On the morning of 15 February 1970, Paul McCartney walked into Studio 2 at EMI Recording Studios, Abbey Road, to record Maybe I’m Amazed, a song written as a raw and honest declaration of love and gratitude to his wife Linda, for keeping him grounded during the painful and depressing implosion of The Beatles.
Maybe I’m Amazed was renowned for being a one-man solo effort, with McCartney playing all the instruments. The only other person on the track was Linda, who contributed backing vocals and handclaps.
The song is also notable for arguably being McCartney’s greatest post-Beatles composition. In an interview in 2009, he reportedly suggested that Maybe I’m Amazed is the song he would most like to be remembered for.
It’s easy to see why. Rarely has Paul McCartney sounded so raw, vulnerable and open, or demonstrated such unbridled emotional power.
Over half a century since it was conceived, Maybe I’m Amazed still stands as a masterpiece and one of Paul McCartney’s finest achievements.
The break-up of The Beatles shocked McCartney to his core. By the time he wrote Maybe I’m Amazed, he was allegedly in a deep depression. Holed up on his Scottish farm, he allegedly spent a lot of time sleeping late and pondering what to do with the rest of his life.
It was Linda who reportedly convinced him to start writing and recording again. He wrote Maybe I’m Amazed at his home at Cavendish Avenue in St John’s Wood, London
“Actually, Linda and I were probably already married,” recalled McCartney in his 2021 book The Lyrics: 1956 To Present, “because I can now visualise sitting at the lovely black Steinway piano that we got after our wedding. I was playing on it one day, and this song came to me.”
Lyrically, the song is direct and heartfelt. “Baby, I'm amazed at the way you love me all the time/And maybe I'm afraid of the way I love you”, he sings at the start of the first verse.
“The elements of fear and loneliness are very much to the fore,” admitted McCartney in The Lyrics book.“‘Maybe I’m afraid of the way I love you’ is itself a troubling idea.”
As the song picks up pace in the second verse, his voice takes on a much grittier and strident edge. “Maybe I’m a lonely man who’s in the middle of something/That he doesn’t really understand.”
This is a soulful, passionate love song, sung by a man who is scared and whose life is about to change dramatically. He is on the brink of a romance that will last for 29 years, until Linda’s untimely death in April 1998. At the same time the band he had tried so hard to keep together was slipping through his fingers.
At its core, Maybe I’m Amazed is a piano ballad with strong gospel, soul and R&B tinges and a spiritual and confessional feel. In many ways, it feels less inhibited and less tightly structured than much of his solo material.
There’s a raw quality to the song he laid down in a single day at Abbey Road’s Studio Two in February 1970. His piano playing in particular is soulful and fluid, with an ebb and flow that feels wholly instinctive.
There’s also a sense of urgency and immediacy, not simply due to the time constraints he has set himself, one suspects, but more from a compulsion to unburden himself from the turmoil he is experiencing.
The song begins with a fade-in and a ‘false’ introduction of slow, meandering piano and organ in the key of D major, before the whole thing unexpectedly drops down to B flat, 17 seconds in, and the song begins.
And then it’s just McCartney and the piano, beautifully plaintive and yearning. After the second line – ‘Maybe I’m afraid of the way I love you’ –there is the first of numerous dramatically ascending piano arpeggios in A major that feature throughout the song.
30 seconds in, on the second half of the first verse, bass guitar and a smattering of cymbals enters the mix. At 0:45, the drums start up as the chorus kicks in, underpinned by a layer of backing vocals. It’s a soaring, strident sound with McCartney’s vocal sounding completely ravaged and intense on the line: “And maybe you're the only woman who could ever help me.”
Like many great songs, the strength of Maybe I’m Amazed lies in the power of the live performance in the studio. It’s the raw, ragged emotion and feeling that elevates this to a whole different level.
This is music from McCartney’s soul, and he has rarely sounded more emotionally bare and vulnerable.
As Alexis Petridis noted in a piece in The Guardian in 2021, Maybe I’m Amazed is “both a pledge of devotion to his new wife and a howl of bewilderment at The Beatles’ collapse”.
