When Paul McCartney woke up with the melody to what became the song “Yesterday” he had a dilemma: was it his or someone else’s?
McCartney woke up and hurried to the piano. He worked out the melody that was stuck in his head to avoid forgetting it. He thought he had never heard it before the dream, but couldn’t be sure. He didn’t want to steal some other songwriter’s work, but he also wanted to be able to use it if it came from his mind.
“(I) made sure I remembered it and then hawked it round to all my friends asking what it was: ‘Do you know this? It’s a good little tune, but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it,” McCartney said in The Beatles Anthology.
Nagging songs
Not knowing what a song is that pops into your head can be annoying.
You can try asking others as McCartney did. They may or may not know. Fortunately, there’s a better way these days.
Record the melody
Today, in the age of the smartphone, McCartney wouldn’t have had to start playing the piano in the middle of the night at his girlfriend’s house. Instead, he could have gotten up and headed over to where he kept his phone while he slept (for he wouldn’t want to have it at his bedside because it would be too much temptation to scroll through when he went to sleep; he also wouldn’t have wanted to wake up his girl in the middle of the night with him humming out a song. That would have been rude.).
As a musician and songwriter, he might have a folder on his phone where he kept every app relating to song development. You don’t want to go through endless apps trying to find your recorder app. It’s far better to plan for this.
Then he would have simply hummed out the song that was stuck in his head.
After that, he could have gone back to sleep.
Check online
One way to check is to download the SoundHound app. It’s available for Apple and Android phones. You can hum the song or even tap it out.
Another site to try is WatZatSong, a song identification community.
If your song can’t be found in either place, there’s a good chance that it might be an all-new song straight from the music halls of Dreamland.
Also on this blog:
James Cobb RN, MSN is the founder of the Dream Recovery System, one of the top sites on the Internet that deals with sleep and dreaming.
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