazing stuff (rightly so). If my friends went through my life and listed all the amazing genius moments I've remembered something obscure, you'd thing I'm a genius too. But what you wouldn't get is the 1000s of times I've forgotten stuff. I'm not attacking the editor. They are doing what they are paid to do, and the article was fun to read, but bias is just something readers should be aware about.
Theodores 4y ago
He is a godfather to a relative of mine and there was a wedding where we were not sure whether or not he would make an appearance. Luckily he didn't. I say this because the wedding had the lucky couple as top billing and did not need to have the cameras focused on one of the guests. It was their special day, not his. Everyone thinks that they know him, whereas he does not know them. This skews things and I think that it is this that gives the appearance of a 'freakish memory'. People project what they want onto him and have made up their minds about him already. Those of us that write code know how hard it is. With Paul McCartney he can meet up with a friend, bang out some ditty in minutes and sell that by the bucketload. As much as I might mock 'The Frog Song' and such, I don't have the chops to do better. Yet compared to the effort to write code, I do not see 'The Frog Song' as in the same league of endeavour. I am not saying it is easy, but then I am. Personality is a 'skill' and the likes of McCartney can hold a stage with an audience of thousands and no material. He can work that crowd, raise spirits and make everyone have a good time. These experiences are practically faith healing and, again, people read things like 'freakish memory' into this.
dghughes 4y ago
My lone amazing skill was I could sometimes grab a handful of quarters and have exactly $10. I rolled a lot of coins when I worked for my uncle's coin-op arcade game business in the 80s.
klelatti 4y ago
The main thing I took away from this is how hard some things can seem to someone who has a casual acquaintance with the topic. This seems to be particularly true with regard to some acts of memorisation. Lots of classical musicians can play a reasonably wide repertoire of complex and long pieces from memory. Is that freakish? Not really, and if you play an instrument you will soon find yourself being able to remember long stretches of the music you play without much effort - people say 'it's in the fingers'.
mgkimsal 4y ago
For all his 'great memory' anecdotes (and I've read others too), we can also see that... he may not always be correct. Anthology series showed Paul, George and Ringo recounting stories that contradicted each other (Elvis meeting in particular).
- cooperadymas 4y ago
  That just means George and Ringo were wrong :-)

248 points by tintinnabula 4y ago

> Of course he got it from the cemetery. The idea that he coincidentally landed on the name ‘Eleanor Rigby’ - for a song about a woman who “died in the church and was buried along with her name” - is wildly implausible. ... > (Note that the gravestone in question isn’t even for Eleanor Rigby herself but her grandfather; her name is further down, a detail). So, in any case he didn't name the character after someone who died in the church, or was even buried there, but someone whose name appears there. Essentially, the connection is that the name Eleanor Rigby is engraved in a place where Paul McCartney has been before. The fact that he met Lennon there does not mean that the place is seared in his memory, it just means it's of historic importance to Beatles fans, which may be making this coincidence seem like something else.

wingspar 4y ago
I do not now the custom of that area or era, but I took that grave marker to be basically a family marker and they were all buried there.
- cryptonector 4y ago
  That is clearly the case. It's almost certainly like the plot behind it and to the right -- not covered by dirt, but more like a buried mausoleum which is opened to add urns with the ashes of recently passed family members.
cryptonector 4y ago
The names listed on the stone are the names of people buried there. Multiple people are buried in the same plot. Eleanor Rigby was buried there. The coincidence or non-coincidence is indeed of really low importance in the grand scheme of things, and says nothing about McCartney's "freakish memory".
budgi4 4y ago
It's more likely that he felt it was inappropriate to link the song to the grave which the song title derived from for his own personal reasons.

sceptically 4y ago

I don't get it. Please explain. Is it the weird dollar sign on the stone?

