The White Album 50 Project: "I Will"

"I Will" has a few similarities with "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?", the song that precedes it on the White Album.  It's a brief song, it lasts little more than a hundred seconds (at 1:46, it's only four seconds longer than "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?"), it has an uncomplicated arrangement, and it was written by Paul McCartney.  But there the similarities end.  While "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" is a heavy piano rocker with repetitive lyrics, "I Will" is a lighthearted ballad with three lyrically distinct verses and an additional bridge verse, centered around Paul's acoustic guitar and some rudimentary percussion.  Ringo Starr plays the bongos while John Lennon keeps time tapping wood on a piece of metal, as well as adding maracas.  (George Harrison is absent, as he is from most Lennon-McCartney songs on the White Album's second side.)             

Paul, Ringo and John (above) recorded "I Will" in over sixty takes, with some of those takes being pieces of impromptu ad-libbing from Paul, who has a tendency to improvise or revisit songs when he needs some inspiration to find the right sound or lyric for the song he's already working on.  Take 19 of "I Will" was in fact an untitled song revolving around the lyric of "Can you take me back where I came from?", an excerpt of which was included between two tracks of the White Album's fourth side (we'll discuss that later).  Immediately after that, Paul improvised another brief song called "Down In Havana."  Take 36 was a mashup of "I Will" with Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern's "The Way You Look Tonight," and the take before that,  Take 35, was a medley of Paul's song "Step Inside Love" (written for British pop-music icon Cilla Black) with an improvised song called "Los Paranoias," prompted by John's mention of the offhandedly silly name the pre-fame Beatles once used.  Outtakes from the session for "I Will," which took place in the evening and overnight hours of September 16, 1968, indicate a low-key, relaxed atmosphere in the studio, with John and Paul laughing at each other's jokes and having fun with their basic instrumentation.  It was probably the most easygoing White Album session ever.  (The final master received Paul's finishing touch - an overdub of a doo-wop-style vocalized bass line.) 

But what of "I Will" itself?  It's an earnest song that, on the surface at least, expresses romantic sentiments that one might find in a Hallmark Valentine's Day card, and so it gets overlooked a good deal by critics.  "A brief encounter with Paul's mushy side," Tim Riley once wrote of it, "it wins points by being quick."  But once you dissect the lyrics, the song's meaning is deeper than that of your typical love song.

After a couple of sentiments expressed for the woman he's addressing in the present-perfect and present tenses ("Who knows how long I've loved you / You know I love you still"), Paul mostly refers to her and expresses his feelings for her in the future tense - as befits the song's title.  He says he will wait for her, but it turns out that he hasn't even met her yet; he doesn't know if he ever saw her, and even if he did, he didn't get her name.  (Although there's no tense assigned to the bridge verse in which Paul sings of loving her, the overall sentiment of "I Will" suggests that it's meant to be in future tense as well.)  Paul isn't singing to her, he's singing about her . . .  and he's singing about how she is destined to be part of his future.  In other words, when he recorded "I Will," he was singing about the dream girl who hadn't come along yet - just as John sang about his not-yet-arrived dream girl in the Rubber Soul song "Girl."  And that may explain why "I Will" is perhaps the only Paul ballad from the White Album that John never disparaged.  He got it. 

Paul's dream girl, of course, turned out to be American photographer Linda Eastman (shown above in 1965), just as John's dream girl would turn out to be Yoko Ono.  Paul had first met Linda on May 15, 1967, when she was at the launch party for the Sgt. Pepper album to photograph the Beatles, and the pair encountered each other again four days later (a Friday night) at a London club.

"The night I met Linda I was in the Bag O'Nails watching Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames play a great set," Paul later remembered.  "She was there with the Animals, who she knew from photographing them in New York. They were sitting a couple of alcoves down, near the stage. The band had finished and they got up to either leave or go for a drink . . . or something, and she passed our table. I was near the edge and stood up just as she was passing, blocking her exit. And so I said, 'Oh, sorry. Hi. How are you? How're you doing?' I introduced myself, and said, 'We're going on to another club after this, would you like to join us?' That was my big pulling line! Well, I'd never used it before, of course, but it worked this time! It was a fairly slim chance but it worked. She said, 'Yes, okay, we'll go on. How shall we do it?' I forget how we did it. 'You come in our car' or whatever, and we all went on, the people I was with and the Animals, we went on to the Speakeasy."

However, Paul was still dating Jane Asher at the time, and he would be dating another woman - Francie Schwartz, another American like Linda - briefly in the summer of 1968 after breaking up with Jane.  "I Will" had been begun in India when Paul was obviously conflicted as to who the love of his life really was.  Was it Jane?  Someone else he'd already met?  Someone he hadn't even met yet but might have seen - like the anonymous beautiful woman Emil Sinclair loves from afar and refers to as Beatrice, but never meets, in Hermann Hesse's "Demian"?  By the time "I Will" was recorded - with Paul revising the words as he went along - all the signs were pointing to Linda as the answer.  "Unsurprisingly," wrote Steve Turner in his book about the Beatles as songwriters, "A Hard Day's Write," "there's a sense of anticipation in the lyric, provoked no doubt by knowledge that Linda and her daughter were arriving in London the very next week [after the session]."  

By October 1968, it was clear.  Linda was the one.  Soon she and Heather, her daughter by her first marriage, would leave New York and settle with Paul in London.  Paul and Linda were wed in March 1969 and stayed married until Linda's death from cancer in 1998.

"I Will" may not necessarily have started out as a song about Linda, but it's arguably Paul's best song about her.