Paul McCartney Says Kanye West's "Only One" Was Inspired by the Beatles' "Let It Be"

According to Paul McCartney, “Only One,” his collaboration with Kanye West, was inspired by the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” In a conversation with The Sun, the legendary singer-songwriter shed some light on how the story behind the Beatles’ timeless song influenced Kanye’s single, which was written from the perspective of the his late mother Donda West:

“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 further revealed that he and Kanye employed a similar process that McCartney and John Lennon used when they wrote Beatles songs together.

“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.”

Listen to “Let It Be” here.