In late 1980, after John Lennon's assassination, the battle for the title of greatest former Beatle was over, and John Lennon had won in a rout. Yes, Lennon had made some bad decisions in the '72-'73 range, but he had come back strong with Walls and Bridges, and his half of Double Fantasy showed that, if he really put his mind to it, he could still come up with music that really mattered to people. In contrast, George Harrison had gotten off to an incredible start (after a couple of irrelevancies) but was treated as a has-been preachy joke by the end of the decade; Ringo Starr had never been treated as much more than a gimmick and showed little reason to treat him otherwise; and Paul McCartney, well, Paul McCartney had always had the cards stacked against him. After getting slammed for making two solo albums (excuse me, one of them was credited to him and his wife Linda) that had the audacity not to be Beatles albums, Paul then had the nerve to form a new band (Wings) that made music that clearly wasn't as good as what he had done in his previous band, and pretty soon it became a fait accompli that post-Beatles Paul was just a joke. That he then proceeded to lead his new band in making a critical and commercial smash, followed by two more albums that helped turn Wings into one of the most popular bands in the world, was treated as a mere inconvenient blip that had no effect on the accepted narrative; when it turned out that Wings had reached its peak popularity just before punk was about to start to become a thing, and that the band would gradually fade away before breaking up at the end of the 70s, it seemed like the universe had corrected itself and had revealed Paul's post-Beatles output as nothing but insignificant trifles.
In the 1980s, Paul made the mistake of living to see the era of formerly great 60s musicians getting trampled by new technologies and styles that they didn't properly understand, whereas John continued to exist only in the realm of legend and hypotheticals. By the end of the 1980s, a decade in which Paul made a good deal of music that he probably soon wished he hadn't made, the gap between John and Paul in the public perception had only grown; Paul had become a dated relic, someone who existed only to remind people that they didn't like him as much now as they once had, occasional attempts at 'comeback' albums notwithstanding. By the end of the 1990s, McCartney had attempted to reassert himself as somebody who could make music that "mattered," and to some extent people came around to this, but the prevailing consensus attitude on McCartney remained that his post-Beatles career had been a lightweight disappointment.
In the early 21st century, however, the prevailing winds began to shift, and this shift largely became permanent. As the artists who had supplanted Paul in his advanced years began to age themselves, and as some of Lennon's artistic and personality traits that had once seemed noble and free-spirited became troubling, Paul began to move into the same sort of rarified air occupied by The Rolling Stones, as carriers of a flame lit decades earlier that refused to go out despite many chances along the way. The question of "Does McCartney's music even mean anything" became paired, more and more, with the question of "Does McCartney's music even need to mean anything," and as this happened, the indisputable truth emerged that Paul McCartney's cumulative post-Beatles output exceeded the cumulative post-Beatles output of each of his fellow former Beatles, including John Lennon. No, he wasn't great in the ways that allowed Lennon (or, in the great burst that was All Things Must Pass, Harrison) to reach greatness, but on the other hand, Lennon wasn't great in the ways that made McCartney great either. He was maddeningly inconsistent, yes, but when McCartney's creative engines as a tunesmith and as an arranger were firing on all cylinders, post-Beatles McCartney could be just about as great as Beatles McCartney was, even if all he wanted to do was, in his words, fill the world with silly love songs. Solo Paul McCartney (plus Wings, which I am including on this page because it's not like this was Denny Laine's band) gets a **** rating (the same as John Lennon), dammit, and if that doesn't make me a serious connoisseur of rock music, then I didn't want to be in your crappy club for jerks anyway.
Best song: Maybe I'm Amazed
Well, I've come to really like this, and I'm glad that the general consensus eventually swung hard back in favor of this. It's not for nothing that I mentioned Self Portrait, which I also like a lot; even if the two albums are different in many ways, they're both albums where their respective makers found themselves in a state of quiet reflection during their creation, and where both of their respective makers were more interested in using these albums as a way to work out some things in their heads than in making new masterpieces (of course it is worth noting that Dylan made Self Portrait for the express purpose of getting people to stop worshiping him, while McCartney was somewhat blindsided by the reaction this album received). At the time, the idea of purposefully making an understated and underdeveloped album was somewhat foreign to the world of rock music (for instance, Plastic Ono Band didn't come out until 8 months after this one), and people just assumed that if an album was underdeveloped it was either due to laziness or drugs or some combination thereof (for instance, I've seen people compare this, both positively and negatively, to Smiley Smile, and that comparison strikes me as insane; it's much more comparable to Wild Honey or Friends). Nowadays, though, we live in a world where indie-rock is a recognizable genre, and McCartney works, at the very least, as a rough forebearer to that general world (maybe not as one of the more significant forebearers, but as a forebearer nonetheless).
For all of this album's reputation for semi-finished high quality numbers, it also has one song, "Maybe I'm Amazed," that stands well with any of Paul's late-period Beatle anthems. Maybe it could have benefited from another Beatle throwing in different guitar parts to counter Paul's rougher approach, and maybe it would have benefited a good deal from George Martin production, but nonetheless it's memorable and rousing and charming all at once, and I kinda like the way it ultimately collapses into just the descending organ line. It was a major hit on an album that really needed a major hit to make it so people couldn't ignore the album even if they wanted to.
Aside from the presence of the hit on the second half, the two sides of this album strike me as pretty similar in overall quality and in feel, as well as in the relative proportion of proper songs and instrumentals. The opening "The Lovely Linda" is a short trifle, but it's a nice short trifle, and I feel like, if he'd written a slightly different version of the song and ended the side with it (like what he did on the first half of Venus and Mars), it would be regarded more highly. Beyond that, the side has two instrumentals: "Valentine Day" is a 1:45 jam-like snippet with Paul layering acoustic, electric, and bass guitars over a drum track (this track is raw but absolutely dripping with personality), and "Hot as Sun/Glasses" starts as a less raw acoustic/bass/drums number with a delightful organ part before turning into 40 seconds of Paul creating an eerie dream atmosphere by playing wineglasses before an out-of-context unrelated song snippet comes bouncing in. In terms of songs, "That Would Be Something" has only one simple verse and a bunch of low-key scatting and little flourishes to flesh it out, yet even if it's just an expanded fragment it's such a fascinating fragment that I don't mind it at all; "Every Night" is an absolutely delightful bit of pop-rock with acoustic guitar parts that can play in my head forever if they want to (there's a rising one in the verses in particular that I really love); "Junk" (which dates back to the sessions for The Beatles) is quiet and beautiful even if it's not about something "profound" (it's about random objects that were once considered important but now are being sold as junk in a yard sale; I would note that this isn't that different a topic from, say, the later King Crimson song "Dig Me"); and "Man We Was Lonely" has Paul in full-fledged Wings granny music mode already, but I think it's a delightful example of that mode. All in all, this is a really delightful side of music, even if it's not one of full of deep heartfelt serious statements.
On the second side, aside from "Maybe I'm Amazed," the songs are "Oo You," with Paul rocking out as much as he reasonably can when it's just him by himself (that is, it doesn't rock out that much, but I find the effort charming), and "Teddy Boy," a lightweight acoustic number with a descending chorus that I find irresistible; in a certain sense these aren't much, and yet in another sense they're everything they need to be. Among the instrumentals, the closing "Kreen-Akore" is a bit of a dud (it's big loud guitar sounds with Paul drumming aimlessly), but "Singalong Junk" is every bit as nice as its sung counterpart is, and so help me I absolutely love "Momma Miss America," featuring a combination of barroom piano and and a fantastic bassline, with some bits of guitar glazed on top for texture (before turning into a different guitar-based jam in the second half, culminating in some delightful wooshes up and down the piano). This one in particular interests me because I can't help but hear a sneak preview for "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five" from a few years later, but it works great in a standalone sense as well.
