Footprints | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

‘Footprints’ is the fourth track on Paul McCartney’s sixth solo album Press To Play. See more…

The song was written on a snowy day. It came from an image of a magpie looking for food out in the snow. Eric and I changed the magpie to an old man, although the magpie came back for the third verse. The old man is out there looking for yule logs or something, like the character in ‘Good King Wenceslas’. He’s lonely. Does he live on his own? What do we know about him? The song goes into what his story might have been, the heartaches there might have been, the girl he might have left behind, the paths he didn’t take, the moves he didn’t make, etcetera.