behaveEc0n00 4y ago
Tao3300 4y ago
That's an IHS with the letters imposed on one another. It's short for 'ihsous', Greek for Jesus.
- wheels 4y ago
  Fun fact: the actual "dollar" sign is actually a P and an S superimposed, as it's actually a symbol for "peso".
- ahazred8ta 4y ago
  The superimposed IHS: https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/ihs-ancient-medieval-christogram-christian-monogram-of-jesus-christ-the-savior-gm1186549235-334824925 https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/ihs-ancient-medieval-chri... And actually the dollar sign started out as two pillars with ribbon banners wrapped around them in an S shape, not as a P-S.
mywittyname 4y ago
Given the context, I think that says "IHS". There are a variety of IHS symbols, some can be confused as a dollar sign. https://cemeteries.wordpress.com/2006/08/23/ihs/ https://cemeteries.wordpress.com/2006/08/23/ihs/

jjulius 4y ago

>The idea that he coincidentally landed on the name ‘Eleanor Rigby’ - for a song about a woman who “died in the church and was buried along with her name” - is wildly implausible. ... is it, though?

notahacker 4y ago
An exceptionally unusual line about names and burials and a fairly unusual name associated with a burial in one of the only churches the Beatles are likely to have spent much time hanging around? (Throw in the fact that Lennon claimed to have written a lot of the song, which meant McCartney who disagreed with that claim had a lot of reason to make up an alternative story if he couldn't remember where the name or line came from...) I passed a narrowboat called Eleanor with the location it's based in (Rugby) painted below the name (it's from the Aintree Beetle range too... ) a month or two back. If the owner told me he'd named his boat Eleanor because of a film star, and coincidentally decided to moor it at Rugby some time later, I wouldn't believe him :)
- vlunkr 4y ago
  In my opinion it's not that impressive either way. If he did remember it: Seems like it's very common for artists to take mental or physical notes of interesting things they see. He saw the name, associated it with the cemetery, then forgot that it was a real name and place. If it's a coincidence: Tons of people are buried at churches, that's not unusual. There's a chance there's more than one Eleanor Rigby buried at a church.

nicoburns 4y ago

> In 1999, McCartney recorded a haunting cover version of an obscure song called No Other Baby. He’d had the song in his head for years without knowing who recorded it or who it was written by. Whenever he sang it to people, nobody knew it. Only after recording it did he discover that the song, or at least the version of it, was by a skiffle group called The Vipers, who released it as a single in 1958, the year after John met Paul (as it turns out, the record was, rather remarkably, produced by George Martin). Paul said he never owned the record, which means he would have heard it on the radio, or in a record store listening booth, what - once, twice? Yet forty years later, he remembered all the verses, as well as the refrain, which goes, I don’t want no other baby but you….I don’t want no other baby but you… This kind of memory is certainly possible. And from what I've seen of McCartney - he has a vast repertoire of songs he knows (not just his own) - it seems almost certain that he has this talent. I suspect it's actually a relatively common ability though. I have family members who can remember both the tune and the lyrics of songs after 1 or 2 listens through. This just isn't so noticeable because they're not musicians. In general, I find what people find easy to remember a fascinating topic. my personal ability to remember song lyrics (and in general auditory information) is awful - I actually can't remember the entire lyrics to single song. I'm sure I could memorise some if I really tried, but it would take me hours of conscious. effort. On the other hand I often recall visual or written information from a single glance, and am very good at book learning and retaining an understanding of system and concepts.

cardiffspaceman 4y ago
The power of ad jingles is often attributed to songs being easy to memorize. According to legend that was the core idea for Sesame Street teaching things with songs and music. But I am sure I don’t remember nearly as many songs as musicians do, never mind McCartney
coliveira 4y ago
Yes, this is not so surprising. I remember songs I heard in my infancy and never again. I also didn't have a record. I guess people find this surprising because they live in an era where you can find any song you want (the already common thought of "how people did this before smart phones...").

