PAUL McCARTNEY ONCE WROTE A SONG THAT FEELS LIKE A “PLAN” FOR HIS OWN FAREWELL — AND ONE LINE IN IT HITS PEOPLE RIGHT IN THE CHEST 🥺🎶 Not dark, not dramatic—just very McCartney. He’s said that when the day comes, he’d want jokes to be told, a glass raised, and to be remembered with warmth instead of grief. The piece frames it as Paul quietly shaping the way he hopes the world will feel about him, especially after living through the losses of John Lennon and George Harrison. A song that sounds gentle… but carries a surprisingly heavy message.

It’s going to be a sad day for the entire world when Paul McCartney is no longer with us.

While I hope that day is a long way from today, the thought of any member of The Beatles being gone forever will be the moment where a bit of light has left the world. But while Macca has always kept a more lighthearted mood throughout all eras of his career, it’s not like he hasn’t thought about it more than a few times when going through his life as one of the most famous people in the world.

After all, there was already a bit of apprehension before the Fab Four even broke up. Their rise to fame had come only a few months after President Kennedy was shot, and when they had that kind of hysteria surrounding them, McCartney did have a strange fear that he had a target on his back the minute that he went onstage with the rest of his mates. But as you grow older, you start taking inventory of the legacy you want to leave behind as well.

McCartney had already seen John Lennon pass away and had to deal with the brutal fall out of it, but when seeing George Harrison cross over to the other side, it wasn’t supposed to be all that sad. Harrison knew his time on this Earth was short, and since he was leaving his Earthly body, he was more than happy to have lived a full life and given everything he could to the world up until the very end.

And as McCartney reached the 2000s, he seemed to have some thoughts on the matter in his mind. He would occasionally throw a loving nod to his friends like making the Harrisonian song ‘Friends To Go’, but on the back half of Memory Almost Full, ‘The End of The End’ planned out exactly what he wanted to see towards the end of his life.

Most people would be too scared to write a song like this, but McCartney was the first to say that he wanted to be remembered fondly on the day he passed, saying, “I suppose writing a song about death – there’s a song called ‘The End Of The End’, which is just about ‘On the day that I die I’d like jokes to be told’ – well, that’s pretty honest. It just happened that the subjects I chose were like that.”

There’s no telling what he was going through at the time that made him write this, but the fact that he’s gone on to release several more albums since then is a reminder that he never stops working, either. He may have the odd moment to get sombre every now and again, but it doesn’t take much for him to get back into cheerful territory every single time he gets back to work on a new record.

In fact, ‘The End of The End’ may as well be the inverse of what he was writing when he wrote ‘Here Today’ for Lennon. That song was about celebrating the life of one of the most important figures he had ever known, and now that he had the opportunity to see his twilight years, he wanted a chance to have a say in what fans would think of him on that fateful day that he passed on.

Because for all of the light he gave to the world, Macca wouldn’t want everything to suddenly go dark when he passes away. He was more than happy to bring up any party that he could, and when the rest of the world hears the news, here’s hoping that some people cue up ‘The End of the End’ and raise a glass to the songsmith that set a million hearts on fire ever since playing The Ed Sullivan Show.