Most of us have sung along to a song for years without knowing where it came from. The lyric feels finished and permanent, as if it simply arrived that way. Often it didn’t.
Some songwriters have been generous about the messy, accidental or deeply personal beginnings of their work. Here are four who have talked openly about how a famous song came to be.
Dolly Parton and the Songs Written in One Night
Dolly Parton has said she wrote both Jolene and I Will Always Love You on the same night in the early 1970s. Jolene drew on two real encounters. One was a red haired bank teller who paid a lot of attention to her husband, Carl Dean, and the other was a young fan named Jolene who asked for an autograph.
I Will Always Love You was a farewell to Porter Wagoner, the mentor who had given her a national platform on his television show. She wrote it when she decided to go solo. Whitney Houston’s 1992 recording later turned it into one of the best selling singles of all time.
Paul McCartney and the Tune That Arrived in a Dream
Paul McCartney has long described how the melody for Yesterday came to him in his sleep in the mid 1960s. He woke with the tune fully formed and sat down at a piano to work it out. He was so unsure it was really his that he played it for people in the music business to see if anyone recognized it.
The words took longer to arrive. For a while the placeholder lyrics began with scrambled eggs, a working title he has joked about for decades. The finished song appeared on the 1965 album Help! and has since become one of the most recorded songs in history.
Joni Mitchell and a View From the Airplane Window
Joni Mitchell began Both Sides Now in 1966 while reading Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King on a flight. A passage about looking down on clouds from a plane stuck with her, and she started writing as soon as she could. Judy Collins recorded it first, in 1967, and Mitchell released her own version in 1969 on the album Clouds.
She returned to the song in 2000 with a slower, orchestral recording that reflected a lifetime of added perspective. In 2024 she won a Grammy for Joni Mitchell at Newport, an album drawn from her return to the Newport Folk Festival in 2022.
Taylor Swift and the Ten Minute Version of All Too Well
Taylor Swift has said All Too Well began during rehearsals for her Red era touring, when she improvised over a groove her band was playing. The words poured out as a long, rambling piece that ran close to ten minutes. She later worked with songwriter Liz Rose to shape it into the version that appeared on the 2012 album Red.
For years fans asked about the longer original. In November 2021 Swift released All Too Well (Taylor’s Version) at ten minutes, restoring verses that had been trimmed. She also made a short film to accompany it.