borski 4y ago

So much of what is described matches perfectly my experience with having ADHD. It’s less about having an insanely good memory and more about being able to find connections where others don’t normally see them, completely subconsciously. Plus the “homework while doing TV and remembering both perfectly,” etc. I would bet many dollars Paul McCartney has ADHD. :)

schnevets 4y ago
Observe a trivia night focused on a specific TV Show (like Simpsons or Seinfeld trivia) and you'll see this phenomena en masse. People make connections based on plotlines, celebrity guest stars, or even head writers on episodes and then can drill down to a precise line of dialogue or gag. The same thing happens with die-hard sports fans. You ask "Who was the rookie points leader on the 05-06 Toronto Maple Leafs?" and a sports nut can start piecing together how the team did that year, who was on their roster, and finally derive an educated guess.
- borski 4y ago
  For sure! One of the hallmarks in how ADHD often presents is also hyperfocus on things they’re particularly interested in, which also exists in non-ADHD folks sometimes of course. Paul was clearly curious about everything, and hyperfocused on a few things (music). Get Back is a great thing to watch to see this in action; his brain flies from idea to idea, until he lands on one he is imminently curious about and then that’s all he talks or thinks about for hours.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    It's not so much hyperfocus as the inability of the executive function to unswitch

spoonjim 4y ago

Almost everyone "smart" has a really good memory. Turns out it's a lot easier to think of things when you have everything in RAM instead of tape storage.

johnwalkr 4y ago
Ironically beatles famously used an analog tape-based predecessor to synthesizers in "Strawberry Fields".

alexpotato 4y ago

I actually had a Ask HN question that went nowhere about how senior folks in tech with bad memories got to their positions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18309597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18309597 I ask b/c it seems that most (if not all) of the senior folks I've worked with in the past somehow managed to have incredibly detailed memories around: - the tech stack - the people that worked for them etc If they didn't, they did the "if you are a fighter pilot with bad vision, get a wingman with good vision" and hired a number 2 or team lead who did.

sibeliuss 4y ago
This is def me. Interestingly, I have a terrible memory when it comes to facts and names and things I read in books and so on and so forth. But I have a way-above-average situational memory. Interactions with people (or code), conversations and reasons why decisions were made tend to stick forever. It's bizarre. Granted I'm not Paul McCartney interacting with innumerable people across time and space over a whole lifetime, but this story felt familiar because I can imagine something like this happening to me.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  I'm the opposite. I can remember all sorts of weird facts and numbers. I can remember the IP address of the DNS servers of a job I worked 20 years ago. And lyrics to songs I learned as a child. But I will forget someone's name minutes after meeting them even if I try all the tricks of repeating it 3 times or associating it with a particular action. As a side note, after I got COVID, for a few weeks I couldn't retain anything. I'd read some documentation and afterwards couldn't remember a single thing. I remember discussing it with my sister and her response was "welcome to the world of ordinary people!" It has made me more patient with people not getting what I've explained on the first hearing, so at least I've learned from my experience.
  - sibeliuss 4y ago
    How interesting -- and then after COVID resolved your memory gradually improved? I've heard anecdotal evidence about this. How frustrating! And sorry you had to experience it!

joe_the_user 4y ago

That the Beatles were astoundingly, uniquely talented actually became fodder for right wing conspiracy theories [1]. I remember a relative in 1974 asking rhetorically how four uneducated working class men could produce music of musical genius. The actual story is the Beatles had a remarkable series of musical opportunities, from the background described here to studying with some of the Greatest American Rock and Rolls to endless performance in their first gigs. [1] https://publicseminar.org/essays/was-theodor-adorno-the-fifth-beatle/ https://publicseminar.org/essays/was-theodor-adorno-the-fift...

blacksqr 4y ago
The topic of the Beatles is one of those where the more you learn about it, the more uncanny and mysterious it becomes.
- jleyank 4y ago
  Yeah, but survivorship bias is a big thing as well. There are a number of "relatively uneducated folks" who generated significant catalogues: the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, ... The writers at the Brill Building generated gobs of hits and none of them were musicologists as I recall. In the case of the Beatles, they were coupled to a producer who was musically trained, had an ear for comedy and was willing with his engineers to push the technology quite hard. We don't remember or even hear about the also rans and nearly made it's, so we can't really judge how rare the Beatles talent was vs. how rare their opportunity was (and how they jumped on it). Certainly did the 10K hours of training and continually advanced. They also had the advantage of doing it first so there was (far?) less of a minimum-standard they had to exceed.
  - blacksqr 4y ago
    https://youtu.be/Sd4NstnaEk8 https://youtu.be/Sd4NstnaEk8 https://youtu.be/ZQS91wVdvYc https://youtu.be/ZQS91wVdvYc https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/39381 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/39381