Would it have been better for the world if the best tracks from here had been combined with the best tracks that the others were doing in 1970, allowing Paul's contributions to be part of yet another super-album? Perhaps, and yet I don't want the hypothetical of what this album could have been a part of to stand in the way of how charming and interesting and enjoyable it is. I wouldn't necessarily start with this when getting into Paul's solo career, of course; as quickly became apparent, this kind of stripped down approach would not be at all typical of his career, and it's possible that you could get the wrong idea about where Paul was going the same way so many other people got the wrong idea in 1970. I certainly wouldn't avoid it for very long, though.
Best song: so hard to choose
Time heals all wounds, though, and I'm here to proclaim that this album emphatically and unambiguously rules. For a long time I somewhat resisted coming to this conclusion: I certainly liked it, but I couldn't get beyond the idea that, at its core, this was too lightweight and too lacking in real substance to merit consideration as a great album. Once I finally got around to giving this serious listens, though, I couldn't help but find my admiration going up and up; this may be "just" a pop album, with a vast imbalance in the emphasis given to the melodies and arrangements vs the lyrics, but if so it's one of the greatest pop albums I've ever had the chance to study closely. It may not "mean" anything, and there's nothing gritty or sleazy or violent or agitated or horny about it, but it sucks me in all the same, and my admiration and enjoyment of the songs is so complete that it rouses me every bit as much as an album with more "substance" in typical ways could.
The opening "Too Many People" provides an effective illustration of how this album succeeds on its own terms while not giving heed to terms others would set for it. Nominally, it's a protest song, but it's also one where the lyrics are so silly that they have no real bite, and in the hands of a lesser tunesmith and a lesser arranger the lyrics would doom this song to mediocrity. And yet, the song is amazing: the verse melody is lightweight fun, but the rising melody to "That was your first mistake ..." is SPECTACULAR, and the arrangements, full of dreamy guitars (turning into a guitar frenzy in the last minute) with touches of horn here and there, are absolutely on par with something on a typical Paul song from Abbey Road. An argument I've sometimes seen is that this song exemplifies what would have happened with "Yesterday" had Paul stuck with his original stand-in lyrics about scrambled eggs (the argument here is that Paul's neglect of coming up with lyrics that resonate in a way that lyrics are supposed to resonate with people ends up undermining his songs), and I suppose there's some truth to that, but at the same time I'm much more likely to be in the mood for this one than for "Yesterday" (not because "Yesterday" is overplayed, but just because I think this is a clearly better song), so I'm not especially persuaded.
Picking out my favorites for this album is an excruciating and impossible task. Some days, I feel like it might indeed be "Too Many People," if only for that amazing hook in the chorus. Some days, it's "Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey," a set of incomplete song ideas crammed together that starts as a mournful and impeccably arranged ballad (about nonsense), has a delightful bridge over a flugelhorn (courtesy of Marvin Stamm), and then turns into one of the most fun ending sections I can think of with the "hands across the water, hands across the sky" parts. Some days, it's "Smile Away," a silly stomping rocker with Paul at his catchiest and at his best as a yelling sorta-rocker. Some days, it's "Heart of the Country," an acoustic silly ditty that could have fit in perfectly on The Beatles and that has one of his best scat-vocal performances in his high pitched mode. Some days it's "Monkberry Moon Delight," a song that's complete raving nonsense lyrically but builds a great memorable tune around a nagging guitar/keyboards (I'm not actually totally sure what that is) line and a vocal part that leans into the track's nonsense while still being catchy as can be. Some days it's "Long Haired Lady," which starts with maybe the one bit of the album that still annoys me (the ear piercing vocal from Linda in response to Paul's rising "Well well well well well," which returns later in the song) but completely makes up for it with the rest of the song, from the gentle and intricate verse melody and low-key guitar arrangements to the spectacular coda featuring Linda's voice with Paul's voice and a trumpet and a piano and other things swirling around it. And sometimes it's the closing "The Back Seat of My Car," which starts as a quiet and pensive guitar ballad and explodes into a giant anthem that leaves me singing along loudly even if I know everything about the song (and to an extent everything that came before it) is a giant put-on. What can I say, the harmonies and the arrangements in this one are spellbinding.
The other songs might not be on the list of ones that I'd consider my potential favorite, but I still like them a lot all the same. "3 Legs" is a stripped down countryish song that sounds a lot like something that might have been on McCartney, and it's lots of fun, both in the main portion and in the silly bluesy stomp that emerges in the last 30 seconds. "Ram On" (and its reprise) is absolutely lovely, if slight, with some fun vocal-trumpeting and whistling, and Paul made the right choice to perform it with a ukulele (it's too delicate to merit a full-fledged guitar). "Dear Boy" is a disdainful piano-based number about Linda's former husband (people assumed it was about the other Beatles but they were wrong) which passes quickly but is essential to the album, and finally, "Eat at Home" is a catchy-as-hell retro guitar-rocker extolling the virtues of being a homebody (it immediately drew comparisons to Buddy Holly, which are not unfounded) that may not be a highlight for me but was a highlight for a lot of people (even John Lennon admitted to liking it).
For a long time, I went the route with Paul that many go, regarding Band on the Run as his undisputed peak and this as a reasonable inclusion to his top 5 but not much more than that. Well, at this point, all I can say is that life is too short to love The Beatles, especially late-period Beatles, while putting down Ram, even if "putting it down" in this case means putting it in the B+/A- range. The approach of "worry about melodies and arrangements and let substance happen as it may" would often let Paul down in his solo and Wings efforts, but in this case it succeeded as well as it possibly could have. This album is essential.
Best song: Dear Friend
The juxtaposition between the mastery of Ram and the mediocrity of Wild Life fascinates me, because in a way it's an excellent example of a fundamental difficulty with Paul's post-Beatles career: the line between great pop music and mediocre pop music can be perilously thin. In taking inventory of this album in my mind, I can't help but notice that some of the attributes I would use to damn this album have a lot in common with attributes I would use to praise the last two albums. For instance, on McCartney, the lack of polish and finishing on some of the tracks gives the album a spontaneous and cozy feel; on Wild Life, the lack of polishing and finishing on some of the tracks makes the album feel sloppy (many of the tracks here are from their first take, which was probably meant to help the album but ends up hurting it). On Ram, the de-emphasis of lyrical sophistication allows the tunes and the arrangements and the vocal deliveries to stand out in a fascinating way; on Wild Life, the de-emphasis of lyrical sophistication makes the album feel utterly insignificant. These albums serve to emphasize that, in pop music, so much of what makes an album seem good or bad comes down to nebulous concepts such as "inspiration" and "genius," and while post-Beatles Paul had enough inspiration and genius to create some truly outstanding material, these traits would frequently abandon him, and thus his career from here on out would be one of maddening inconsistency. In this sense, Paul from this point onward could best be compared with somebody like Prince; not in terms of style, of course, but in terms of how his lesser output could leave one baffled as to how his better output was possible, and vice versa.
The album nominally has 10 tracks, but practically speaking it has 8 tracks ("Bip Bop Link" and "Mumbo Link" are short instrumental variations on earlier tracks, and are utterly insignificant), and it's a pretty uninspiring collection of material. On the first side, the most notable inclusion is a five-minute reggae cover of "Love is Strange" (originally by Mickey and Sylvia, and covered by Buddy Holly), which is most interesting for how the introduction goes so long that it tricks the listener into thinking it will be an instrumental before the vocals come in, but at best it's a mild curiosity. Otherwise, the side consists of "Mumbo," a silly jam with half-improvised lyrics that is a screamy mess; "Bip Bop," a silly country groove with more nonsense lyrics and an odd singing style that at least has a really fun bass part; and the title track, which is inexplicably seven minutes and never manages to go beyond "kinda sorta ok."
