Lonely Road | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

‘Lonely Road’ is the opening song on Paul McCartney’s 2001 album Driving Rain.

McCartney wrote ‘Lonely Road’ in Goa, India, in January 2001, while on vacation with Heather Mills. It was McCartney’s first visit to India since the 1960s. See more…

We had such a relaxing start to an Indian holiday which was at the beginning of 2001. It was exciting, I hadn’t been back to India since the Mararishi days, which was 25 years or so ago. It was great to look around a bit more; I’d only seen Rishikesh, north of Delhi, before. We started off in Goa, relaxed beach time, and one afternoon I wrote ‘About You’ on a little travel guitar I’ve got which has it’s own amp in it. I picked some words out for the song after seeing a copy of The India Times which was lying around. ‘Lonely Road’ was also written in Goa, where I was enjoying the beach and the sea and generally chilling out in the new century. Again, I had a few moments in the afternoon, which is always a good time for me, a quiet spell when it’s always cool for me to go off and fondle my guitar. The songs basically wrote itself in about an hour. It is what it is, this song, you can make of it what you want to make of it. To me it’s not particularly about anything other than not wanting to be brought down. It’s a sort of anti-being brought down song, which is for anyone and everyone. It’s ‘don’t want to get brought down again, don’t want to walk that lonely road’, it’s symbolic for anyone who’s been through any sort of problems. It’s a defiant song against loneliness, written in a hotel room in Goa.