Paul McCartney has admitted he gets “very emotional” listening to ‘Dear Friend’ because he wrote it about John Lennon.

• READ MORE: ‘The Beatles: Get Back’ review: Peter Jackson’s long and winding but utterly unmissable epic

The song was released in 1971 as part of McCartney’s post-The Beatles project Wings. To celebrate the 50th anniversary reissue of their debut album ‘Wild Life’, a Q&A about the record from 2018 has been shared on PaulMcCartney.com.

Speaking about ‘Wild Life and the track ‘Dear Friend’, McCartney revealed that he finds it “very emotional when I listen to it now. I have to sort of choke it back.”

He went on to explain how the track is “me talking to John after we’d had all the disputes about The Beatles break up.

“That lyric: ‘Really truly, young and newly wed’. Listening to that was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s true!’ I’m trying to say to John, ‘Look, you know, it’s all cool. Have a glass of wine. Let’s be cool.’ And luckily we did get it back together, which was like a great source of joy because it would have been terrible if he’d been killed as things were at that point and I’d never got to straighten it out with him.”

He goes on to say that ‘Dear Friend’ was “me reaching out. So, I think it’s very powerful in some very simple way. But it was certainly heartfelt.”

Elsewhere in the interview, McCartney says that Wings was his attempt to “relearn what it is to be in a band.”

“We followed what the early Beatles did which was form a band of people who couldn’t play very well, couldn’t write very well, and just do it a lot until it gets good,” he added.

In other news, McCartney has admitted that Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back documentary changed his perception of The Beatles’ split.

“I’ll tell you what is really fabulous about it, it shows the four of us having a ball,” McCartney told The Sunday Times after watching the film. “It was so reaffirming for me. That was one of the important things about The Beatles, we could make each other laugh.”

He went on to add: “I definitely bought into the dark side of The Beatles breaking up and thought, ‘God, I’m to blame.’ But at the back of my mind there was this idea that it wasn’t like that. I just needed to see proof.”