At least the second half is better. "Some People Never Know" should definitely not last 6:35, but it's a gentle and memorable and sentimental ballad all the same, and the instrumental break about two minutes in with Denny's guitar and Paul's guitar playing in tandem is absolutely terrific. "I Am Your Singer" would have been a mistake had it lasted four minutes, but at 2:13 it's a good enough combination of atmosphere, an interesting tune and a very hippie-ish recorder to make me enjoy it. "Tomorrow" is Paul's one Granny Music indulgence on the album, and it's a nice one, especially in the way the coda staggers its way to the conclusion. And finally, "Dear Friend" may not have technically been a response to John Lennon's "How Do You Sleep?" from Imagine (Paul originally wrote and recorded it during the Ram sessions), but his decision to release it on this album was almost certainly at least influenced by that one, and I'm glad he did, because it's a fine closer. It's a six-minute mournful piano ballad, with Paul staying in his upper register and hitting some high notes that sound super sad in context, and while it might have gotten across its point in a shorter time, the combination of memorability and the expression of pain behind a minimalist facade (there are some orchestral and brass arrangements to fluff it up here and there, but the song is primarily just Paul and his piano) is enough for the song to hit me whenever I listen to it.
Still, a pretty decent second half isn't able to save the album when the first half provides such a poor impression, and ultimately I can't give the album more than a mediocre grade. Still, the album's reputation for being flat-out bad strikes me as overstated; it was the worst album he'd yet been a part of in his career, yes, but there's no need to go too far. Some tracks are worth hearing, but don't put too much effort into looking for it.
Best song: Little Lamb Dragonfly
A good amount of the hatred this album receives emanates from the disdain that "My Love" often receives (a comparison that comes to my prog-addled brain is how people dismiss the Genesis album Duke solely because they hate "Misunderstanding"), and while I can understand disliking it and considering it a schlocky bore, I like the climactic hook of "My love does it good / *wordless whoa sounds* / My love does it good" enough to forgive its more syrupy aspects. Plus it has a solo from McCullough that is quite nice and shows he had his own style to contribute (which he unfortunately didn't get to show much while in the band), and it helps bring the song beyond the prom ballad epithet that's often attached to it. I don't consider it a great song, but I definitely think that the hatred it received from so many people was yet another example of people looking hard for things in McCartney's music about which they could mock him (and certainly looking harder in his music for such things than in Lennon's music or Harrison's music, at least to this point).
Beyond "My Love," the album has its fair share of material that is a good distance from the greatness associated with Paul at his best, yet I have difficulty getting myself to have any strong negative feelings towards any of them. I mean, am I really supposed to work up a lot of hatred towards "One More Kiss" (a gentle country ballad with nice subtle guitar parts woven around the vocals), or "Single Pigeon" (a solo piano number that McCartney probably could have done in his sleep but is full of charm and lasts less than two minutes)? I guess "When the Night" is a little lumbering (the call-and-forth between Paul and the backing vocals isn't very inspired) in the main portion, but the melody in the "... The way you made my senses reel? / I fell in love and now I feel / Like I will never go" is one I've always enjoyed, so I'm not going to throw this one away either. I'm also not going to throw away the more rocking "Big Barn Bed" or "Get on the Right Thing" either; in a sense they're similar to something like "Mumbo" from the previous album, but they're more memorable and tightly constructed than that one was, and I find myself enjoying them whenever they come on even if they're both essentially meaningless.
That leaves three tracks, and I enjoy all three plenty. "Little Lamb Dragonfly" was initially treated generally as one more example of the album being too light and fluffy for its own good, but over time the general assessment of it has become much more favorable, and I'm glad for it. It's not immediately clear what the song is about, or if it's about anything in particular, but the song is breathtaking regardless, with two main sections (the "Little Lamb" section and the "Dragonfly" section) that are each terrific in their own right and that ultimately interact with each other like two animals playing with each other in a field. When McCartney sings in the "since you've gone" parts, in particular, he's absolutely in peak form as a singer and as a tunesmith, and if you can't feel any goosebumps in those moments at least then I don't know what to tell you.
The other two tracks don't generally get a lot of love, but again, I'm totally on board with them, so long as I remember that it's ok for solo Paul to be 80% as good as Beatles Paul. "Loup (1st Indian on the Moon)" is a 4-minute instrumental that strikes many as pointless wankery, but I think the interplay between the bass and the percussion is fascinating, and the way the mellotron and guitars and whatever else pop in and out can't help but prick up my ears every time. And finally, the album ends with the 11-minute "Medley" that is 100% Paul trying to make a successor to the Abbey Road medley, and while I certainly don't feel like this track gets to that level, I also find the way that people take a pass/fail approach to this track, where a "pass" was only possible if it lived up to its predecessor, a little disingenuous. None of "Hold Me Tight," "Lazy Dynamite," "Hand of Love," or "Power Cut" would have been especially remarkable had they been fleshed out into individual songs, but I'll be damned if I don't find myself smiling and bobbing my head along happily as I hear Paul singing banalities like "Hold me tight / hug me right" or "Baby I love you so / Be I love you so / Be I love you so" and shifting from one section to another with reprises appearing at ideal times. It's just such a fun blend of arrangements and such a nice collection of melodies that I find hatred of this baffling; if the Abbey Road medley was an A+, then this is somewhere around a B, which might be disappointing relative to misplaced expectations but is a long way from an F.
No, this may not be anywhere close to a great album, but for the life of me I cannot find a justification to hate this album that doesn't involve wanting to re-litigate Paul's role in disbanding The Beatles. This album is just pop music, but it's pop music made during a period when Paul's creativity (fickle as it often was) was at least sporadically working at a high level, and that's enough for me to consider it a good album. If nothing else, hunt down "Little Lamb Dragonfly" and bask in its sheer positive uplifting goodness.
Best song: Band On The Run or Nineteen Hundred And Eighty-Five
The resulting album, Band on the Run, is typically held up as both the best in the career of Wings and as the best post-Beatles album involving Paul McCartney, and while I'm definitely on board with the first, I can't quite get there with the second, even if I enjoy this album to pieces and consider it very strong. With this album, McCartney found a way to merge his core artistic approach with the world of 70s arena rock (even if the way it was recorded had a lot in common with his pre-Wings albums), which turned out to suit him well, and yet there's just a bit of coldness and distance that I feel towards this album that I don't feel towards the more intimate approach of Ram. This doesn't especially affect my feelings towards any of the particular songs, but when I consider the album as a whole in my mind, this coldness is present just enough to nudge it down from the tier that I now consider Ram to belong to without any doubt.
When I listen to the album, I also can't help but notice that this album suffers a bit from Who's Next syndrome, in that my attention is disproportionately drawn to the very beginning and end while considering much of what's in the middle as relatively second tier. And that's not to say I dislike these tracks! I think all of them are good to great in their own way, full of interesting melodies and clever arrangements, and I enjoy them all in the context of the album and when they appear in a shuffle context. And yet, at this point I think the one I enjoy the most is the one that for years I typically forgot was even there; "No Words," by far the shortest song of the album at 2:35, and very much a lightweight McCartney song at its heart, has such a fantastic arrangement of the guitars (both in the main breaks and in the solo that fades things out) that it grabs me every time in a similar way to the songs on Ram that I grew to love so much.
Among the others, it's hard for me to pick between them; I suppose that my favorites in the bunch are "Bluebird" (it's impossible not to draw instant comparisons to "Blackbird," but the song is completely different from its predecessor, largely courtesy of the calypso percussion that instantly evokes walking along a beach (there's speculation that he originally wrote it while on vacation in Jamaica and I totally believe it)) and "Let Me Roll It" (which largely sounds like McCartney subconsciously attempting a Lennon song, mostly in terms of the guitar playing and the singing, and totally pulling it off while also creating a great song in its own right), but if I have criticisms of the others it's only on things around the edges. "Mrs. Vandebilt" is effortlessly memorable nonsense with a great bridge leading into the saxophone solo, and while I feel it could have been exactly as good of a song had it lasted 3:40 instead of 4:40 that's not really as much of a knock as it sounds. "Mamunia" is essentially Paul's low-key upbeat answer to "Rain," and while it doesn't seem like it does much for much of its run time, I also can't help but notice the rush up my spine at the line "You've never felt the rain my friend / Till you've felt it running down your back," so it's a keeper. "Helen Wheels" (named after a Land Rover that Paul and Linda owned) wasn't originally part of the album (it was added for the US release and is on all CD releases), and it doesn't especially feel like it belongs, but it's still a delightful slab of glam-pop that weirdly reminds me of an update of the car songs that The Beach Boys did for about a year in the early 60s. And finally, "Picasso's Last Words (Drink to Me)" is a delightful acoustic number in the main song portion (the story goes that Paul improvised the song during a visit with Dustin Hoffman), though I'm still not 100% sure I love the collage of themes from the rest of the album that follows it. I suppose this is meant to help give the album a greater sense of cohesion and epic sweep, but it feels oddly unnecessary to me.
