Paul McCartney's worked with a who's-who of legends in the music industry including, but certainly not limited to, Michael Jackson, Pete Townsend, Stevie Wonder and Kanye West, but John Lennon is a different story entirely. With nearly all of the Beatles' music credited to the Lennon/McCartney songwriting team, they're no doubt one of the most respected songwriting duos in history. That's why it's so crazy to hear Sir Paul compare Kanye's songwriting process to his former right hand man's.
Speaking with The Mirror, the UK veteran drew a parallel between Lennon and West: “When I wrote with John, he would sit down with a guitar. I would sit down. We’d ping-pong ’til we had a song. It was like that [with Kanye].”
He also spoke on the making of "Only One":
"My first thought was, 'Woah, what am I going to get into here?' He is amazingly talented but controversial and can make eccentric moves. I realized if it didn't work out we'd just say so and shake hands and leave... We sat around and talked an awful lot just to break the ice. One of the stories I told him was about how I happened to have written 'Let It Be'. My mum came to me in a dream when she'd died years previously. I was in a bit of a state -- it was the Sixties and I was overdoing it. In the dream she said, 'Don't worry it's all going to be fine, just let it be.' And I woke up and thought, 'Woah' and wrote the song. I told Kanye this and he said, 'I'm going to write a song with my mum.' So then I sat down at the piano."
Hopefully we hear more McCartney on So Help Me God.
[via]