Songfacts®:

• This emphatic call to arms is a track from McCartney III, an album recorded at Paul McCartney's English home while in lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic. He wrote this song for those gripped with doubts about the future. Speaking with BBC 6 Music interviewer Matt Everitt, McCartney explained that the song's message was about "just reminding myself and anyone listening that, yeah, we better grab the good stuff and... try and get on through the pandemic."
• I don't care to be bad
  I prefer to think twice
  All I know is it's quite a show
  But it's still alright to be nice
  Yankee toes and Eskimos can turn to frozen ice
  
  McCartney wrote the song on piano and started improvising lyrics. He told NME that by the time he got to the line "Yankee toes and Eskimos can turn to frozen ice," he didn't have a clue what he was singing about.
  
  "But it's best not to question too deeply a lyric," McCartney said. "So instead of it making an amazing amount of sense it becomes a little bit surrealistic."
• When the cold days come and the old ways fade away
  There'll be no more sun and we'll wish that we had held on to the day
  Seize the day
  
  Once he got to the chorus, McCartney started singing about "the cold days." That led to a lyric about enjoying the present and not worrying about tomorrow. He told The Sun: "There will be cold days, days that will test us, but we should remember to enjoy this day. Really it's 'carpe diem' but that didn't fit... although I must admit, in one of the demos, I start trying to throw it in!"
• At first, McCartney was concerned the song sounded too much like his old Fab Four material. The former Beatle told Apple Music he wondered whether he should stop what he was doing and come up with something more radical. "The chorus, the descending bassline," he said, "it's very Beatle-y, but you know what? Once you're done that little question and said, 'Should I be doing this?' the answer is, yes, you should. Just embrace this whole thing and have some fun."
• Speaking to Uncut magazine, McCartney compared the writing of this song to following a trail of breadcrumbs leading you out of the woods. "I was in the first verse of 'Seize the Day,'" he said, "and completely at random - it's always random - I came up with, 'Yankee toes and Eskimos.' What's this all about? I like it, but how the hell am I going to get out of this? Where are these breadcrumbs leading? Then out came, 'Can turn to frozen ice.' That's good! Not every day of your life is sunny, so when these cold days come, let's seize the day - hang on to the good times. So it became philosophical, but I didn't set out to write a philosophical song."
• Phoebe Bridgers recorded her own version of the song for III Imagined, a collection of covers, reworked versions and remixes of the McCartney III tracks. McCartney handed each song to the artist, giving them complete freedom to reimagine it; Bridgers' interpretation maintains the original's march tempo but restrains its electric guitars.