Beatles – Two Of Us

I’ve been watching Get Back on Disney Plus and this is one of the songs they have went over. I always thought Two Of Us should have been a single… It’s not slick or full of production…just John and Paul singing together like they did in the early years. It feels like they had come full circle.

Paul McCartney wrote this about enjoying his travels with his wife Linda. The song was on the album Let It Be recorded in January of 1969 but wasn’t released until 1970. It was the last studio album released of the Beatles career but not the last recorded.

After this album The Beatles embarked on recording the classic album Abbey Road in the summer of 1969. As the film Get Back shows…yes they would argue but it was not as bad as we have been led to believe or they would not have recorded Abbey Road. There was also talk of another possible album after Abbey Road but they decided to call it a day.

I always thought The Beatles ended at the right time. They never made a bad album like some other bands. I do think they had a couple of albums left in them but to end a career recording Abbey Road…its hard to top that.

It’s interesting to speculate if they would have got back together if John Lennon would not have been murdered. I don’t think they would have recorded again but I do think Lennon and McCartney would have written together again.

Linda McCartney: As a kid I loved getting lost. I would say to my father – let’s get lost. But you could never seem to be able to get really lost. All signs would eventually lead back to New York or wherever we were staying! Then, when I moved to England to be with Paul, we would put Martha in the back of the car and drive out of London. As soon as we were on the open road I’d say, ‘Let’s get lost’ and we’d keep driving without looking at any signs. Hence the line in the song, ‘Two of us going nowhere’.

Paul wrote ‘Two Of Us’ on one of those days out. It’s about us. We just pulled off in a wood somewhere and parked the car. I went off walking while Paul sat in the car and started writing. He also mentions the postcards because we used to send a lot of postcards to each other.

From Songfacts

Lennon and McCartney sang together on this song, which is something they did a lot in the early years of The Beatles, but not so much later on, when they started writing separately and restricting the lead vocal to whoever wrote the song.

This song is mostly acoustic, with Lennon and McCartney each playing acoustic guitar. George Harrison’s electric guitar is there, but low in the mix. There is no bass on the track.

This appears twice in the Beatles documentary movie Let It Be, first as a duet by John and Paul and then with the whole band.

John Lennon did the whistling on the fade-out.

Two Of Us

Two of us riding nowhere
Spending someone’s hard-earned pay
You and me Sunday driving
Not arriving
On our way back home
We’re on our way home
We’re on our way home
We’re going home

Two of us sending postcards
Writing letters on my wall
You and me burning matches
Lifting latches
On our way back home
We’re on our way home
We’re on our way home
We’re going home

You and I have memories
That stretches out ahead

Two of us wearing raincoats
Standing solo
You and me chasing paper
Getting nowhere
On our way back home
We’re on our way home
We’re on our way home
We’re going home

You and I have memories
That stretches out ahead

Two of us wearing raincoats
You and me chasing paper
Getting nowhere
On our way back home
We’re on our way home
We’re on our way home
We’re going home

We’re going home
Better believe it
Good-bye

Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player.

24 thoughts on “Beatles – Two Of Us”

  1. it’s a catchy tune. Maybe, just maybe, the single most telling feature of their talent is how many excellent songs they had, people know and enjoy, but weren’t even singles. Any band… well, no very FEW bands… can put out a string of excellent singles for seven years. I don’t know any that also had an equal number of “shoulda beens”.
    Very interesting doc as we both expected it to be. Maybe a WEE bit too long, but very cool to see the inside goings on. As I said to you elsewhere, it surprises me now that John and Paul didn’t work together at least off and on in the 70s, seeing how they seemed to still be on good terms here.

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    1. Oh yea….this expanded version is for Beatles nuts….like me lol…. but yea…I guess if you have all of that footage….you might as well use it. It surprises me that they didn’t have an edited version and then this version for the Bluray…

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      2. They have 50 hours lol…I have to wonder if he cleaned it all? He probably did I would think…just for history purposes and further releases.

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    1. Yea I’m in the middle of the 7.8 hours of Get Back…for a Beatles fan…this is like heaven lol. They were so influenced by the Everly Brothers that they took that harmony and ran with it.

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    1. Yea me either…I think he only went back to the Anthology becasue of financial reasons. I do think Lennon and McCartney would have got to together though for some project.

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  4. The song displays the relief felt by McCartney at being able to leave the business troubles with Apple behind and enjoy uncomplicated moments with Linda who he had married on March 12, 1969 six weeks after the song was recorded.

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    1. Yea when Allen Klein came in…the one thing I’m happy about this new film is that it was not all gloom during Let It Be….infact it was for the most part a good atmosphere.

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  5. Paul was big on trying to get back to the roots of The Beatles. For example, his idea for saving the band was to put together a tour within England, possibly under a different name. (Klaatu?) Them choosing to do “One After 909,” which they had written back in the Hamburg days, might have been another (and that one is a hell of a song).

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    1. Yes just popping up at universities and things like that. He did that later with Wings but with the Beatles it would have been mass hysteria.
      They also talked about a giant ship…George said basically…are you kidding me? Two weeks on a boat with no way to get away? I see his point. I agree with One After 909. I wish they would have went to the Cavern and done it with select fans.

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  6. Great track i always thought it was catchy enough to be a single. But we didnt even get long and winding road in the uk! Apple made some appalling non singles choices in 1970 71 in the uk. No imagine. No what is life. No uncle albert. No maybe im amazed. Ive seen an hour or so of the film so far, its like it was only yesterday to me thats how the beatles looked and sounded to me when i was 11, yet it also is bizarrely a lifetime ago..

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    1. I didn’t know that about those singles. That was stupid on Apple/EMI’s part. Lost opportunity.
      The film looks like it was shot yesterday. Peter Jackson did a great job cleaning it up. The look and sound is awesome.

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    1. Mitch this is nirvana for me. Sorry if I tell you more than you want to know….but I was 8 in 1975 and read my first Beatle book not long after…I’ve been reading about 56.5 hours of unseen footage from Let It Be…now that I’m 54 I’m finally being able to see it! Yes to see them interact like this is just so cool.

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    1. To see the songs from scratch… and the background singing to Don’t Let Me Down…wow…yea it didn’t go too well but they saw that.

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