The Day McCartney Recorded “Maybe I’m Amazed”

On the morning of 15 February 1970, Paul McCartney walked into Studio 2 at EMI Recording Studios on Abbey Road and laid down “Maybe I’m Amazed.” It took a single day. The session produced a track that has since become difficult to separate from the chaos surrounding it. The Beatles were coming apart. McCartney was holed up on his farm in Scotland, sleeping late, unsure what came next. The song that emerged from that period was not about the band. It was about Linda.

Linda McCartney was the only other person on the recording. She sang backing vocals and added handclaps. Everything else was McCartney alone: piano, bass, drums, the winding guitar solo that enters late and pushes the song somewhere less tidy. The whole thing reads like a diary entry made public before the ink dried. There is a gospel undercurrent and a confessional structure that feels less composed than wrung out.

He had written it at home on Cavendish Avenue in St John’s Wood, at a black Steinway piano the couple received after their wedding. In his 2021 book The Lyrics: 1956 To Present, McCartney recalled the moment: “I can now visualise sitting at the lovely black Steinway piano. I was playing on it one day, and this song came to me.” The lyrics that followed were unguarded in a way he has rarely permitted since. The second verse lands differently once you know what the man was carrying. “Maybe I’m a lonely man who’s in the middle of something / That he doesn’t really understand.”

The song never appeared on a studio album in his lifetime with Linda. It closed the live record Wings Over America in 1976. In 2009, McCartney reportedly said it was the song he would most like to be remembered by. Half a century later, that preference holds its logic. The guitar work still cuts. The vocal still sounds like a man trying to believe what he just wrote down.