Eat At Home

One of five co-written songs on Paul and Linda McCartney’s 1971 album Ram, ‘Eat At Home’ was written about their love of domestic life together.

Linda and I were newly married, with a baby, and we were desperately trying to escape the hurly-burly and just find time to be a family. We were completely cut off on our farm in Scotland, a place I’d bought a few years before but Linda really fell in love with. So we just made our own fun. We drew a lot. We wrote a lot. We inspired each other. Linda took a lot of photographs, and I think Scotland helped her find a new side to her work, moving away from musicians and capturing nature and the everyday of family life.

In 1975 Paul McCartney was asked about the song, and said it was “a plea for home cooking – it’s obscene”. Certainly the lyrics are a barely-disguised come-on, with eating used as a euphemism for sex.

From a musical perspective, ‘Eat At Home’ owes much to the example of Buddy Holly, a huge influence on The Beatles when we were growing up and starting to write our own songs. One of the aspects I rather enjoy is that I modified Buddy Holly’s tendency to mimic a speech hesitation by introducing a sheep’s baa into the phrase ‘eat in be-e-e-e-d’. I was proud of that!

‘Eat At Home’ was released as a single in several European countries in 1971, with ‘Smile Away’ on the b-side. Although not issued in the US or UK, it reached number seven in the Netherlands and eight in Norway.

Wings later performed ‘Eat At Home’ during their Wings Over Europe tour in the summer of 1972.

In the studio

‘Eat At Home’ was recorded under the working title ‘Come On Little Lady’.

The first session took place on 16 October 1970 at CBS Studios in New York. The basic track had Paul McCartney on acoustic guitar, David Spinozza on electric guitar, and Denny Seiwell on drums.

‘Eat At Home’ was completed on 30 March 1971 with seven new overdub tracks. Four were lead vocals, one of which was marked ‘main’ and featured Paul and Linda singing in tandem. The second featured McCartney double-tracking his parts, and the remaining two were by Linda.

The final overdubs were cowbell and two electric guitar parts, though not all made it into the final mix.