Paul McCartney bonded with Kanye West by sharing a story about how the loss of his mother inspired him creatively.
Kanye, 39, lost his mum Donda in 2007, after she died at the age of 58 following complications caused by cosmetic surgery. The rapper was just 30 at the time.
Paul, 74, who collaborated with the hip-hop star on the 2014 track Only One, lost his mother Mary at an even younger age when she died of an embolism in 1956 when The Beatles rocker was just 14.
The British star explains that in order to bond creatively with the Jesus Walks musician he told him the story of how a vision of his late mum inspired him to write The Beatles song Let It Be.
Paul tells the BBC, “(When meeting Kanye) I just was myself and I told Kanye various stories that had inspired me musically. One of them was how the song Let It Be arrived, which was through a dream I’d had in which I’d seen my mother, who had died 10 years previously but I was so inspired by that that I wrote the song. I told Kanye that, because he’d lost his mother. So then he wrote a song called Only One when I was just noodling around on the electronic piano. So he got the melody, I put the chords in and the style and that’s how it happened.”
The former Wings frontman admits that writing a song with Kanye was a bit of a departure for him, and jokes that if he hadn’t been happy with their collaboration he’d have denied all knowledge of working with him.
“Now with Kanye, I had no idea what was going to happen because I knew it wasn’t going to be two acoustic guitars opposite each other,” he adds. “So I thought, ‘Well, here goes nothing’.
“The one provision I said to everyone, I said, ‘Look, if I feel this doesn’t work out, then we just won’t tell anyone. Kanye who? I didn’t work with him!'”
Paul is currently working on a new solo album, and has enlisted Greg Kurstin, the man who co-produced Adele’s record breaking 2015 album 25, to help him perfect his material.
