Jenny Wren / Blackbird

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Hi everyone, it's Paul muldoon. Before we get to this episode, I wanted to let you know that you can binge all twelve episodes of McCartney A Life and Lyrics right now, add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus on the McCartney A Life and Lyrics Show, pedge in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash Plus.

Look, there's a beautiful bird.

I loved bird watching when I was a kid.

How can you tell one bird from another?

So I like to be able to get out of the normal stream of life. We were about a mile away from quite deep countryside, so I used to just go on my own, just being away from the normal stuff, school, family, life.

Appearance is one way to identify birds. How does it look?

I had a little bird book, the Observers Book of Birds.

In yards or in pipes, wherever people are, you are likely to find another small bird with a beautiful song.

The wren was a great favorite because you wouldn't see that often. Just suddenly said, flit from one of the push.

To This small brownish bird is a wren.

And singing as it goes.

We can learn to know Wren's by their sound, so I loved birds. Because of that, I started being able to recognize the birds.

I'm Paul muldoon and I've been fortunate to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of the era.

And will you look at me? I'm going too. I'm actually a performer.

That is, Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours of our conversations.

Oh, actually I'm a songwriter. My god, Well that crypta homie.

This is McCartney, A life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir, and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic figures in popular music. In this episode, Jenny Wren.

The Girls, Jenny Wren to King she could See's age way.

Paul McCartney has been a nature lover and birdwatcher since childhood. His song catalog is teeming with feathered friends. There's single Pigeon from nineteen seventy three.

Same pigeon through the railing dig throw you out.

There's Bluebird from the same year.

La Night Window, willis no Algoline.

Your dog.

And you know what love this.

I'm a bluebird.

And there are a couple from the Beatles era.

I am a rabbit pornithologist. I like my birds. Say.

When Paul McCartney went off bird watching as a kid, he was trying to escape the daily grind of school, errands, work and other people. Even now when he's looking for a location to buckle down and write songs, here's the same impulse.

When you're writing something as embarrassing, as potentially embarrassing as a love song, it's best to hide away in the furthest corner cupboard you can find so that no one can hear you through this process. So I will often literally try and get away so that nobody can hear me do this, because this is like very private.

It's got to just be me and this guitar.

Then I can touch this sort of inner place where I am the troubado wandering around in the forest thinking of love, thinking of the beauty of it, the mystery of it, the strength of it.

You know.

Well, I say it's potentially embarrassing because you know, someone could walk in and go, oh god, you know, and that would be the worst thing. So I'll go very hidden aways. But once I get on that trail, I really like it.

Your impulse to get into that cupboard.

Yeah, to get into that little place to work.

Yeah, it's a kind of nesting impulse, I think.

Is it partly.

Yeah, maybe, I think it's mainly privacy. I think it's mainly to not be overheard.

For privacy, one can head either to the tiniest cupboard or to the great outdoors, as McCartney did when he wrote Jenny Wren.

I was in Angeles and there's a canyon that I particularly like to go walking in and you have to drive there, so I'd gone.

On my own.

I just found a little quiet parking space along the side of the road and it was very rural area. I'd taken my guitar unusually, so I meant to go and write a song again. This was my outdoors cupboard.

Like so many girls, Jenny Wren Good scene took some away, Like so many girls Jenny Wren Good scene Booken Up.

Took so away.

I remember just sitting there thinking, yeah, I just said the idea of the story was she could sing.

Well, something had happened. We don't know what.

The protagonist of the song, Jenny Wren is halfway between bird and human, singing and taking wing like the other girls.

Like the the girls, Jenny Wren took wing.

She could see, and it's high way.

In fact, McCartney may have derived the name from a character in Charles Dickens's eighteen sixty five novel Our Mutual Friend.

Here.

Jenny Wren is a dressmaker for dolls. She's a teenage girl who was born with a crooked spine and underdeveloped legs.

Something sparkled down among the fair hair resting on the dark hair, and if it were not a star, which it couldn't be, it was an eye.

Despite her struggles, Jenny Wren has a sunny outlook and keen powers of observation.

And if it were an eye, it was Jenny Wren's eye, bright and watchful as the birds whose name she had taken.

I mean, it's the name is has currency beyond that. Jenny Wren was a term we used, perhaps you used when you were not in the fields outside the estate, just about the regular the little wren.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, which is often think it's probably my favorite bird.

Mm hmm.

There's very little, very private, very sweet little thing. So in other words, because she doesn't sing, but she can see the world in its foolish way. Is how we spend our days cassiing love society. You can see.

The reality of the situation.

Oh we span days, guys.

You can see all these sad things happening.

Side of life broke.

That broken world is not unreminiscent of the broken wings of that other singer.

Yeah, that's right. M hmm.

Blackbirds singing in the dead of life.

Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life you were on waiting for this moment to arise.

Which I think again.

Songs being a conversation with songs from the tradition but also within your own work. They're talking to each other.

Yeah, and that's a good thing. Yeah.

I think you know, when you're sitting down with an acoustic guitar, there's a few ways you can go.

And with Blackbird, it's a little part.

It's a guitar part that you sing against rather than strumming chords, and so I think this has the same kind of thing.

