He continued: “I remember coming home from the studio the day we heard the news that he died, turning on the TV and seeing people saying, ‘Well, John Lennon was that’, ‘What was he,’ and ‘I remember meeting him then.’ I said to myself “I don’t know, I can’t be one of those people. I can’t just go on TV and say what John was to me.” It was just too deep. I couldn’t put it into words.”
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McCartney said that “once the emotions calmed down a bit,” he could begin the grieving process, and songwriting was key. ‘Here Today’ appeared on 1982’s Tug Of War and in the song, Paul imagines what he would say to his late friend, if he were still alive today. “When I wrote ‘Here Today’, I was in the building that would later become my recording studio and there were only a few empty rooms upstairs. So, I found an empty room, sat on the wooden floor in the corner with my guitar and just started playing the opening chords of the song.”