Ah well, in the grand scheme of things, it's ultimately the other tracks that matter most. The opening title track finds Paul once again trying his hand at a medley, and if there was any ambiguity as to how good the medley that closed the previous album was, there's no ambiguity here. The opening ballad portion, centered around guitar and synthesizer, is slow and breathtaking; the brief middle gritty funk-rock section (with more heavy use of synthesizer winding over the descending main riff) is intense and a great table-setter; and then, after one of the greatest transition sections in the history of rock music (the part with the rising horns and guitars), we come to the main part, as epic of an up-beat country song as there ever has been. In one sense, the song is just about being on the run from the law because of pot, but in a broader sense, it's about a broader need to escape from constraints in general, whether societal or artistic, and it's one where I'm absolutely guaranteed to sing along at full blast if I'm in the car by myself.
"Jet" is another great one, and as the first single released from the album (initially Paul didn't want any singles, but it turned out the album sold tepidly without them, so he gave in) it bears a lot of the credit for this album selling as well as it did and helping save McCartney's reputation. Lyrically, there's not much to the song; at one point McCartney said it was about his dog, while later he said it was named after a pony he had owned, and either way there's not much to say about them. Musically, though, it's an absolute pop powerhouse, with the song's guitar/bass/drums core supplemented amazingly with a droning Moog chord and bits of effective saxophone, and whether it’s the simple chorus of "Jet! Ooooh-ooooh-oooh" or the more involved verse melody, the song is instantly grabbing to a degree I can't help but respect immensely. For a long time, this was actually my favorite Wings song by a good distance, and while it doesn't quite reach that point anymore, it still ranks really high for me.
Ultimately, though, it's the closing track that defines the album most for me, or at least every bit as much as the title track does. "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five" (a name that I have to imagine was picked to loosely evoke feelings about "1984" even though the lyrics do nothing to suggest as much) might well be the best song post-Beatles McCartney ever did, gibberish lyrics or no, creating a feeling of grandiose unease throughout thanks to the descending piano line that propels the song forward, with slower wordless vocal breaks popping in from time to time to scale back the tension just a bit. By the end, the song becomes an unstoppable force of runaway intensity, with arrangement details appearing seemingly at random but always seeming to make sense in the context of a whole (Why the random clarinet part? Why not the random clarinet part?!), before the song crashes into a giant horn-prominent orchestrated flourish that in turn gives way to the final section of the title track. It's stunning, and it's almost enough to make me agree with the masses who rate this as McCartney's post-Beatles peak.
Even if I can't get there, though, I can get most of the way, and if for whatever reason you've never heard this album, you really owe it to yourself to do so. If nothing else, this is the one time that I can see a confirmed post-Beatles McCartney hater making an exception and enjoying a post-Beatles McCartney album, and hell, I could even somebody who dislikes The Beatles, for whatever reason, enjoying this. And if you don't like this, well, I have lots of other pages you could be reading instead.
Best song: Listen To What The Man Said
I've always liked this album a lot, and if I don't like it as much as I like Band on the Run, then I probably like it about 90% as much. There's an ease and a quiet confidence to the material that I've always found very appealing; when I listen to this album, I feel like the band knows exactly who and what it is, without feeling any need to justify its existence or respond to external critique, and over the years I've found that this is part of why I've found myself in the mood to listen to this much more frequently than I've felt in the mood to listen to Band on the Run, even if as a whole I prefer that one. This album doesn't quite reach the spectacular peaks of its predecessor, but it's super consistent, and the various songs feel like they naturally belong together to a greater degree here than on that album. This one is sometimes dismissed essentially as Band on the Run + New Orleans, but I feel like that's an unfair oversimplification.
The first half begins with the title track, a lovely short acoustic snippet with a delicate synth on top and an achingly beautiful vocal melody, before breaking without pause into "Rock Show," a song that's much more about rocking than it is actually committed to the cause of rocking, but that has so much charm that I'm able to forgive how absolutely dorky it is at its core. What can I say, it might be a bit of a joke, but it's a joke with some great riffs and silly lyrics alluding to seeing performances at various famous venues, and I enjoy it a lot every time. "Love in Song," which follows, may in turn be about melancholy love balladry as much as it is an actual melancholy love ballad, and yet there's so much delicate mystery about it that I can forgive it for being somewhat of a put-on. The oft-maligned "You Gave Me the Answer" may indeed just be another bit of granny music a la "When I'm Sixty-Four" or "Honey Pie," but it's done oh so well, with the production treated so as to make it sound like something from the 20s, and dagnabbit I'm forever a sucker for the combination of the clarinet and the low-key sad lyrics "I love you and you you seem to like me." "Magneto and Titanium Man" may be the dorkiest song on an album not short of dorky songs, and who knows if the lyrics are a metaphor or are meant to be taken literally (I like a suggested interpretation I've seen where the song is about the other Beatles not accepting Linda as the new most important person in Paul's life), yet these dorky lyrics are delivered with such self-assurance that they make me admire the song more than I might if it was more clearly profound, and I like the song quite a bit. And finally, closing out the first side, "Letting Go" is a fine dark brass-heavy rocker, especially in those great instrumental breaks where the guitars and the saxophones combine into a single menacing force.
The second side strikes as roughly equal to the first in quality, though it also has some wrinkles not yet seen in the context of Wings. After a 2-minute reprise of the opening title track to start things off, we have two songs in a row with somebody other than Paul taking lead vocals: "Spirits of Ancient Egypt" features Denny, and "Medicine Jar" features Jimmy (who wrote the song with Colin Allen, marking one of the very few times that a Wings song wasn't written by Paul). "Spirits of Ancient Egypt" isn't amazing, but it has a dark exotic feel that doesn't feel especially tacky, and I like the way the chorus initially serves as a soothing respite before turning in an intense direction itself. And "Medicine Jar," well, that one just unreservedly rocks; the lyrics may once again be dorky, yet I still love the line "Dead on your feet you won't get far / If you keep on sticking your hand in the medicine jar," and the rhythm section is a propulsive beast here.
If the album has a clear misstep, it's "Call Me Back Again," a 5-minute blues/soul/gospel number where Paul tries to tap into a younger version of himself vocally but doesn't quite get there; I don't hate it, but I could easily understand where somebody could consider it an embarrassment. Fortunately, the album immediately redeems itself with my absolute favorite of the batch; "Listen to What the Man Said" is pure pop with not a drop of rock in sight, with an amazing blend of a memorable guitar riff and playful saxophone work, and the vocal melody is as perfect as anything else he wrote post-Beatles. It's slick to a degree that might easily sicken somebody who demands grit and authenticity in their rock music, and yet it is so intoxicating that I can't come within a hundred miles of even considering disliking it. From there, the album rounds out with "Treat Her Gently / Lonely Old People," a bombastic pair of incomplete ballad ideas superglued together into top-notch nostalgia pop, and a brief cover of the theme to a British soap opera called "Crossroads," which I have to imagine made the album even more of a target for jokes than it would have been otherwise, yet which seems like the only proper way to end the album.
In a certain sense, I absolutely get the idea (which I've read multiple times) that this album was a major inspiration for punk rock (in the sense that people heard this album and decided rock music needed to be saved from albums like this); as much as I enjoy it, there's a whiff of slick inauthenticity to much of the album, much more so than even with Band on the Run, that puts this album at odds with the quintessential primary purposes of rock music. And yet, I just can't let myself be bothered by this too much; most rock music is inauthentic beyond a certain point, and McCartney's main crime here (and elsewhere in his solo career) is not bothering to make the effort to apply the facade of authenticity that the "rules" said he was supposed to apply. It's such a memorable and fun and well-crafted album that I'm willing to forgive that it's transparently just an entertainment product, and I would heartily recommend it to anybody who enjoys Band on the Run but somehow hasn't heard this one.
