You Tell Me | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

‘You Tell Me’ is the fifth song on Paul McCartney’s 14th solo album Memory Almost Full. See more…

It was written in the Hamptons in Long Island, where Linda McCartney’s father Lee Eastman had a property. Linda had died of cancer in April 1998, and Paul wrote ‘You Tell Me’ about her.

Because Linda’s father had a place in the Hamptons, I started going out there with her. That’s way over forty years ago – could be over fifty. I think that’s also where I wrote this, sometime in the early 2000s, and perhaps where the line about the red cardinal came from too, since you see them out there. ‘When was that summer of a dozen words?’ When everything’s going really well, nobody needs to talk, so you may just be sitting around with someone and reading books, or reading a newspaper, and you hardly even speak because there’s no need to; you’re in such a comfortable situation. ‘When was that summer when it never rained?’ I like that I’m not even going to try and remember what year it was.