This is a little part rather than just chords.

So I mean, I think I was probably intentionally writing another Blackbird.

Ba Bird Bye, black Bird into the line of a dark black man.

If the guitar part of Jenny Wren echoes McCartney's Blackbird, then it carries within it another echo, one from the classical genre Bachs Burret in E minor.

A little guitar part which is so much a part of it was something that George and I. It was a party piece of us when we were kids, and it's it's box, it's.

Do do do do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do do do do.

Do do do do.

We knew the tune, liked the tune, but particularly liked the counterpart, because well, do do do do do do do do do do do do do there's a baseline m So with this bark piece, George and I learned do do do do do do?

Do you do?

Do do do it as the melody, and then do you do do you do?

Do you do? Do do?

And then we kind of ran out. We didn't know how it went, so we made up the rest of the door. So so we have our own little version of this back too, which become a party piece.

And I know that I've been.

Fascinated with it its structure, do you do do do do do do you do do do do that little bit, do do do, do.

That little thing.

I just switched it around a bit, made it my own, but I knew where I was coming from. How he with that became the blackbird singing in the dead of night.

Blackbird singing in the dead up night, Take these broken wings and learn to fly.

All your life.

So I had that, and then I just I don't know where, really, I think it was in Scotland, the time or the break I got this idea of a blackbird singing the dead of night. Just so it's just an image of a silhouette of a blackbird silhouetted in the dead of night in a sort of forest somewhere as being this lonely sort of image.

Black bird light into the light of a dull black light.

The loneliness of the blackbird is reflected in the simple instrumentation of that famous song, no orchestration, just McCartney and his guitar and the terps of the bird. He's singing about, blackbird singing in the dead Um.

Take these broken wings and learn to fly on your line.

And I there's such an all encompassing record company of the old variety that they had a Sound Library. So if I wanted the sound of blackbirds singing, I could just sort of look it up on the largicle most birds, blackbird, and.

You would get you know, you can look it up and get someone will go and get it for you were only.

Waiting for this moment do a rise. You were only waiting for this moment to a ride. You were only waiting for this moment doing right.

The song may have started out as a simple image of nature, the silhouette of a lonely bird crying out into the dark, but when McCartney wrote the song in the spring of nineteen sixty eight, he was also speaking to the turbulence of the American civil rights movement, including the enforced desegregation of schools.

Then it started to be about arising. Yeah, you know, Blacky said to take these broken wings. So in others I was writing about the civil rights disturbances in the Little Rock, particularly that we've been hearing about segregation and stuff that shocked us so much. Colored children to attend that all my schools have been upheld by the United States, have been caught. City and state police had cordoned off the school and many table makers were taken her a custody.

Really, she saw poverty breaking up warriors to their song Away the Blackbird.

McCartney writes about singing and protest in Jenny Wren. However, the bird's protest comes in the form of silence. Instead of selecting a chirping bird to accompany this song, McCartney included a du duc An Armenian woodwind instrument with a haunting sound.

In the minute I'm talking about Jenny Wren, I'm seeing the bird, and then I'm seeing a person. And then in this story, for no apparent reason, she just doesn't sing anymore. But she's she could sing, she's a great singer, and she doesn't sing anymore. And it turns out that it's because of all our foolish ways, like a protest, right, And so then it just becomes a bit reflective about our society, how we screw things up and everything, and so now we sympathize with the person who protests. Oh,

Jenny Wren too green, she could sing.

AND's a ways, what did Jenny Wren see?

You saw who we are? Yeah? What did she see?

Who are?

She saw our foolish ways and the way we cast all aside, the way we lose sight of life. So they we are we have poverty, breaks up homes, and we wounded warriors.

To their song away.

She saw sure the screw up that society.

Is. And you know, like everyone, we're just looking for that better way. So it's kind of nice that someone spotted that the change needs to happen. I think, you know it's it's a good old world, really, and I do. I think we screw it up, you know, that's it's it's highly obvious with the ocean filled with plastic, it didn't get there by itself, and so you could say we screwed that up.

In typical McCartney fashion, he ends the song on a note of hope rather than despair. By taking the protests of Jenny Wren as a warning sign, he builds a world in which she may sing again, but.

The day will come there you go. It's going to be a great day. Jenny Wrene will sing, but it will come.

Jenny will sing. When they spoken world, when's it swoolish? Way we spell cad cos Jey?

Can you hear a little bird singing at the moment?

That's a rain? Is it really?

Yes?

It is?

It's a house rain.

Wow.

The Indian name for it, I happen to know is a little bird with a big voice.

And that's it.

Wow. Well that is pretty cool. Oh I love that little Journy Wren. Hey, Jenny, Yeah, it's so beautiful. Now now why is that so beautiful?

Young?

But also, you know what, that gives one faith that everything comes together connected.

I think so too.

Do Jenny Wren from Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, released in two thousand and five. In the next episode, an argument through song, you know.

Now what can?

It was at a time when John was firing missiles at me with his songs. I don't know what he hoped again, other than punching me in the face. And this kind of annoyed me.

Obviously, I suddenly decided to turn my missiles on him.

McCartney. A Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia NPL and Pushkin Industries.