“I Will”

• Published on 1968
• Author: Lennon/McCartney
• Track 16 on “The Beatles – White Album“

Paul McCartney quotes about “I Will”

PAUL 1968: “We’re not just completely rock & roll. We’re not just completely one kind of group. ‘Cuz like, when we played in Hamburg, we didn’t just do rock all evening ‘cuz we had to have these sort of fat old businessmen coming in and saying… (jokingly) or THIN old businessmen, as well, were coming in and saying ‘Play a mambo. Can you do a rhumba?’ And we couldn’t just keep saying no, you know, so we had to get into mambos and rhumbas a bit. So this kind of thing is like a pretty sort of smootchy ballad– ‘I Will.’ I don’t know if it’s getting off the subject, but that’s why there’s great variety in this LP– ‘cuz in everything we do, you know, we just haven’t got one bag, you know. And ‘cuz on one hand you’ll get something like ‘I Will’ and then you’ll get ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road,’ you know. Just completely different things– completely different feelings… But it’s me singing both of them. It’s the same fella. Uhh, and I’ve wrote both of them, you know. So you can’t explain it. I don’t know why I do ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’ shouting it like that… and then do this sort of smootchy laughing American ‘Girl From Ipenema.'”

PAUL circa-1994: “I was doing a song, ‘I Will,’ that I had as a melody for quite a long time but I didn’t have lyrics to it. I remember sitting around (in India) with Donovan, and maybe a couple of other people. We were just sitting around one evening after our day of meditation and I played him this one and he liked it, and we were trying to write some words. We kicked around a few lyrics, something about the moon, but they weren’t very satisfactory and I thought the melody was better than the words… it’s still one of my favorite melodies that I’ve written. You just occasionally get lucky with a melody and it becomes rather complete and I think this is one of them– quite a complete tune.”