“Yesterday” by The Beatles

"Yesterday" is the Beatles song with only one Beatle on it. Paul McCartney wrote it, though it carries the Lennon–McCartney credit, and he recorded it alone with an acoustic guitar and a string quartet: Tony Gilbert and Sidney Sax on violin, Kenneth Essex on viola and Francisco Gabarro on cello, with George Martin producing. It first appeared on Help! in August 1965, but American fans got it as a single that September, and it went to number one; its US album home came in June 1966 on Yesterday and Today.

It's a quiet, aching thing, usually heard as a lament for lost love, and it turns rock-and-roll swagger inside out; and McCartney later suggested it may have grown from a childhood memory of teasing his mother about sounding posh. It was so unlike anything else the group had done that the band wouldn't let it out as a British single until 1976, when it reached number eight.

The world did not share their hesitation: some 2,200 cover versions, an Ivor Novello Award in 1966, a place in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1997, and a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll that named it the best song of the 20th century.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.