Best song: Beware My Love
McCartney isn't in consistently peak form himself, either. The closing piano ballad "Warm and Beautiful" crosses the line from "simple genius" to "simple banality" and might well be the worst song Paul sang in the 70s; the level of sap quickly becomes unbearable, and there's simply not enough in the way of interesting melody to compensate. Elvis Costello apparently really liked it, and I could actually envision this getting reworked into an interesting ballad in his hands, but in this context it just doesn't work. Elsewhere, "She's My Baby" and "San Ferry Anne" may not be immediately offensive, but they're so lightweight that they just float away without leaving any permanent impression, aside from the nice bits of trumpet in the latter.
For all of this album's flaws, though, it has three songs (sadly loaded into the first six songs of the album; the end of the album is kind of a slog) that are so great that I can at least somewhat forgive my irritation with the rest of the album. "Let 'Em In" is utterly insignificant lyrically, but the piano line and the vocal melody and the horns and the flutes are absolutely irresistible, making this another one of Paul's triumphs of form over substance. "Silly Love Songs," Paul's defiant protest against the idea that his songs could only have value if they had social value, is great Great GREAT, from the assembly line opening sounds (Jeff Blehar has suggested this is an homage to "Money" by Pink Floyd and I completely agree), to the main vocal melody, to the simple "I love you" chorus, to the horn breaks, to the terrific vocal arrangement (especially in the second half), and if somebody considers a bad song then I just don't know what to say. But the peak, the one that should convince even the hardest cynic of post-Beatles Paul, is "Beware My Love," which lulls the listener with a calm and moody intro (first in the keyboards, then turning into a restrained acoustic ballad) only to turn into an absolutely scorching rocker, with McCartney convincingly screaming his head off (and laying down terrific bass lines with the pounding drums) and McCulloch using his hard wah-wahs like a flame-thrower. Plus, it actually earns its 6:30; around 5:30 it starts to feel like it should be winding down, but the band finds a second gear and the song is able to go another minute without feeling like it overstayed its welcome.
Unfortunately, three great songs and a mish-mash of decency and crap do not a great (or even especially good!!) album make. The best songs here are worth hearing on a regular basis, and some of the rest is worth coming back to once in a while, but as far as the album as a whole, try and get it cheap if at all.
Best song: lol
I personally find (a) somewhat of a silly argument; this may have been on the long end for a live album back in the 1970s, but today in 2019 (when I'm writing this), when full concert live archives (and new full concert live albums) for all sorts of acts I enjoy get released on a regular basis, this objection strikes me as awfully quaint. As for (b), well, there's something to that; the album draws heavily from the three most recent Wings albums (Band on the Run, Venus and Mars, Wings at the Speed of Sound), and while the performances aren't strictly carbon copies of their studio counterparts, they don't stretch very far either. The album is at its most interesting when it dips into non-album singles, old Beatles songs, and surprising Denny-sung covers, and I'll discuss each of these in brief:
* Non-album singles: The biggest inclusion here is of course the fantastic "Live and Let Die," the enormous single (and James Bond theme) released between Red Rose Speedway and Band on the Run, with one of Paul's most oft-mocked misheard lyrics (it's "in this ever-changing world in which we're living," not "in this ever-changing world in which we live in") and with an over-the-top horn-driven orchestrated break that's only somewhat successfully replicated here (though the attempt is charming). Much later, the set ends with "Hi, Hi, Hi," a delightful 1972 boogie rocker with smutty lyrics, and "Solly," a lumbering 1971 up-tempo rocker that doesn't kick as much ass as it thinks it does but is still a lot of fun.
* Old Beatles songs: "Lady Madonna" and "The Long and Winding Road" make appearances (I'm guessing that McCartney's on piano for each), and later on, in an acoustic set, McCartney bangs out "I've Just Seen a Face," "Blackbird," and "Yesterday" in a way that must have made everybody present feel like they were on cloud nine. There's nothing particularly special about any of these performances other than that they're the first officially released live recordings of these songs, but that's enough to make them at least somewhat special.
* Surprising covers: Denny breaks out a decent cover of "Richard Cory," a Paul Simon song originally from Sounds of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel, but much more surprising than this is the revival of "Go Now," which Denny had made famous back when he was with the first incarnation of The Moody Blues. In a certain sense these two performances don't fit in the show at all ("Richard Cory" is sandwiched between a brief snippet of "Picasso's Last Words (Drink to Me)" and "Bluebird," while "Go Now" is sandwiched by "Magneto and Titanium Man" and "My Love"), but they're so at odds with all of the rest the material that I find them rather delightful.
As for the rest, I won't say that I find the track listing ideal (nothing from Ram and only "Maybe I'm Amazed" from McCartney isn't surprising but I'm not thrilled), but overall I consider these perfectly acceptable alternate versions of songs that, for the most part, I either like or love. If nothing else, it has all of the great Speed of Sound songs (and a good one in "Time to Hide") and none of the bad, and thus one could make the case for skipping that one entirely in favor of this one if they wanted. Maybe this album isn't "necessary" from a certain point of view, but I definitely like it when versions from this album (especially of "Silly Love Songs," "Beware My Love," or the opening "Venus and Mars / Rock Show / Jet" medley) pop up during shuffle. Unless you have an allergy to live albums that aren't clearly important, this is absolutely worth getting at some point.
Best song: London Town or Deliver The Children
Personally, I have a lot of mixed feelings about this album. This album is definitely much more consistent than Wings at the Speed of Sound; it doesn't hit quite the same highs, but it doesn't have anything like the hideous lows of that album, so that's something. When I go through the track listing, I find that I basically like all of the individual songs on here, and yet I always feel underwhelmed when I consider it as a whole. Part of the problem is the length; Paul (and Denny, who co-wrote a whopping 5 songs here) didn't have enough material for a double album, but at 14 tracks and 51 minutes it's too long to work as a low-key single album. In regards to general approach, it's actually a much more adventurous and experimental album than its reputation suggests, but somehow almost all of this adventure and experimentation gets directed into mellow pop music that makes me feel sedate more than anything else. In short, it's an album that I end wanting to like more than I actually like, and while I don't want to join the forces of people who dismiss it just because "Soft Rock!!11!!" I don't really have the enthusiasm to muster a strong argument against them.
On the first half, the opening title track is the highlight, combining a sedate but memorable melody with lyrics about how nice London seems to be but how frustrating it is to not make real connections in such a big city, and while it seems almost trite to compare the horn parts here to those on "Penny Lane," it's a comparison that's unavoidable (and meant as a compliment). Beyond that, "Cafe on the Left Bank" is a decent up-tempo song with a very late 70s feel in the guitars and keyboards; "I'm Carrying" is a touching acoustic ballad (with overdubs to make it sound like he's playing a harp); the "Backwards Traveler"/"Cuff Link" medley is a novel combination of songs ("Backwards Traveler" last a minute and sounds like a spacier version of something from late 60s Beach Boys, not least because of the brief allusion to "Here Today," while "Cuff Link" is two minutes and provides a glimpse into the future of McCartney's keyboard experiments, as he makes a Moog sound like a sitar); "Children Children" is a gentle Laine-sung number with a neat vocal arrangement and a fascinating mix of guitar, organ and other instruments; "Girlfriend" basically sounds exactly like you'd expect it to sound from Wings if you've heard the Michael Jackson cover first; and "I've Had Enough" is an okayish bit of a guitar-rock that nonetheless has enough energy to make it stand out on an album that isn't exactly overflowing with energy. Note that I just shoved all of those songs into one sentence; they each deserve mention, but best as I can tell, none of them deserves its own sentence.
