Heather

‘Heather’ is the eleventh song on Paul McCartney’s 2001 album Driving Rain.

It was named after McCartney’s second wife, Heather Mills, whom he married on 11 June 2002. They separated in May 2006 and divorced acrimoniously two years later.

There’s a funny story about this track. It actually came about early one morning. I’d got up and was just jamming on the piano and Heather, who doesn’t know all of The Beatles songs because she’s young, said ‘That’s great – which Beatles song is that?’ I said ‘It’s not, I’m just making it up’. And she’s like ‘What? Now? Making it up now?’ Yeah. Suddenly she’s saying ‘Get it down! You’ve got to get that down, get it on a tape, now!’ I’m saying ‘No, it’s OK, I’m just noodling’, but she’s insisting ‘get it down!’, so we found a little dictaphone and played it into that. And then she said ‘By the way, what’s it called?’ ‘Oh’, I said, ‘It’s called ‘Heather”.

‘Heather’ was recorded at Henson Studios in Los Angeles in February 2001, during a three-week block of sessions for the album.

Some tracks from Paul’s original demo were transferred to 16-track analogue tape then loaded into Logic Audio for overdubs on 2nd March 2001. Paul played Piano and sang the vocal then overdubbed electric, acoustic and bass guitar. Abe overdubbed Paul’s Ludwig drums. Rusty overdubbed backing vocals. Gabe overdubbed backing vocals. David overdubbed sampled strings. Ralph Morrison overdubbed violin.

McCartney never performed ‘Heather’ live in concert.