Etcetera

Etcetera was a Paul McCartney composition, created, according to Paul, for Marianne Faithfull. Paul recorded a demo of the song on August 20, 1968 (during a Mother Nature's Son recording session), but the song was not subsequently recorded or released by either Marianne Faithfull or the Beatles. The August 20 recording was taken away from the studio on that very day, and has never been seen or heard again. McCartney remembered the song as being an inferior effort, and that it was a good thing that it wound up "in some tape bin." Engineer Alan Brown said that it was a beautiful song, though he only heard it twice: when it was recorded, and when it was played back. McCartney's recollections of the song place it in 1966, two years before the demo, leading some to believe that Alan Brown's 1968 comment may have been about a different song or version than the one Paul sent to Marianne Faithfull in 1966. Since the song has been lost for over 40 years, very little evidence remains about it, its subject matter or whether it was good or bad.