"With a Little Luck" kicks off the second side, and while it was a big hit and a song that I basically like, it also strikes me as a pop music equivalent to cotton candy (which I don't actually like but that's not pertinent to the metaphor), in that it dissolves into nothing if I spend too much time with it (if I had to guess I would surmise that the album's poor long-term reputation largely stems from this single). Of the remaining five tracks, the clear highlight is "Deliver Your Children," a Laine-sung up-tempo acoustic-based number with a genuine sense of urgency and a chorus that's as interesting in its rhythm as anything, but the rest are fine as well. I guess I'm supposed to not like the closing "Morse Moose and the Grey Goose," as it's kind of a weird six-minute disco-punk (?!) that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the album or with any regular sense of what McCartney is good at, but dagnabbit I enjoy hearing Paul screaming his head off over the insistent beat and murky keyboards, even if I'm somewhat aware that my IQ is dipping a bit with every moment I spend with it. As for the others, "Famous Groupies" is exactly what you think it's about lyrically but has some tempo changes that keep my interest and stop me from panning it; "Name and Address" is a 50s pastiche that Paul probably wrote in his sleep but is help because Paul's instincts could still pull him through even at his most half-assed; and "Don't Let it Bring You Down" is an interesting blending of acoustic and electric guitars that deserved better than getting stuck near the end of a late-period Wings album.
In terms of rating, I might be going too low, and yet, if I try to will myself to go a notch higher, I feel weirdly uncomfortable with that rating as well, so I may as well just leave it where it is. Maybe if they had cut this down to ten tracks, and maybe if they'd found a way to work "Mull of Kintyre" into the track listing, I'd feel a good deal better about it, but as is, there's just too much of the album for me to enjoy it as much as I do in parts. It's ... it's an average Wings album, and should be treated as such.
Best song: Winter Rose / Love Awake or Baby's Request
In a certain sense I admire McCartney's effort here (and it should be stressed that this is primarily McCartney again; Laine only has one songwriting credit here, thus ending the experiment of letting Laine take on more of a role in that regard), but only to a point. Paul's choice of producer was a good one on paper; Chris Thomas (who had helped out on The Beatles and Abbey Road) had recently been the producer for Never Mind the Bollocks by The Sex Pistols, and he'd also been involved in several albums I enjoy a good deal (mostly with Procol Harum, Roxy Music, and Badfinger). If Paul was serious about moving his sound in a more contemporary direction, both as a rocker and as a balladeer, Chris Thomas was as good of a choice as anybody would be, and yet, as decent as the album sounds in aggregate, it never quite overcomes the fundamental problem of how the sound of this album just doesn't fit Paul's strengths (it's only when he gets beyond the typical sound of the album that things get clearly better). As a casual listen (which is how I interacted with this album for years) this album sounds pretty decent, and individual songs from this album tend to evoke a reaction in me of "this isn't great but it's pretty good I guess" (though there are exceptions). When I listen to this closely, though, the difficulty that the rockers on this album have in going beyond that level of quality for me becomes fascinating to me, and the biggest factor is that Paul sounds largely incompatible with the kinds of rockers that he wants to make here. That's not to say that he sounds hopeless on this album, mind you; even if I understand them, I think that the degree to which critics slaughtered this album at the time was excessive and was largely meant to keep up appearances. Rather, it means that, even if Paul is pretty effective at making the up-tempo songs punchy and memorable, and even if the songs are delivered with a good amount of energy, these positive features aren't enough to make up for how so much of this album sounds like late 70s rock cosplay more than actually legitimately good late 70s rock.
And yet, there's that weird thing about how I don't actually dislike any of the songs on here, rockers or not (with the exception of Laine's sole contribution, "Again and Again and Again," which manages to have almost nothing memorable or interesting about it whatsoever). "Getting Closer" is decent up-tempo rock with big loud guitars, "Spin it On" is decent punk/new-wave-ish speedy rock with big loud guitars, "Old Siam Sir" is decent hard rock with lots of layers of big loud guitars, "To You" is decent rock with a big fat bass part (and a little less in the way of big loud guitars), and "So Glad to See You Here" is yet more decent rock with with big loud guitars that almost sound Spector-ish in how they're layered. If this seems like an excessively half-assed way to get through the album's rockers, well, that's kind of the point; these songs are essentially failures relative to how they tried to succeed, and they have almost no personality, and they're essentially irrelevant to any overall assessment of McCartney's overall career, and yet they're so thoroughly competent (in the good and bad sense of the word) that I can't dislike any of them. Put another way, if I hear any of these songs every couple of years on shuffle, I won't be thrilled, but I won't skip them either.
The rest of the album is at least somewhat better than the songs mentioned already, not least because there's a level of variety that's on par with what one might typically expect from a Wings album. A couple of the tracks ("Reception" and "The Broadcast") exist solely to lend some conceptual sense to the album (though I have absolutely no idea what the concept might be, and I generally ignore these tracks), but the others are at least fairly interesting. On the first side, the acoustic "We're Open Tonight" is only 1:28, but it's an absolutely lovely example of Paul taking a potential toss-off and making it into something striking and memorable, and I'm glad it's here. Later on, the side closes with "Arrow Through Me," a mellow New Wave funk-pop-rocker that might have fit in well on McCartney II with a slightly different arrangement (the horn breaks would disqualify it), but that here sounds not unlike a decent contemporary Stevie Wonder track (listening to this makes it easier to understand why those two would have wanted to work together in a few years).
Side two begins with "Rockestra Theme," an instrumental (mostly, aside from some scat vocals from Paul) that would have gone down as an ok throwaway if the band hadn't had the idea to invite a hilariously over-the-top list of prominent rock musicians (go ahead, go look up the list, it's a crack-up) to participate and overdub the simple parts into oblivion. I'm not sure it deserved a Grammy in the abstract, but keeping this from completely falling apart is an accomplishment in and of itself. A couple of tracks later, after "To You," we get a generally decent series of four pop songs, made interesting largely from the decision to pair them off into two medleys of two songs a piece. Collectively, "After the Ball," "Million Miles," "Winter Rose," and "Love Awake" are closer in quality to "Medley" from Red Rose Speedway than Abbey Road, but as before, that's not an insult; "After the Ball" is a nice bombastic ballad (with a nice climactic guitar solo), "Million Miles" is a low-key ballad driven by an accordion, "Winter Rose" is moody with big production to make it feel more melancholy, and "Love Awake" (probably the best of the batch) has a great combination of delicacy and instant memorability that deserved better to be buried in the middle of side two of Back to the Egg. And finally, even if it wasn't intended as such, the jazzy "Baby's Request" weirdly strikes me as the perfect way to close out the career of Wings; it may be just Paul doing his grandma music again, but he once again does it oh so well, and if he had written this ten years earlier I think it would be remembered much more fondly.
As with London Town, the general public assessment of this album, decades after release, is along the lines of "oh yeah, this album exists," and I totally get that. These albums are generally unremarkable, and they show that Paul, by this point, was a pretty long way from the peak of his powers, stuck in a band that missed its window to go out with a bang instead of a whimper. And yet, they're still thoroughly competent, full of decent material and with few clear low points, and if an average Wings album isn't the best thing in the world, then it sure isn't the worst thing in the world either. As for rating, I give this the same grade I gave London Town, even though my rationale is slightly different; London Town has better individual songs but doesn't quite hang together as an album, while this one has worse individual songs but somehow hangs together better for me, so take that as you will.
Best song: Waterfalls
Much like its spiritual predecessor, this one got panned upon release, and there are still some purists who treat this album as a weird throwaway that should never have been released as a proper album. In some ways, I understand this; where McCartney featured Paul playing "normal" rock instruments in service of creating an odd mish-mash of instrumentals and low-key songs, this album features Paul diving head first into a pool of late 70s and early 80s keyboards and production effects, and it's much more difficult to draw a line from Wings to this album than it was to draw a line from The Beatles to McCartney. It would be the easiest thing in the world to dismiss this album as the throwaway scribblings of somebody capable of much more, and there's no way that I would put this in the top tier of post-Beatles McCartney releases or anything, and yet I thoroughly like it. As on McCartney, this album shows Paul relying more on his instincts than on his skills as a craftsman, and I for one find it fascinating to hear him churn out tracks that succeed (at some level) for different reasons than other tracks of his that had succeeded in the past.
