109. When I'm Sixty-Four

Paul singing a song at 26 that he wrote at 16 in a style that was popular when he was 6 about being 64

The first three songs recorded for Sgt. Pepper were Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane, and When I’m Sixty-Four. The first two were exported to become perhaps the most famous two-sided single in pop music history. The third is also famous in its own way, but is generally not regarded with anything like the same critical enthusiasm. Some McCartney-skeptics might even argue that this song marks the turning point when the Beatles started to shift from rock to rococo. Even its biggest admirers would probably have to admit that it’s rather corny.

And yet, there’s actually something quite subversive about it. An aspect that was apparent in the moment but has grown harder and harder to see in recent decades. It all has to do with the status of Sgt. Pepper, which quite famously was regarded as the first ‘concept album’ (even though it only has the loosest of concepts) but also as the Greatest Album of All Time.¹

As the years pass, and the zeitgeist shifts, the respect for Sgt. Pepper ebbs and fades. It’s still highly regarded, of course, but is no longer treated as unique or as the default best. Part of this is simply down to changing tastes. Pepper falls and Revolver rises. Abbey Road ascends. People gain a new sense of appreciation for A Hard Days Night or Beatles for Sale. But there’s also, more broadly, been a significant shift away from the consideration of albums as such. In the download and streaming eras, individual songs can (and usually are) detached from their context and experienced individually.

Obviously, for an artist as historic and renowned as the Beatles, a significant percentage of fans will always want to experience the music in its intended form. Which means listening to the albums as albums. But another significant (and expanding) percentage of fans have grown up in an era where albums were rather quaint. As a result, songs are now regularly experienced outside of their original context.

In the case of When I’m Sixty-Four, this new independent existence has produced some significant gains. It’s actually one of the most-streamed tracks from Pepper, only being topped by the three opening songs and A Day in the Life.

At the same time, the idea of a free-floating When I’m Sixty-Four invites quite a bit of critical scrutiny. For those who tolerate it more than they love it, the corniness is significantly magnified once you remove the song from its milieu. As one piece of the Sgt. Pepper kaleidoscope, it’s reasonably cool. But as an individual song that someone has specifically picked out to listen to in a vacuum? Not very cool at all.

However, it’s worth really considering the context in which it was created. Because I think that Sixty-Four—perhaps more than any other song—defines the scope and meaning of Sgt. Pepper as an album. That’s true even though it was written and recorded before Paul and Mal Evans even dreamed up the idea of Sergeant Pepper and his band.

Its presence bolsters the ‘concept’ of the album enormously, by providing a song in a style that is wildly at odds with the contemporary, and which very specifically draws in the prehistory of rock and roll. In fact, this illustrates the actual concept of the album, which is about the severing and reconstitution of time and subjectivity. It’s a study of things which exist outside of their ‘proper’ time and place, and which therefore take on a peculiar hue. Things that make ‘the present’ itself feel like something of a fiction which we all have temporarily agreed to inhabit.

It achieves this in two ways—one of which is related to the form of the song, the other which relates to its content. First, as a formal matter, it exemplifies the expansive repertoire of the Beatles, along with their genre-breaking popularity. Because they stood so far above everyone else in 1967, they could do things that would have previously felt unimaginable, and in doing them, reshape the sense of what was possible, or reasonable. In that sense, Sixty-Four’s is important not in spite of its status as one of Paul’s silly songs but because of that. That the Beatles could include a song like this on an album that was prefigured to be ‘the greatest of all-time’ is actually integral to its mythos. The reason everyone immediately agreed that Sgt. Pepper had fulfilled its promise is that it consistently broke the mold of the possible. They did things that no one else would have been willing to dare to do, that no one else would have even really thought about doing. That’s what makes Sgt. Pepper such a perfect illumination of that fateful summer of 1967. If the common creed of the counterculture was “if it feels good, do it,” then the creed of Sgt. Pepper was “if it sounds good, play it.” A song like this could never be cool, exactly, but when performed by the Beatles in 1967, it almost transcends the category entirely.

But second, and perhaps even more interestingly, the song itself performs a sort of disjuncture. It is deeply nostalgic in its conceit—both as a callback to the music hall songs of their parents’ generation as well as to the sort of gentle love songs that would be performed as the family gathered around the piano at a party.²This suffuses the song with nostalgia, but it is a light nostalgia, and one that is wielded with more of a wry smile than with the ache of loss. Nothing in the song suggests that things were better back then. It just reminds us that the simple things which brought us joy when we were children can still delight us as we grow older, if we can set aside our cynicism for a moment.

It’s also important to remember that it’s a love song. And a very particular kind of love song, too. The arrival of rock and roll ushered in an era of love songs about passion and desire, but this hearkens back to an older spirit of gentleness and slow appreciation. He doesn’t speak of burning need; he imagines the delight of standing at the far end of a long journey, looking back with contentment and satisfaction.

He’s older, losing his hair. Of course, she’s older, too. They do no great deeds together; they simply sit by the fireside, dig the weeds, maybe go for a drive. It’s all idyllic but not too idyllic. They’ll rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight “if it’s not too dear.” It’s a vision of a series of tomorrows which some might say “creep in this petty pace from day to day” but which Paul imagines far more optimistically: as a series of days that unfurl themselves with fresh new quiet and simple delights.

All of this is old-timey in form but also rather juvenile in its construction. Which shouldn’t be that surprising, actually, given that this is a song Paul originally wrote when he was sixteen.

But as it turns out, that ten year gap between composition and production is the final piece of its magic.

When I’m Sixty-Four is most fundamentally an act of imagination—an effort by a young man to evoke the feelings he sees in his parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and neighbors. Feelings that he can recognize as powerful, but which he simply can’t experience for himself because you only actually feel them in the passing of time. You can’t possibly understand what it’s like to spend a life with someone when you’re sixteen. Nor can you at twenty-six, which Paul was by the time he recorded it. Someone that young can never really grasp what kinds of trials and tribulations a lifetime partnership might entail. But that doesn’t mean he lacks the capacity to wonder and marvel at those who have traveled that far.

And of course, eventually Paul himself made it to sixty-four. Sadly, Linda had passed a decade earlier. But it’s still very clear that (just as John had been writing songs about Yoko before he ever met her), Paul wrote this song in anticipation of his life with Linda. And it’s a truly wonderful thing that he did in fact get to basically live the life he had imagined all the way back at Forthlin Road in Liverpool.³

Albeit with a bit less scrimping and saving.

1. For an excellent rundown on how Pepper really did shake the world on its arrival, this essay from Perry Gartner is well worth a long-read.

2. This is quite literally what Paul’s family did. He has talked often about the importance of the family piano as a focal point for intergenerational joy and celebration—something that was deeply important for kids who grew up in the era before pop music. Especially kids who grew up poor.

3. The line “will you still need me, will you still feed me” hits extra hard, when you consider how important cooking was for Linda and for their life together.