At first glance, the lyrics of “Got to Get You Into My Life” hint at a song dedicated to a woman. Perhaps Paul McCartney wrote it for someone he was (allegedly) seeing behind Jane Asher’s back? (They ultimately broke up in 1968 — two years after the song came out.) But no, “Got to Get You Into My Life” isn’t about Macca’s new girl, or any other person, for that matter. Instead, it’s about the sweet leaf.
In the 1997 Barry Miles-written biography “Many Years From Now,” McCartney explained (via Beatles Bible) that despite how it is ostensibly written for a person, “Got to Get You Into My Life” is actually about marijuana, and how he was first introduced to it. “I’d been a rather straight working-class lad but when we started to get into pot it seemed to me to be quite uplifting … I didn’t have a hard time with it and to me it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding,” he said, later on adding, “It’s saying, I’m going to do this. This is not a bad idea. So it’s actually an ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret.”
So there you have it — it’s not as blatant in its support for weed as Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” but it makes perfect sense if you come to think of it.
