'It was like finding him in the street': The Beatles' Yesterday and five other songs inspired by dreams

Inspiration for songwriting can come from anywhere – but the realm of sleep is perhaps the most mysterious. Is it the subconscious or something more? Ignorance is part of magic, and writing songs inspired by dreams has given rise to absolute classics.

Whether it’s a line, a chorus, a riff, or an entire song that the writer wakes up to capture before it disappears again, we’re here to review the best 40 songs that owe their existence to 40 winks.

1. Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me) – Train (Pat Monahan)

The American band’s 2001 Grammy-winning hit Drops Of Jupiter took on a deeper dimension for listeners when its genesis was revealed by the singer. Pat Monahan. It was the group’s breakthrough success, but its inspiration came at a bittersweet price.

“I would give it back,” Pat Monahan candidly told the Daily Blast in 2022. “I lost my mother that year, that’s why the song was written. So I would give it back if I could still call my mother , but she It was a great gift she gave me.”

She came to me in a dream

A gift because Monahan felt that one evening, his late mother Patricia was reaching out to him. “She came to me in a dream and told me she could do all these things now, including swimming across the planets and coming back with drops of Jupiter in her hair. But I’d rather be there with you – heaven is overrated and you should really take care of your life, because it’s important.”

It wasn’t just an inspiration for a good song at the time, it was life advice for Monahan to pursue with the band. But there was one thing the singer wanted to make clear to all the guitarists who would come after him after mishearing the phrase “Man Heaven is overrated” in the chorus.

“When the song came out, people thought I was singing ‘Van Halen is overrated,’ so I was getting hate messages like crazy,” he told the Daily Blast.

2. Yesterday – The Beatles (Paul McCartney)

The ultimate dream song? It’s definitely the most covered. Paul McCartney stayed with former flame Jane Asher’s family in London for three years in the mid-60s. They allowed him to stay in the attic room upstairs. “Perfect for an artist,” the Beatle reminded Paul Muldoon in the excellent podcast series McCartney: A Life in Words. “And I managed to put a piano there – a little piano shaped like a swan. I fell asleep one night and dreamed of this melody.

When I woke up I thought, “This is great, I love this song.”

“Somewhere in this dream I heard this song and when I woke up I thought, ‘This is great, I love this song.’ It was so vivid that the songwriter couldn’t not determine if it was an existing song he remembered from his childhood.

“Is this a Fred Astaire and Cole Porter thing? What is it?” he wondered. “So I fell out of bed and the piano was right there, to the left of my bed. So I just thought, well, I’ll try to figure out how this song goes. I wonder what it is? It must be an old standard that I just heard years ago and forgot about it.

“So I worked on the chords, and the two opening chords are pretty cool,” McCartney continued. “I was very lucky there because I didn’t have to listen to those chords.”

Chance? This is Paul McCartney speaking. “It was very clear,” he says, humming the melody that opens the song. But without any portable recording devices invented/at hand, what if he forgot?

Bassist Paul McCartney of the rock and roll band

Paul McCartney in 1965 (Image credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

“In order to solidify it in my memory, I just blocked it out with a few words that were ‘Scrambled egg / oh my baby, how I love your legs…’ Turns out those kinds of fake lyrics weren’t common for McCartney in the Beatles. “We did that sometimes but not often,” he explained. “Most of the time we just sat there and wrote it so you had your only lyrics. We never really revised our stuff.” But McCartney was always convinced that the melody he had came from someone else’s song.

“So I got this song, and I think the first person I saw was John. I said, ‘What’s wrong with me, what is this song?’ I thought he would know.” He had never heard it before. Then McCartney tried his hand at the encyclopedic musical mind of George Martin.

“After a few weeks it became clear that no one knew about it and it didn’t exist except to my ears,” McCartney added. “And so I claimed him. It was like finding him on the street.”

3. Villa Strangiato – Rush (Alex Lifeson)

Who dreams of a nine and a half minute instrumental? Alex Lifeson Of course! In truth, rather than a specific melody or lyric emerging from a recurring nightmare the guitarist would have, it is more of an attempt to recreate their experience musically with Geddy Lee And Neil Peart on the trio’s 1978 opus Hemispheres.

