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Paul McCartney during the taping of All You Need Is Love | 25 June 1967 © David Magnus

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"It is a wonderful, beautiful, spine-chilling record. It cannot be misinterpreted. It is a clear message saying that love is everything. It's the best thing they've done."

- Brian Epstein, on All You Need Is Love

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"the Beatles' penchant for raucous, late-night merrymaking seemingly came to an end during the European tour, with the boys sometimes retiring for the night as early as eight o'clock on their off days, often ignoring their usual scrum of adoring female fans."

June 1965 - Living the Beatles Legend

sorry was nobody going to mention that Mal told us nearly the exact date that the Beatles stopped fucking girls and started fucking each other?

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In the original, for the anon who requested (quite some time ago, sorry):

paolo si è arrampicato sui grattacieli e per cosa per finire a fare lo schifoso con quell'altro e lasciar fare i versi della balena morente A ME

paolo climbed the skyscrapers and why to end up being disgusting with that other one and let him make the noises of the dying whale TO ME

this is a google translate of a bookmark on 'believe me when I tell you', and I hope the person doesn't mind me posting it because I don't know how poetically fantastic it is in the original, but in translation I think it is the loveliest beatles imagery going

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People are doing the fic questions meme and I realised I never posted it for ways to love you, so here are some questions nobody asked me about last year's fic.

1: What inspired you to write the fic?

helplessly seeking ways through the darkness.

2: Was it easy or hard to write? Which part was most difficult?

It was okay ... except that I still don't quite really understand fic that isn't hurt/comfort, so I kept getting confused with the lack of... anything happening, and I was a bit like 'you can't just write a fic about them being HAPPY! NOBODY wants that!' so I kept abandoning it and ignoring it, but then I also kept drifting back to it, and eventually enough that I finished it and posted and turns out lots of us just want nice soft things to happen to the people we love, so it was OK.

3. Were there any parts where it could have gone in another direction?

Yes, there are two fics this fic should have been which would have been better than this fic. But I didn't notice either of them until I was almost finished.

Firstly: THIS POST

Secondly: Gay people in the actual world historically couldn't replicate marriage through contract law, that's one of the biggest worst things about gay history and I just pretended it wasn't. But actually when gay men couldn't get married they sometimes ADOPTED ONE ANOTHER in order to become next of kin etc. So I had the most beautiful golden opportunity for Paul to casually serve John with adoption papers, and I just didn't even think about it until I was nearly finished.

4: What’s your favourite line of narration?

They're both aware that Paul is made of gold, and none of his mistakes mean a thing

5: What’s your favourite line of dialogue?

"She misses him," Paul says softly, like it's a secret. Ritchie nods. "But she'll be okay."

6: Did you always know how it would end?

No. I mean I sort of knew, I knew that it's a happy fic where they're secretly married, so I knew they weren't going to break up and have a sadness, so I suppose I knew that Paul would eventually Express Love. But I mean it's not a lot of an ending though, it's not like I had a proper Good Ending in mind. I don't probably care enough about endings, and I think the only meaningful endings are angst and gutting heartbreak, which... I can't cope with and so I don't do.

7: Where did the title come from?

From a paul song, because I couldn't decide on anything, and I think it's very paul, that lyric, 'always looking for ways to love you', I think it's beautiful and romantic, and speaks to love being active rather than passive, being about doing things, than just feeling things. And that's something they genuinely needed to work out in 1969, stop taking it for granted that they loved each other and actually think about how that looked, and how/whether they could care for each other as well as just caring about each other. So it's a lyric I think about a lot, and it seemed to fit.

8: Were there any particular lines or scenes which you had to cut despite wanting to keep them?

No, I left them all in, pologies.

9: What do you like best about this fic?

I like that it is (sometimes) exactly 23000 words. When I originally posted the last chapter it was only three words over, so I edited it down, and it's so round and pleasing. (Sometimes I edit it, and ruin my word count, but I usually try to get it back eventually.) (I edit my fic a lot, if you leave a comment on my fic, I will read a bit of that fic when I go to reply, and I will change some of the words.)

10: What do you like least about this fic?

I think it's slightly lumpy. This is the thing I like least about all my fics, I should be able to articulate it better by now.

11: What music did you listen to, if any, to get in the mood for writing this story? Or if you didn’t listen to anything, what do you think readers should listen to to accompany us while reading?

I don't really listen to music, so I should definitely take this question out of this meme that I choose to answer every time I write a fic.

12: What happens after the end of this fic?

Oh I don't know. I think because they're not actually them, because they're fic versions of each other, they'll be okay. It's just in real life it would be much much worse than our own timeline, it would be daggers and divorce in six months, because you don't solve John by giving him Paul, and you definitely don't solve Paul by giving him John. It feels like the right thing to do, and you hope for the best, but it's always a bit of a wing and a prayer.

13: What scene (or line) did you first put down? Did you plan it out, or write as you go?

The first four or five sections were the first bits I wrote, because I'm good at starting. I could write you seventy three beginnings of a fic tomorrow if you wanted, all very soft and moody and full of promise... and then it would take me a year to badly finish any one of them.

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Paul McCartney, I think, is an endlessly fascinating figure who is a lot weirder than people give him credit for. -- Charlie Brooker, 2023

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAUL McCARTNEY

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happy 83rd birthday, Paul!

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Happy Birthday, Paul McCartney (b. 18th June 1942)

And when I think that all this stuff, Can make a life, it's pretty hard to take it in, That was me.

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“I met Paul McCartney later in the ’60s, in a studio. I was almost always in a studio back then. He came by when we were at Columbia Square working on vocal overdubs, and we had a little chat about music. Everyone knows now that “God Only Knows” was Paul’s favorite song—and not only his favorite Beach Boys song, but one of his favorite songs period. It’s the kind of thing people write in liner notes and say on talk shows. When people read it, they kind of look at that sentence and keep going. But think about how much it mattered to me when I first heard it there on Sunset Boulevard. I was the person who wrote “God Only Knows,” and here was another person—the person who wrote “Yesterday” and “And I Love Her” and so many other songs—saying it was his favorite. It really blew my mind. He wasn’t the only Beatle who felt that way. John Lennon called me after Pet Sounds—phoned me up, I think the British say—to tell me how much he loved the record. But Paul and I stayed in touch. Another time not too long after that he came to my house and told me about the new music he was working on. “There’s one song I want you to hear,” he said. “I think it’s a nice melody.” He put the tape on and it was “She’s Leaving Home.” My wife, Marilyn, was there, too, and she just started crying. Listening to Paul play a new song let me see my own songs more clearly. It was hard for me to think about the effect that my music had on other people, but it was easy to see when it was another songwriter.”

— Brian Wilson, I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir. (2016)

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this is the Beatles movie of 2027 I'm excited about

(full article here)

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3 years can sometimes make quite a difference, can’t it?

The Beatles and George Martin in EMI studio 2, 27th February 1964. Photos by Dezo Hoffman

The Beatles and George Martin in EMI studio 2, 28th February 1967. Photos by Henry Grossman

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There's something extremely George Harrison (The Beatles) about being the only Beatle with a name clarification on ao3

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"we can't say for sure whether john and paul actually had sex with each other" well that's your definition of sex. they're weirder than you.

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tags by @m1ssunderstanding

“I don’t wear my glasses during our act, so I sometimes miss out on the fun. Paul likes to say that he has seen the girl of his dreams out there. He knows I go crazy because I can’t see the birds.”

— John Lennon (via what-about-the-beatles)