kaiwen1 4y ago

In counterpoint, a recent 60 Minutes piece on Paul MacCartney showed him playing an impromptu concert in his local pub. While playing one of his old hits – I can't recall which one – he suddenly started to stumble and couldn't remember the lyrics. Fortunately the audience was signing along and knew every word.

macshome 4y ago
I saw him on tour in 1990 and he got lost in a Beatles song on stage and had a laugh about it. That’s said, everything I’ve read or seen about him points to him having an encyclopedic memory of songs.
- 2-718-281-828 4y ago
  Those slips - I'd assume - tend to occur with people who have very high trust in memory. Sometimes something gets messed up. Doesn't even have to be due to forgetting something but rather overmemorizing versions of a song getting entangled upon accessing them. People who don't trust their memory will rehearse more thoroughly.
- lowercased 4y ago
  He's done this multiple times - We Can Work It Out from Unplugged, for example. I think in some cases, it's semi-rehearsed. But not in all cases, certainly, and he can just roll with it apparently.
arinlen 4y ago
> In counterpoint, a recent 60 Minutes piece on Paul MacCartney showed him playing an impromptu concert in his local pub. While playing one of his old hits – I can't recall which one – he suddenly started to stumble and couldn't remember the lyrics. Fortunately the audience was signing along and knew every word. I'm sure that the 80-year old Paul McCartney deserves a free pass when he misses a line or two from an impromptu song.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago

nathias 4y ago

rhyme and rhythm are linguistic information compression mechanisms

madrox 4y ago

I enjoyed reading this, but what a strange article that's projecting a lot onto McCartney. Every anecdote has some plausible, other reason for these situations, but the article seems insistent on putting McCartney's memory on a pedestal. Paul himself never acknowledges these anecdotes are due to memory, and he's never mentioned his memory is particularly noteworthy. If I got anything out of this article, it's the mystique of celebrity when they don't answer your every question.

meowface 4y ago
Yes, I found this one of the oddest articles I've read in a while. It's just the author projecting all of these things onto McCartney, without ever having any clear evidence of what really happened in any of these cases or evidence that he has a particularly good memory.
seneca 4y ago
Yeah, exactly this. This is an unwitting article about how people are desperate to deify celebrities. I've always been a bit bewildered by the phenomenon. It almost seems like internalized marketing.
vallanceroad 4y ago
In fact, he alludes to just the opposite with the title of his 14th solo album, "Memory Almost Full", which itself is an anagram of "for my soulmate LLM" (Linda Louise McCartney). Paul insists this was not intentional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Almost_Full https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Almost_Full
- 72deluxe 4y ago
  I had the first version of that album and it's mastered and mixed horrendously. One of the worse albums I have ever heard - I emailed the mastering engineer and he said "McCartney wanted it like that..." and that he think he had learned from it because he rereleased it some years later with a much less brickwall compression.
  - 4y ago

yuan43 4y ago

> I find this fascinating. The exact sequence of his writing process for the song [Eleanor Rigby] is probably irrecoverable now but I’d love to know precisely when he decided on the song’s theme of loneliness, death, and worship, and when the name ‘Eleanor Rigby’ bubbled up into his conscious mind [from a gravestone in a graveyard he and John used to walk through]. It’s almost as if his unconscious mind had been giving him prompts, first ‘Eleanor’, then ‘Rigby’ (hey, check that sign out!), like a stage magician guiding their mark towards a card while creating the illusion of a free choice. It's not uncommon for writers to put things into their novels even they don't see. Readers and editors note what's there, and the writers can be surprised that it happened. Sean Coyne talks about this several times on the Story Grid podcast, and it's on display in several of the episodes in which a writer's draft is examined. Maybe the real story here is how the process of creating art taps into a part of the mind that it keeps hidden from itself, or at least doesn't expose without persuasion.

