Paul McCartney has revealed he may have subconsciously drawn inspiration to write the Beatles 1965 hit Yesterday from the death of his mother from cancer almost a decade earlier.

Someone did suggest to me that this was a losing my mother song, which I always sort of said, No, I dont think so, McCartney told Irish Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon in a new episode of their iHeartPodcast McCartney: A Life In Lyrics .

But the more you think about it, [the line] Why she had to go, I dont know, she wouldnt say. Losing your mother to cancer, no one said anything. We didnt know what it was at all, he explained of the iconic song, for years characterized to be about a romantic break-up, and the melody he said came to him in a dream when he was just 24.