Friends To Go

‘Friends To Go’ is the fifth song on Paul McCartney’s 13th solo album Chaos And Creation In The Backyard.

The funny thing about it was I felt as if I was almost George Harrison during the writing of that song. I just got this feeling, this is George. So it was like I was writing – I was like George – writing one of his songs. So I just wrote it, it just wrote itself very easily ’cause it wasn’t even me writing it.

Funny thing about some songs is when you’re writing them you can think you’re someone else. I mean when I was doing ‘The Long And Winding Road’ I thought I was Ray Charles. In actual fact my record of it, the Beatles record of it, is nothing like Ray Charles at all. But in my mind I was being him. I was playing Ray. And on ‘Friends To Go’ I realised I was playing George Harrison. So to me it just started to sound like a George Harrison song. So I was writing with that in the back of my mind, so it was kind of like (sings) ‘I’ve been waiting on the other side for your friends to leave so I don’t have to hide’.

You know that whole sequence I can see George doing it [sings] ‘I’ve been waiting on the other side for your friends to go.’ So that was it. You know I just sat down to write and the feeling of George came over me and I just kept writing it thinking, ‘George could have written this’. It was nice. It was like a sort of friendly song to write. And I just kept imagining I was just over by some sort of housing estate, where these people lived, in a sort of block of flats and I was like over the other side over here just watching them and waiting for them to go so I could go in. I don’t know why, a psychiatrist could probably again have a whale of a time with that one.