Paul McCartney Says Kanye West’s "Only One" Was Inspired By "Let It Be"

Photo by Inez and Vinoodh

In a new interview with The Sun (via Rolling Stone), Paul McCartney revealed that Kanye West‘s McCartney-assisted single “Only One” was inspired by the Beatles‘ “Let It Be”.

Well, more accurately, it was inspired by the story that inspired “Let It Be”. He said:

“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 ’60s 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. … [Kanye] said, ‘I’m going to write a song with my mum.’ So then I sat down at the piano.”

He also compared working with West to working with John Lennon. “When I wrote with John, he would sit down with a guitar. I would sit down. We’d ping-pong till we had a song,” McCartney said. “[Working with Kanye] was like that.”

Here’s “Only One” and “Let It Be”: