Too Much Rain | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

‘Too Much Rain’ is the seventh song on Paul McCartney’s thirteenth solo album Chaos And Creation In The Backyard. See more…

The song was inspired by ‘Smile’, written by Charlie Chaplin for his 1936 film Modern Times, with lyrics later added by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons. Chaplin had based the music on Puccini’s opera Tosca.

Most of us can accept that some rain must fall into each life, because generally we don’t have more than a little rain. But some human beings – say, refugees in flight, or some people in developing countries who’ve got absolutely nothing and are literally dying of hunger – have, in the most basic of terms, too much rain. It’s not fair that some people should have so much to cope with when the rest of us have so much to be grateful for.

So, even though I might originally have been raised to be that Liverpool tough guy, I’ve learnt over the years to try to open myself up, to understand that so many people’s hearts and lives have a lot of rain in them, a lot of pain. I’d like to think that some of my songs have done the same, have made people feel something they did not even know was there. People have told me they’ve had that experience. And plenty of songs have done the same for me. It’s true that life can sometimes be ‘too much for anyone’, but that’s why we have songs – to try and make the rain go away or, at least, hold an umbrella over you for a while.