Alex has some of the weirdest bad dreams

“Alex has some of the weirdest bad dreams, especially when we’re on the road touring,” Peart explained to Geoff Barton for Sounds magazine in 1978. “Sometimes when we’re all supposed to be sleeping soundly in our hotel rooms , he will wake Geddy (Lee, the singer and bassist of the band) or me with a phone call in the middle of the night and start telling us his terrible dreams while you are barely conscious, some of the stories he may make up. be quite breathtaking.

The same goes for how Rush recorded it. “It was all recorded in one take,” Lifeson told Guitar World in 1996. “Because we were writing on the road, we would use our scales to go through the songs we were going to record. We would go off the road, have a a few days off and start recording Everything was recorded at the same time with all of us in the same room.

“We had arguments around the guitar, bass and drums and we looked at each other to find the signals,” recalls the guitarist. “My solo in the middle section was overdubbed after recording the basic tracks. I played a solo while we were doing the first take and re-recorded it later. If you listen very closely, you can hear the ‘another ghost solo in the background.

4. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction – The Rolling Stones (Keith Richards)

Who really knows the mysteries that have been swirling in Keef’s subconscious for decades. They did the rolling stones the legend stands proud here though; presenting him in his sleep with one of the most famous guitar riffs of all time, which was used within a month not only to be recorded, but also to realize the band’s then three-year-old innovation. Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone famous pedal. The only initial stumble was that Richards forgot he had written it. Fortunately, he had it recorded on tape.

I wish all the songs could come that way, you know, where you dream them, and then the next morning they’re presented to you.

“I wish all the songs could come this way, you know, where you dream them, and then the next morning there they are, presented to you,” Richards told Fresh Air in 2010. “But Satisfaction was this kind of miracle happened. I had one of the first little cassette players, you know, Norelco, Philips, the same thing, actually, but it was a fascinating little machine to me, a. cassette player where you could just write down ideas and, you know, wherever you were.

“I set up the machine and put in a new cassette,” he continued. “I go to bed as usual with my guitar, and I wake up the next morning, I see that the tape is played to the very end. And I think, well, I didn’t do anything, you know ?I said, maybe I pressed a button while I was asleep, you know, so I put it back to the beginning and pressed play and there it was in some kind of version? ghostly, it’s (singing) da, da, da, da, da – I can I get no satisfaction.

“And so there was a whole verse. I won’t bore you with all that. But – and after that, there’s, you know, 40 minutes where I snore.”

5. All you had to do was stay – Taylor Swift

This cut of Taylor Swift‘s 1989 album has a chorus taken directly from a vivid dream Swift had about an ex – an anonymous individual who is supposedly Harry Styles.

“There’s this ‘remainder!’ very sharp. and I dreamed that my ex showed up at my door, knocked on my door, and I opened it and I was about to launch into the perfect thing to say,” she revealed to Ryan Adams – who would also cover the song, and even the entire 1989 album in 2015. “Instead, all that came out of my mouth was this high-pitched chorus of people singing ‘stay!’.

6. River of Dreams – Billy Joel

“I had this idea for a song, I woke up one day (sings), ‘In the middle of the night / I’ll walk in my sleep'”, Billy Joel recalls in the video below a song he wrote, almost against his will. “It was kind of like a gospel song, (I thought) I can’t write this. I’m not a gospel artist. I tried to shake it off, then I went in the shower this morning- there (he continues singing the song) and it wouldn’t go away.

I still don’t know what that means

“That’s it – if you go in the shower and it becomes an earworm, forget it – you’re not going to get rid of it,” he adds. “It’s not going to go away. There are all these biblical references – I still don’t know what they mean. But they were very strong visual images: ‘Through the Valley of Fear,’ ‘The Wilderness of truth’… baptized by anyone it was I’m not a biblical person, I’m not a religious man but those images were very powerful and the reason I wrote it, I don’t. I didn’t understand it but it became a hit record.