I Lost My Little Girl

Album: Unplugged (The Official Bootleg) (1991)
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Songfacts®:

  • "I Lost My Little Girl" is the first song Paul McCartney ever wrote. He was 14 years old when he penned it, and the year was 1956. He wrote it using a Framus Zenith model 17 acoustic guitar that he kept throughout his life.

    The song wasn't officially released until 1991, after McCartney performed it for MTV Unplugged. There's also a rehearsal version of it sung by John Lennon during the Beatles Get Back Sessions.
  • The lyrics of the song's bridge go:

    Well gather round people
    Let me tell you the story
    The very first song I wrote


    It's likely that "the very song I wrote" line, at the very least, was added later and not in the original.

    The rest of the lyrics are the sort of generic lost-love stuff one would expect from a teenager, but the song has an interesting angle because McCartney's mother died of an embolism on October 31, 1956, and many have wondered if the song was about her.

    When asked by GQ if the song was about his mother, McCartney stated that he didn't know. "A psychiatrist might have a field day with that," he said. "I certainly didn't think it was at the time, but it could have been."

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