Vacations and days off were rare commodities in the world of The Beatles. Especially during the height of Beatlemania, the band were expected to keep a tight schedule of studio recording, live performances, photography shoots, and promotional appearances. There wasn’t much time for relaxation, especially as EMI required two albums a year from the group, plus singles and other releases.
Paul McCartney managed to find a brief hole in the band’s schedule in May of 1964. Along with Ringo Starr and their respective girlfriends, McCartney took a holiday out to the Virgin Islands. The foursome rented a yacht to enjoy a day out on the water, but McCartney still found time to work out a new song, ‘Things We Said Today’.
“I remember writing ‘Things We Said Today’ in one of the cabins below deck one afternoon on my acoustic guitar,” McCartney recalled in the book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. “I got away from the main party but it was a bit queasy downstairs; you could smell the oil and the boat was rocking a bit and I’m not the best sailor in the world, so I wrote a little bit of it downstairs and then the rest of it on the back deck where you couldn’t smell the engine. I don’t know why the engine was on, I suppose we were moving.”
“That particular day on the boat, I started with an A minor chord. A minor to E minor to A minor, which gave me a sort of folksy, whimsical world,” McCartney added. “And then in the middle, on ‘Me, I’m just the lucky kind’, it goes to the major and gets hopeful. The thing I always loved and still love about writing a song is that, at the end of two or three hours, I have a newborn baby to show everyone. I want to show it to the world, and the world at that moment was the people on the boat.”
“I had to remember it, of course, because I didn’t write it down. I didn’t write down music – because I couldn’t,” he also said. “It was all in the head. I have wondered since why it was easy for me to remember these things. When I’ve used a little cassette recorder or some other recording device, I find it hard to remember songs because I haven’t made myself remember them. Looking back, I love the fact that my circumstances were as they were. Years later, as I try to explain why I don’t read music or write it down, I blame my Celtic tradition, the bardic tradition. The people I come from trained themselves to rely on their memories.”
Less than a month after writing it below deck, McCartney brought the song to The Beatles and recorded it for the A Hard Day’s Night album. Only two takes were required of the track, after which the band added overdubs. ‘Things We Said Today’ eventually found its way onto the B-side of the ‘A Hard Day’s Night single. The track was a frequent part of the band’s 1964 live show, but was dropped by the following year.
