Two of Us (Beatles song)

• 1. Introduction

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  "Two of Us" begins with a joke. On the Let It Be album, before a single note plays, John Lennon's voice cuts in: "'I Dig A Pygmy' by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf-Aids! Phase one, in which Doris gets her oats!" It is the kind of absurdist humor the Beatles had made their private language. But the song that follows carries something more tender beneath its acoustic strum.

  Paul McCartney wrote "Two of Us" about road trips with his then-girlfriend Linda Eastman. They were the "two" in the title. By the time the song reached listeners on the opening track of Let It Be in 1970, the band had collapsed around it, and the words had quietly shifted to mean something else entirely. Who was McCartney really singing to? And what does it mean that one of the band's final recordings began as a love letter to someone who was not in the group at all?

• 2. A Song About Linda

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  McCartney wrote "Two of Us" with Linda Eastman in mind, drawing on their shared travel adventures. He married Linda in March 1969, just weeks after the Beatles recorded the song's final version on the 31st of January 1969. The lyric "you and me chasing paper / getting nowhere" felt personal and immediate when he wrote it.

  The song was originally titled "On Our Way Home," which fits the image of two people driving without a fixed destination. Music critic Ian MacDonald noticed that the same lyrics could be read as a comment on McCartney's frustration with the Beatles' business dealings, particularly the contractual troubles with Allen Klein. MacDonald pointed out that the phrase "funny paper" appears in another McCartney song from the same period, "You Never Give Me Your Money" on Abbey Road, also referring to the Klein situation. One song written for Linda had quietly absorbed the anxieties of a band coming apart.

• 3. The Everly Brothers in the Room

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  George Harrison played bass on a six-string Fender Telecaster for the finished recording, an unusual choice that gave the song its particular texture. The personnel breakdown, according to Ian MacDonald, lists McCartney on lead vocal and acoustic guitar, Lennon on co-lead vocal and acoustic guitar, and Ringo Starr on drums.

  The two-voice center of the song was intentional. McCartney and Lennon had grown up listening to the Everly Brothers, and "Two of Us" is partly an homage to that close-harmony style. The intertwining vocals sit at the heart of the arrangement, which is why the shift from the earlier version matters so much. The Beatles had first tried the song in a guitar-driven rock style, which McCartney later described as "chunky." They scrapped that approach and rebuilt the song around acoustic guitars, letting the harmonies carry more weight.

• 4. The Rooftop and the Studio

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  The finished version of "Two of Us" was performed live at Apple Studios on the 31st of January 1969. That performance appears in both the Let It Be film and on the Let It Be album. A clip from it was also broadcast on The Ed Sullivan Show on the 1st of March 1970, marking the final appearance by the Beatles on that program.

  An earlier version, recorded on the 24th of January 1969, took a different shape. That session also produced an unexpected footnote: between takes, the band spontaneously launched into a hammed-up version of the traditional Liverpudlian song "Maggie Mae." That 38-second piece ended up on the Let It Be album alongside "Two of Us," though it was left off Let It Be... Naked. The 24th of January version of "Two of Us" itself appeared on Anthology 3, released in 1996.

  A third recording exists that almost no one has heard. In May 1969, McCartney produced a version of the song under its original title "On Our Way Home" for a New York City trio called Mortimer, who briefly recorded for the Beatles' own Apple label. That recording was never released.

• 5. Let It Be, Then and Now

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  Phil Spector's production of Let It Be in 1970 included the Lennon spoken intro before "Two of Us" as a kind of winking prelude. When the album was remade as Let It Be... Naked in 2003, that introduction was cut. The Naked version is a remix of the original recording, stripped of Spector's additions, though Lennon's nonsense intro can still be heard in the Get Back documentary series.

  The song's afterlife stretched well beyond the album. The title Two of Us was used for a 2000 VH1 television drama depicting a fictionalized account of the 24th of April 1976, a day when Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live offered the Beatles $3,000 to appear on the program. By coincidence, McCartney happened to be visiting Lennon at his New York apartment that evening and the two were watching the broadcast together. At a technology conference in 2007, Steve Jobs cited the song's lyric "You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead" to describe his friendship with Bill Gates. The song the Beatles recorded in a single afternoon in January 1969 kept finding new lives in other people's stories.