stevage 4y ago

Boy the evidence in this article is pretty thin.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lowercased 4y ago

In 2007, he told us his memory was almost full.... Yet in 2022, here we are, it's still seemingly got room for a bit more.

lacrosse_tannin 4y ago

Does he drink?

schrodinger 4y ago
It sounds like he had a short stint with over-drinking but got it in control before it got out of hand: https://www.nova.ie/paul-mccartney-cuts-booze-beating-alcoholism-1970s-116450/ https://www.nova.ie/paul-mccartney-cuts-booze-beating-alcoho...

jjtheblunt 4y ago

where is freakish memory evident? (and i did read it)

smm11 4y ago

I often come up with numerical sequences also involving letters. Like RLT237-b, something like that. Sometimes I'll track down what those mean, and very frequently turn up a toy I had when I was 4, or a window code in the back of an International Harvester. Stuff is down there for all of us, it's just a matter of how to summon it.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

If you examine anybody's life, you will probably come up with 'coincidences' like that. Because we all have associations we're not aware of, or at least not aware where they came from.

w0mbat 4y ago

That's a weird article. The anecdote at the beginning has a big buildup then goes absolutely nowhere and the pattern keeps repeating.

squarefoot 4y ago

This is impressive, especially remembering all the exact lyrics after all those years, but hey, he's Paul McCartney!:) I usually have decent memory for tunes: some I can sorta play at the 1st listen, others need a lot more time, not necessarily related to their difficulty, but nothing special. However the most accurate memory I have is for sounds, or actually how a song sounds in its whole: I have on some occasions guessed a song, artist and title, just by listening just one second of it, probably less, while for example a friend was quickly changing stations on the car radio. I have never been able to give an explanation of this, but happened a few times. Sometimes I guessed the wrong song but got correctly the artist and album, which reinforces the idea that I could have memorized the sounding (that album sound) rather than the song structure itself, which probably would have been meaningless when mentally decoding such a short sample.

mgkimsal 4y ago

Related to his vegetarian lifestyle?

inopinatus 4y ago

MARWOOD: Even a stopped clock gives the right time, twice a day.

eyelidlessness 4y ago

A curiosity I’ve seldom seen noted in all the rich lore of the Beatles generally: they recorded their entire catalogue of studio albums over just slightly more than seven years. From their first album release, only a bit more than 2.5 years passed while they released four more albums, two of which were soundtracks for iconic films released in tandem. The fifth album is the one many fans mark as their creative breakout. It was only a year and a half til Sgt Pepper with another creative breakout milestone in between, then only a year and a half til the White Album, then less than a year til Abbey Road (which I personally find preposterous because I sincerely believe it’s objectively the best album by any artist ever), and just over half a year til their final full studio release Let It Be. Oh and Yellow Submarine was in there too, of course. I don’t know how much Paul’s “freakish” memory made that possible. I do know that it astonishes me every time I remember the fact that the whole Beatles recording career lasted about as long as the time I had a locker in grade school.

Maursault 4y ago

I knew guy that could just listen to an engine running, and hear that it had a timing problem! I knew a guy that understood what this other guy was saying in a foreign language! That is crazy. I knew someone that could just look at the curve on a bridge and immediately write down the equation for the curve, right there in front of everybody! * * I have no doubt Paul McCartney can just listen to a song once and immediately play it. Did the author even realize that McCartney is a musician? I hate to be negative, bring on the downvotes, but this is nothing less than being fascination with the ordinary. I also have zero doubt there are dozens and dozens of HN readers that also are musicians and can do the same. Not everyone who begins to study and play music can do it, but they will be able to eventually 1) recognize notes just by hearing them and 2) recognize chord changes just by hearing them. Some people have perfect pitch, and that makes it all the easier, but perfect pitch is not necessary, and it isn't an amazing trick any more than understanding someone speaking French. David Byrne is freakishly smart. Tom Scholz of Boston has an MME from MIT. Both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel have genius level IQs. Geniuses simply are not that novel. What sets Paul McCartney apart is not whether he has a good memory or can pick up a tune, but rather that he was a Beatle.