If there's a single flashpoint on this album where people inevitably end up butting heads, it has to be "Temporary Secretary." In terms of how contemporary fans of the artist reacted to the song versus how future generations would often react to it, the comparison point that inevitably comes up for me is "Who Dunnit?" by Genesis; both of these songs were frequently HATED by long-time fans at the time, who saw them as clear indications that the artist had lost touch with its fans and its own strengths, but decades later I've found that younger fans (myself included) tend to feel much more charitable towards them. Everything about "Temporary Secretary" is ridiculous, from the incessant *beep beep* synths to the awkward vocal melody to the weird tone in Paul's voice to the bizarre chorus, but I enjoy it a lot, and more than that I'm so fascinated by how it sounds both like a product of its time and like it was made for an era that hasn't happened yet (and maybe never will happen). Life is too short to hate "Temporary Secretary."
As with McCartney, this album also features a couple of instrumentals, and while they're not among the best things McCartney ever wrote, they're also pretty far from the bottom. So help me, the main tunes (carried by the highest pitched keyboards in each case) of "Front Parlour" and "Frozen Jap" are a delight, and I hear nothing wrong with the instrumentation that underpins them, so yeah, I enjoy them plenty. As the later albums done as part of the Fireman project would show, this kind of music was far from a passing fancy for Paul, and these tracks mark a successful initial venture into that particular world.
When I go through the eight tracks, I'm not exactly blown away by them in the same way I'm blown away by Paul's very best material, but my reaction to them as a whole is to give them a respectful head nod and a "pretty good!" response. My favorite of the bunch is the somewhat directionless but absolutely lovely ballad "Waterfalls," which might have turned out sappy with a more "proper" arrangement but becomes oddly haunting and moving with this minimalist arrangement of various keyboards and just a bit of acoustic guitar. Elsewhere on the first side, "Coming Up" was the album's big hit, with a fascinating melody and an arrangement full of odd keyboards and guitars that can't help but suggest that he'd given at least a couple of listens to Talking Heads at that point, and it's kind of a blast. "On the Way" is a one-man generic blues-rock song that sounds totally out of place on the album (except for an echo on his vocals that sounds consistent with other sonic approaches) but is better for it, and the first side rounds out with "Nobody Knows," which features Paul carefully layering his arrangements and vocals to create the impression of a sloppy Stones-y bar-rock track, and I rather admire the effort to create something that sounds like effort wasn't expounded on it at all.
On the second side, sandwiched between "Front Parlour" and "Frozen Jap," I'm most partial towards "Summer's Day Song" (filled with what are either mellotron flutes or what sounds like mellotron flutes) and the closing "One of These Days" (a more conventional acoustic ballad with some subtle melody twists that I rather appreciate even if the lyrics are once again typical of Paul); once again, neither of these songs are stunning on the level that Paul ballads could reach at their peak, but they're flat-out good, and I can't imagine how somebody who likes Paul generally would dislike them (even though I know this happens frequently). On the other hand, I can definitely understand how somebody could dislike "Bogey Music," where a boogie rock song has echo effects added to the vocals that routinely make it seem like the song has fallen half a second out of sync with itself, but once again, where a younger version might have sneered at it, older and wiser me merely gives it a smirk. And finally, "Darkroom" is quirky and moody as hell, filled with synth effects that create an atmosphere of paranoia that makes it almost sound like Paul attempting his version of something from the Exposure/Peter Gabriel 2/Sacred Songs trilogy, and while I don't love it by any means, it's a fine way to spend 2 minutes.
So, um, why am I supposed to dislike this again? Honestly, as I'm reading this back, I find myself wondering if I should bump the rating even higher, and while I can't quite persuade myself to go that far, I have no problem with slotting this as a flat-out good album. No, this isn't the ideal version of McCartney, and it's not even the ideal version of 80s pop McCartney, but it's a fascinating alternate version of McCartney, one filled with the kinds of interesting nooks and crannies that make McCartney's discography much more interesting on the whole than it has often been made out to be.
Best song: Tug Of War I guess
The most obvious difference between this album and previous albums is the presence of a prominent guest star, in this case Stevie Wonder, who contributes significantly to two of the album's most standout tracks. This was hardly a peak period in Stevie's career (the peak had ended after the release of Songs in the Key of Life), but it wasn't a low point either; in a couple of years he would release his horrendous soundtrack to The Woman in Red, yes, but this was also the point in his career when he had churned out four terrific tracks ("Front Line," "Ribbon in the Sky," "That Girl," and "Do I Do") that would become highlights of the compilation Stevie Wonder's Original Musiquarium I, also from 1982, so Paul could have picked a much worse time to collaborate with Stevie. The album's big massive mega-hit (written entirely by Paul) was the closing "Ebony and Ivory," and while the lyrics are overly simplistic in how they deal with the concept of racial harmony, I just can't behind the idea of hating this song. The main song is saccharine and a little overblown, yes, but the song also has that section in the middle where the voices get encoded, and as much as part of me wants to give into the crowd and crap all over it (and as much as I like the old SNL skit that made fun of it), I end up enjoying the song immensely despite myself. As for the other collaboration, the funk-rocker (but with very 80s production) "What's That You're Doing?" is much more a Stevie vehicle than a Paul vehicle, but I don't see that as a bad thing; in particular, when it gets to the "Girl I like what you do to me, do to me, do it some more do to me, do to me, do it some more," I get completely sucked in, and I largely end up hearing this track as a companion to "Front Line" (which I love) in particular.
The other ten tracks (nine if you exclude the brief "Be What You See (Link)" which is basically an atmospheric excuse to play with a vocoder for about 30 seconds) are solely written by McCartney, though "Get It," a fun 2:30 acoustic jaunt (buried in the middle of the second side), features a delightful duet with Carl Perkins. The opening title track is the most obvious candidate for the album's best track, even if it's not necessarily the clear winner; it may be very bombastic (especially in the middle), but it's bombastic in a way that seems well-supported in both the music and in the production, especially in the part where he sings "In years to come they may discover / What the air we breathe and the life we lead are all about / But it won't be soon enough / Soon enough for me." The "pushing and pulling" parts are a delight as well, as is the closing orchestration (Martin is in prime form here). The following "Take it Away" (with Ringo Starr on drums!!) is a terrific piano-driven pop song with a secondary melody (the part starting with "Lonely driver out on the road") that's as good as any secondary melody he'd written in years, and I really enjoy the horn-heavy accompaniment that comes in repeatedly. "Somebody Who Cares" is a solid and crisp melancholy acoustic ballad that occasionally ventures into more uplifting territory but then has great moments like "And if you don't know it, how will it find you? How will we know your whereabouts? But I know how you feel" that wrench it back into its moody core, all in a mere 3:14. Closing out the first side, then, is "Here Today," Paul's inevitable commentary on John's death, constructed as an imagined conversation between them, and while it's not quite a great song, the obvious emotion of the song is enough to make it a moving listen, and it's a bittersweet companion to "Dear Friend" from so many years earlier.
The second side is a ton of fun, even if there are some obvious things to poke at around the edges if somebody is so inclined. "Ballroom Dancing" is a piano-heavy rocker (with the exception of a discordant breakdown in the middle that does the song well) somewhat along the lines of "Lady Madonna," this time about a couple who can put aside their differences through their chemistry in the ballroom (which ... I guess isn't a metaphor? Or maybe is? Who knows), and it's another of one those instances where the best way to enjoy a McCartney song is to avoid overthinking it. "The Pound is Sinking" is somewhat silly as serious political commentary, but it has so many little parts colliding with each other that I'm happy to focus on those instead of the lyrics, and Paul gets to use multiple singing approaches, which is always nice. "Wanderlust" is a mid-tempo anthemic ballad that veers from piano to acoustic guitars to horns, and if it's not spectacular in any of its sections than it's awfully consistent in its niceness, and it's another winner. And finally, after "Get It" and "Be What You See" but before "Ebony and Ivory," we get "Dress Me Up As a Robber," which ... well it's not especially memorable, but its seemingly constant shifts in arrangement over the incessant rhythm are enough to keep it interesting when on, and if this is what constitutes filler on this album, then so be it.
