Paul McCartney dies in a helicopter crash in 2012.
At the time, the story that spread was different, just an emergency landing, a scare, no one hurt. In this version, it didn’t end there. The crash happened. The confirmation came hours later, while the world was still trying to process what had just been lost.
This wasn’t just another name. It was one of the last living pillars of The Beatles.
Two years later, in 2014, a posthumous album is released, “Days We Left Behind”.
The material was already there. Paul had been recording demos and near-finished versions in the studio and at home. It wasn’t a closed project, but it was far from rough sketches. The production was kept to a minimum, just organizing, cleaning up the audio and preserving what he left behind.
During the final stages, Ringo Starr was invited to record drums on a few tracks.
He turned it down.
He said it wouldn’t make sense to step into a record that was clearly a personal snapshot of Paul. He chose not to touch anything and wanted the album to remain entirely his, without any symbolic reunion.
Instead, Ringo did something else. He gave interviews, a lot of them, talking about Paul, the songs, how he worked, what it was like to write with him. It wasn’t a traditional promotional push, more like someone trying to give context to what people were hearing.