Paul McCartney says he sees similarities in the songwriting process between Kanye West and John Lennon.
The former Beatle’s comments appeared in British newspaper the Mirror this week, with Macca saying he and ‘Ye had a similar “ping-pong” system, just like he had several decades ago with the his late Beatle bandmate.
Via the NME:
“When I wrote with John, he would sit down with a guitar,” [McCartney] said. “I would sit down. We’d ping-pong till we had a song. It was like that.”
McCartney went on to explain how the story behind The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ helped create West’s ‘Only One’. “We sat around and talked an awful lot just to break the ice,” he said. “One of the stories I told him was about how I happened to have written ‘Let It Be.’ My mum came to me in a dream when she’d died years previously. I was in a bit of a state — it was the Sixties and I was overdoing it. In the dream she said, ‘Don’t worry it’s all going to be fine, just let it be.’ And I woke up and thought, ‘Woah’ and wrote the song. I told Kanye this and he said, ‘I’m going to write a song with my mum.’ So then I sat down at the piano.”
McCartney and West created recent tracks ‘All Day’, ‘Only One’ and ‘FourFiveSeconds’ together, the latter of which features Rihanna.
The songs are reportedly going to be featured on Kanye’s upcoming album, So Help Me God.
McCartney, meanwhile, has been slowly unveiling a string of North American live shows, including a headlining performance at June’s Firefly Music Festival in Dover, Delaware.
Listen to “Only One” below…