At 0:53 there’s some nifty blues piano vamping at the mid-point of the chorus before the whole rousing thing picks up again. At the close of the chorus, at 1:06, McCartney shifts seamlessly to falsetto on a beautifully melodic vocal motif.
And then it’s his guitar solo, with its biting, overdriven tone. It’s a wonderfully melodic solo, played with gritty, bluesy attack.
30 seconds on and the solo segues into another chorus. By now, McCartney’s vocals are getting ever more intense.
And then it’s into the last verse: “Maybe I'm amazed at the way you're with me all the time/And maybe I'm afraid of the way I leave you.”
At this point, percussive ‘dead-string’ guitar chops enter the mix, bolstering the rhythm. At 2:48, the whole thing picks up again and at 3:07 it’s into another emotive solo.
There’s a compelling looseness to the whole song, a spontaneity and feel that fuels its emotional impact.
A preliminary mix was made that day by the two engineers at Studio Two, Phil McDonald and Alan Parsons, and the song was mixed properly on 22 February 1970.
In a BBC Radio 2 programme called The Tracks Of My Years, broadcast in 2019, Alan Parsons recalled watching McCartney recording Maybe I’m Amazed.
“He did the whole thing, start to finish, every instrument, bass, drums, guitars, keyboards, everything, in a day, and I remember being so, so impressed with that.”
Despite being the standout track on his debut solo album McCartney (1970), Maybe I’m Amazed was not released as a single at the time, although the song was widely acclaimed.
George Harrison praised Maybe I’m Amazed, calling it “great” although he was disparaging about much of the album from which it came. His view was shared by a number of journalists, such as Richard Williams of the Melody Maker, who concluded that there was “sheer banality” in all the album’s tracks save for Maybe I'm Amazed.
In the months and years that followed, the song’s popularity grew, thanks largely to widespread radio play.
One band who recognised the potential of the song when it appeared on McCartney’s debut solo album were the Faces.
They recorded a studio version of the song in 1970 and released it as a US-only single, while a live version appeared on their 1971 album Long Player.
The Faces’ version was stirring and soulful, and Maybe I’m Amazed became a staple of the band’s high energy live set. Bassist Ronnie Lane took the lead vocal on the gentler, more plaintive first verse, before Rod Stewart took over with his more gravelly, powerful R&B delivery from the second verse on.
But it would take seven years for the song to be finally released as a single by Paul McCartney, and this was a live version, taken from the 1976 Wings Over America tour.
This is the version that became a massive hit, reaching No 10 in the US Billboard Hot 100, despite its slower tempo and longer running time.
It’s a powerful performance and McCartney’s vocal sounds raw and intense, but it’s more bombastic and arguably lacks the vulnerability of the version he recorded in a single day back in February 1970.
For McCartney, an anomaly of music publishing meant that Maybe I’m Amazed is still categorised as a Lennon-McCartney composition. It’s a point he addresses in his 2021 book The Lyrics: 1956 To Present.
“Though the song was written immediately after The Beatles’ breakup, it was somehow included under the Lennon-McCartney rubric, where it doesn’t belong,” he said. “It was one of my first solo songs, but because of the deal, it got caught in the publishing net. That was very annoying.”
56 years on from writing and recording the song at his Steinway piano, Maybe I’m Amazed stands as one of Paul McCartney’s finest moments. In a 2022 poll in The Guardian, of McCartney’s greatest post-Beatles songs, the song was ranked No 1.
Two years later, in a 2024 Rolling Stone magazine poll of The 100 Best Beatles Solo Songs, Maybe I’m Amazed also came in at No 1. As writer Rob Sheffield observed, this was McCartney’s most soulful, passionate and unforgettable love song for Linda.
“There are no other rock and roll love stories like this one,” concluded Sheffield. “Maybe I’m Amazed tells that story in gloriously vivid detail. You can hear it in Paul’s ragged voice – he already knows that life as he knows it has changed. He has no idea what to expect from his future with Linda. He’s scared out of his wits. But neither one of them is backing away.”