gooseyard 4y ago
I play a lot of sub gigs, often on short notice, usually I get a set list in advance, but often I don't. I've been doing that for, maybe 25-30 years. In the event I get a set list, I've found that what works best for me is to start listening to them about 24-48 hours in advance, and not to play through them more than maybe 2-4 times. Obviously, this is popular short form music, and so I'm mostly getting a picture in my head of the form and the sound of the changes in my ear. The gigs where I get no set list are interesting- after playing for a long time, I just know a lot of songs, or have heard a popular song enough that I know the form and the changes already, and if I can hear the changes in my head, playing them is not a problem. The really interesting bit though is if its a song I've never heard at all. Then, its a game of asking a few questions (what's the key, what's the feel), maybe someone will say it starts on scale degree IV, so you know there's going to be an intro and into the first verse, and you know thats scale degree I probably. Then, you just have to kind of guess your way through the first verse, but you're memorizing the verse at the same time, and usually the second one there's no guessing. And so on. There's also a great deal of watching peoples hands and bodies because there are tells when something is about to happen, and you just get a sense of what they mean. So there's obviously rote knowledge of music, but there's also this subtext of guessing and watching and listening and mimicry that are a huge part of what is actually going on. The older I get, the more I enjoy thinking about that aspect of making live music.

the_black_hand 4y ago

No doubt that Paul has an amazing memory, above ordinary but I would put it at freakish level. There's quite a few people who remember events, people and music really well. Anybody whose a frequent writer would def report similar recalled names and events leaking from their subconscious into their work. Probably happens to all of us at some point. Another issue is that there's an obviously selection bias. The article only picks up the amazing stuff (rightly so). If my friends went through my life and listed all the amazing genius moments I've remembered something obscure, you'd thing I'm a genius too. But what you wouldn't get is the 1000s of times I've forgotten stuff. I'm not attacking the editor. They are doing what they are paid to do, and the article was fun to read, but bias is just something readers should be aware about.

Theodores 4y ago

He is a godfather to a relative of mine and there was a wedding where we were not sure whether or not he would make an appearance. Luckily he didn't. I say this because the wedding had the lucky couple as top billing and did not need to have the cameras focused on one of the guests. It was their special day, not his. Everyone thinks that they know him, whereas he does not know them. This skews things and I think that it is this that gives the appearance of a 'freakish memory'. People project what they want onto him and have made up their minds about him already. Those of us that write code know how hard it is. With Paul McCartney he can meet up with a friend, bang out some ditty in minutes and sell that by the bucketload. As much as I might mock 'The Frog Song' and such, I don't have the chops to do better. Yet compared to the effort to write code, I do not see 'The Frog Song' as in the same league of endeavour. I am not saying it is easy, but then I am. Personality is a 'skill' and the likes of McCartney can hold a stage with an audience of thousands and no material. He can work that crowd, raise spirits and make everyone have a good time. These experiences are practically faith healing and, again, people read things like 'freakish memory' into this.

dghughes 4y ago

My lone amazing skill was I could sometimes grab a handful of quarters and have exactly $10. I rolled a lot of coins when I worked for my uncle's coin-op arcade game business in the 80s.

klelatti 4y ago

The main thing I took away from this is how hard some things can seem to someone who has a casual acquaintance with the topic. This seems to be particularly true with regard to some acts of memorisation. Lots of classical musicians can play a reasonably wide repertoire of complex and long pieces from memory. Is that freakish? Not really, and if you play an instrument you will soon find yourself being able to remember long stretches of the music you play without much effort - people say 'it's in the fingers'.

mgkimsal 4y ago

For all his 'great memory' anecdotes (and I've read others too), we can also see that... he may not always be correct. Anthology series showed Paul, George and Ringo recounting stories that contradicted each other (Elvis meeting in particular).

cooperadymas 4y ago
That just means George and Ringo were wrong :-)