‘Happy With You’ is the fourth track on Egypt Station, Paul McCartney’s 17th solo studio album.
Yeah, I was on holiday and I was just noodling around on the guitar, and I was thinking about the days when I had a lot of free time and used to just sort of lie around basically doing nothing all day, and getting a bit stoned and… just doing nothing really. Busy doing nothing.And so I got this little riff on the guitar and the words came to me, you know: “I used to lie around all day, I used to get stoned, I used to like to get wasted, but these days I don’t.”
So it’s a song about growing up. There’s a period in your life – in some people’s lives – when they’re not being as productive, or not being as organised or disciplined as they may later turn out to be. So this was basically it.
There is a lot to be happy about and when I say in that song that I used to do this, I used to do that, but I don’t need to now, that’s kind of generally true. It’s not absolutely true, but I certainly did used to lie around stoned a lot in that era when everyone was just lying around stoned. And I don’t feel the need now. I’ve got better things to do. And so I list some of them and they are just little things I like, such as hear a Robin singing. I live on a farm, so the baby lambs running to their mothers.This was me remembering the wasted days and then thinking: ‘But now I don’t need to do that because I’m happy with you, and I’m happy about a lot of things – good things to do’. So it was a nice one to write because I think it had an interesting story. And then I list in the middle eight all these little things: a baby calling to its mother, an ice-cold stream rushing down the mountain… They were nice images to me, so I put it together and the song turned out to be ‘Happy With You’.
