DAN RATHER: Let me ask about one of your new songs. “This One.” About a marriage? PAUL: A relationship, yeah. DAN: And about—not expressing emotions and feelings? PAUL: You get those moments, you know, sort of late at night, or when you’re feeling sort of good, or, I don’t know . . . you think, oh, you know, it’d be great to kind of . . . “I hope I tell her I love her enough,” and a bit of all that. And then you kind of come the morning and you’ve got to get off to the office, [rushed] “Goodbye, love you!” And you know, life’s like that, there’s never kind of enough time to—if you like your parents, for instance—to tell them just what you meant to me. And you always think, well, I’m saving it up. I’ll tell them one day. And what happens with a lot of people, with something like John for instance, getting back to that subject—he died. Um, I was lucky, I—the last few we—months that he was alive, we’d managed to get our relationship back on track and we were talking, we were having real good conversations, we were real nice and friendly. But George actually, uh, didn’t, I don’t think, get his relationship right. I think they were arguing right up until the end, which I’m sure is a source of great sadness to him. And I’m sure, you know, in the feeling of this song, that George was always planning to tell John he loved him. But time ran out. And so that’s what the song is about, you know. It’s that like, there never could be a better moment than this one, you know, now. Take this moment to say—I love you.
[—Paul McCartney interviewed by Dan Rather on 48 Hours (episode aired January 25, 1990)]
