Paul McCartney was very sentimental when he shared the story behind “Silly Love Songs.”
“Over the years people have said, ‘Aw, he sings love songs, he writes love songs, he’s so soppy at times.’ I thought, Well, I know what they mean, but, people have been doing love songs forever,” McCartney told Billboard in 2001. “I like ’em, other people like ’em, and there’s a lot of people I love — I’m lucky enough to have that in my life. So the idea was that “you” may call them silly, but what’s wrong with that?”
McCartney’s response to his critics at the time, including his former bandmate John Lennon who criticized his love songs, was this song he wrote, “Silly Love Songs.”
“The song was, in a way, to answer people who just accuse me of being soppy,” McCartney shrugged. “The nice payoff now is that a lot of the people I meet who are at the age where they’ve just got a couple of kids and have grown up a bit, settling down, they’ll say to me, ‘I thought you were really soppy for years, but I get it now! I see what you were doing!'”
The song was the lead single for their 1976 album, Wings at the Speed of Sound. It peaked at the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week of May 22, 1976, the song was more than just a hit. It marked as McCartney’s 27th No. 1 as a songwriter after spending five weeks at the top spot. “Silly Love Songs” was also Billboard’s No. 1 song of 1976, making Sir Macca the first musician with year-end No. 1 with two separate acts. The Beatles, of course, achieved the feat twice in 1964 with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and in 1968 with “Hey Jude.”
“The fact is, deep down, people are very sentimental,” McCartney explained. “If they watch a sentimental movie at home, they cry, but in public they won’t. We don’t like to show our emotions; we tend to sneer at that. And in the same way, people may not admit to liking love songs, but that’s what they seem to crave.”