TRACK FOURTEEN
- WRITTEN BY: McCartney
- LEAD VOCAL: McCartney
Beatles fans who looked to their he-
roes to ride pop’s cutting edge were
surprised by this gentle lullabye
with lyrics as if from another time.
And so they were, one stanza
anyway, lifted almost verbatim
from “Cradle Song,” a 400-year-
old ballad with the opening lines
“Golden slumbers kiss your eyes/
Smiles awake you when you rise,”
by Elizabethan dramatist Thomas
Dekker. McCartney was taken
by the words of the song that he
found in a book of sheet music
that belonged to his half sister.
Unable to read music, he “just
started playing my own tune to it,”
he said in David Wigg’s 1976 The
Beatles Tapes. For his part, Dekker
died in 1632 without knowing his
lyrics would one day become part
of the Beatles canon.
SONG BY SONG
TRACK FIFTEEN
- WRITTEN BY: McCartney
- VOCALS: McCartney,
Harrison, Starr
“Boy! You’re gonna carry that
weight, carry that weight a
long time!” Chanting the
lyric in unison like brawlers at
a Liverpool football match,
with Ringo’s full-throated
vocal prominent in the mix,
he and Paul and George kick
off the medley’s penultimate
track. Recorded in John’s
absence—he was still recover-
ing from a July 1 car accident
and returned to the studio to
add backing vocals later that
month—the song brings
McCartney’s mini-symphony
full circle as, with a flourish of
Sgt. Peppery brass, the “You
Never Give Me Your Money”
melodic theme is reprised.
“And in the middle of the cel-
ebrations,” sings McCartney,
who has said the lyric is freight-
ed with his anguish over the
troubles roiling the Beatles, “I
break down.” He later recalled
in a short documentary to
accompany Abbey Road’s
digital release: “There was
a feeling it might be our last
[album together]. So let’s just
show ’em what we can do.
And let’s try and have a good
time doing it.” And so they did.
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