While people may not know every word to The Beatles’ “Let It Be”, many know the opening line. “When I find myself in times of trouble/ Mother Mary comes to me.” However, “Mother Mary” was almost a different name, as Paul McCartney was deciding between multiple options for “Let It Be”.
Paul McCartney almost used ‘Brother Malcolm’ in ‘Let It Be’
“Let It Be” is one of The Beatles’ biggest hits and one of the best songs Paul McCartney wrote for the band. Many know its opening line, but there might be more to the story behind the lyric referring to “Mother Mary”. Mal Evans, one of the band’s personal assistants, shared a story about the song while on a 1975 TV special hosted by David Frost.
“Paul was meditating one day, and I came to him in a vision, and I was just standing there saying ‘let it be, let it be…’” Evans explained via radiox. “And that’s where the song came from… It’s funny because we were coming home from a session one night, and it was 3 o’clock in the morning, raining, dark in London, and Paul was telling this, saying, ‘I’ve written this song. It was gonna be Brother Malcolm, but I’ve had to change it in case people get the wrong idea!’”
This appeared to be speculation long after Evans died in 1976. However, Evans might have been proven correct when an outtake of “Let It Be” appeared on a 2018 50th anniversary reissue of The White Album. In it, McCartney sings the lyric, “When I find myself in times of trouble, Brother Malcolm comes to me…” Since this was an outtake, it could have just been Paul joking around, but it proved Evans wasn’t lying.
McCartney claims ‘Let It Be’ was written after he saw his mother in a dream
The famous story behind “Let It Be” is that Paul McCartney found inspiration for the song after his mother, who died in 1956, visited him in a dream. She assured him, telling him to “let it be.” So, in the song, Mother Mary directly references his mother and his vision.
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“It was so wonderful for me, and she was very reassuring,” McCartney said in Many Years From Now. “In the dream, she said, ‘It’ll be all right.’ I’m not sure if she used the words ‘Let it be’, but that was the gist of her advice. It was, ‘Don’t worry too much, it will turn out OK.’”
While a song about his roadie is a hilarious idea, it seems Paul wanted to write a track about his mother the whole time. Of course, this could also be the story Macca intends to stick with because Evans’ story is more absurd.
The title also comes from a line in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’
McCartney studied Shakespeare while attending school in Liverpool and could still remember a few verses from Hamlet he was forced to remember. According to Yahoo!, the British singer-songwriter admitted that a line from the play might have “subconsciously” made its way into “Let It Be”.
“In those days, you had to learn speeches by heart because you had to be able to carry them into the exam and quote them,” McCartney shared. “There are a couple of lines from late in the play: ‘O, I could tell you —But let it be. Horatio, I am dead.’ I suspect those lines had subconsciously planted themselves in my memory.”
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