191. Fragments } lost & found.

After “Cry Baby Cry,” Paul McCartney sings a little fragment: “Can you take me back where I came from / Can you take me back / Can you take me back where I came from / Brother can you take me back…”—an eerie excerpt from an unfinished cut, McCartney’s plaintive wish not to be lost anymore. To go home. Another fragment, “Golden Slumbers,” McCartney sings, “Once there was a way / to get back home.” From the same period, “Get Back” (“to where you once belonged”) and “Two of Us” (“…you and me Sunday driving / not arriving/ on our way back home / we’re on our way home…”). Is going back home simply a poignant idea that appealed to McCartney aesthetically, or something to do with personal crisis?

The flip-side of his anxious longing for home appears in the fragments of this era too. From the (rather complete) fragment “You Never Give Me Your Money” that begins the Abbey Road b-side suite: “But oh that magic feeling / Nowhere to go.” And another fragment, “The Lovely Linda,” that begins McCartney’s solo break.