Get this album! If somebody hates "Ebony and Ivory" I could see how they'd feel unenthusiastic about getting the album from which it originates, but the rest of the album sounds little like it, and generally speaking it's about as good of an adaptation of Paul's core skills to the early 80s as one could reasonably hope for. And besides, things were about to get pretty rough, so it's nice to have a reminder that Paul could still (with a little help from his friends) put together something of this quality at such a relatively late date.
Best song: ehn
The first side, aside from the title track and "Say Say Say," is pretty dire; "The Other Me" isn't really offensive aside from being more boring than it probably should be, but "Keep Under Cover" buries some fun piano under an excruciatingly banal arrangement, and "So Bad" reaches a level of schlock that had only been hinted at occasionally in McCartney's post-Beatles career (Paul as an 80s adult contemporary artist is not a good thing). On the second side, I will say that I like "Sweetest Little Show," even if it's essentially Wings-by-Numbers, and I also really dig the silly music hall number "Average Person," which is essentially this album's version of "Ballroom Dancing" and is far more memorable than it probably deserves. Oh, and I guess the disco-funk instrumental (but with very 80s production) "Hey Hey," co-written with Stanley Clarke, is alright too. Unfortunately, the mash-up of "Tug of War" and "Pipes of Peace," called "Tug of Peace," was an interesting idea on paper (it kinda feels to me like he was going for an 80s analogue to the bulk of "Picasso's Last Words (Drink to Me)") but falls apart in the execution, and the closing ballad "Through Our Love" is a tedious slog of anthemic banality that's better off forgotten.
So alas, this album is the worst one Paul had done to this point, and it clearly demonstrated that a lasting Paul revival wasn't just a simple matter of freeing him from Wings and getting him to work with George Martin again. I suppose a handful of tracks from here are worth hunting down, but if you're like me you'll just end up wanting to listen to Tug of War again.
Best song: No More Lonely Nights
There are some new songs to make it so that I have at least something to focus on, and they're a mixed bag. The opening "No More Lonely Nights" (which gets reprised later) is a solid exercise in power balladry, largely courtesy of some nice guitar work from David Gilmour, and while it's not spectacular it immediately puts a good taste in my mouth when listening to the album. "Not Such a Bad Boy" is a decent rocker but it would have been better as a Stones song, while "No Values" is also a decent rocker but would have been better as a Tom Petty song, and the closing "Goodnight Princess" shows that the previously successful formula of "let McCartney do granny music and watch magic happen" had its limits. And, well, that's it.
In a certain sense this album is somewhat useless, and there's a part of me that wants to give this a significantly lower rating (with some reprieve given due to "No More Lonely Nights"). And yet, hearing so many songs I enjoy in one place, with just enough tweaks for me to recognize them as something different than the versions I typically know, ends up lighting up the pleasure centers in my brain just enough that, even though I feel like kind of an idiot for enjoying this even as much as I do, I end up feeling obligated to boost the rating up a bit. A McCartney fan could probably do just fine never hearing this (except for "No More Lonely Nights," which all serious fans should hear), but if somebody enjoyed this more I wouldn't begrudge them for it.
Best song: Press I guess
At least the first half is pretty nice. The opening "Stranglehold" (co-written with Eric Stewart of 10cc, as is a good amount of the album) sounds to me more than a bit like early 80s XTC, which is not a shock given that Padgham had served as producer for English Settlement; Paul's delivery has a mix between frantic and typically poppy that has a lot in common with Andy Partridge, and while the song might not be on par with the best XTC material, it would at least be middle of the pack. The two-part "Good Times Coming / Feel the Sun" that follows isn't especially remarkable in the first part, a vaguely ska-influenced song that still at least has a decently memorable vocal melody, but the second part makes for a very fun coda, as a bunch of ideas that probably couldn't sustain a full-length song nonetheless sound just fine when they only have to carry about a minute, and I don't get why a McCartney fan wouldn't enjoy hearing "Feel the sun shine in, shine in, shine in / Feel the sun shining in on you." "Talk More Talk" is a bit of a slog, with an overlong atmospheric synth-heavy introduction eventually giving way to a bleakly underwritten verse melody with just an ok chorus, but at least the last two songs on the side are good ones. "Footprints" is a low-key atmospheric acoustic ballad (with very tasteful and unobtrusive contemporary production touches drizzled on top) with a vocal melody that doesn't go quite where one might instinctively expect (this is a good thing), and the side-closing "Only Love Remains" is a piano ballad (with orchestration eventually emerging) that doesn't show Paul at his best but definitely doesn't show him at his worst either.
The second half begins on a high note, possibly with the album's peak, and then declines to an almost shocking degree thereafter. "Press" is Paul at his bouncy catchy happy pop best, albeit filled with production and percussion that makes it clear to any casual listener that this came out between 1985 and 1987, and even if I have no idea what the lyrics are (other than vaguely remembering a repeated "Oklahoma was never like this"), the song definitely ranks among his best from the decade (which I guess isn't a huge accomplishment but bear with me here). And then ... things go wrong. "Pretty Little Head" was clearly an attempt on Paul's part to sound as different from his regular self as possible, and on that level it succeeds, but it doesn't succeed otherwise; it basically sounds like it was written by somebody who had listened to a bunch of early 80s synth-heavy World Beat but didn't actually understand it in anyway. "Move Over Busker" is kinda sorta a mid-tempo boogie rocker awkwardly slammed into the 80s, and while there's nothing especially glaring in the production or in the songwriting here, it ultimately leaves very little impression. "Angry" (featuring guitar from Pete Townshend) is kinda sorta a nod to punk that sounds more than anything like an awkward attempt on the part of 1983 Police to record a song in the vein of 1978 Police, and it doesn't fit Paul at all (it isn't especially memorable and it isn't especially powerful, and it ultimately ends up sounding like white noise to me). And finally, "However Absurd" is just five minutes of McCartney doing anthemic glop; the best way to make me appreciate "Only Love Remains" is to play it back-to-back with this one. On its own, I suppose it isn't terrible, but as the capstone to such an aggressively uninspiring stretch, I find it pretty aggravating.
So ok, this album is more of a failure than a success, and it makes perfect sense to me that he would go a completely different direction in subsequent albums (he wouldn't end his fascination with music that made heavy use of synthesizers, but he would save that for later side projects and make better decisions in those cases). And yet, as much as this album probably couldn't have succeeded more than it did (it predictably struggled commercially, and everybody involved with it more or less threw everybody else under the bus), I nonetheless feel it has enough in the way of positive traits for me not to hate it. At the very least, there are more songs on this one that I could plausibly return to in the future than on Pipes of Peace, and that has to mean something. If you like McCartney, and you don't have a reflexive hatred of the mid-80s, then you might end up enjoying some of this more than you might expect.
Best song: uh
While I haven't heard the tracks from the versions with 13 and 14 tracks, I'm inclined to think they wouldn't change my mind about the project as a whole. The easy comparison for this is to Lennon's Rock'N'Roll album from 1975, but I think that comparison is unfair to that Lennon album, which I still quite enjoy; Lennon's album basically functions as an alternate history 'what-if?' experiment in which the relative importance of Chuck Berry and Phil Spector to the general development of rock music had been switched, whereas CHOBA B CCCP sounds like a guy in his 40s quickly banging out a bunch of oldies covers with his buddies (which, uh, is what it was). Now, to be fair, to an average Russian in the late 1980s who hadn't had the opportunity to hear these tracks in any form before, this album might have seemed like the greatest thing in the world at the time, and if somebody has a nostalgic attachment to it for that reason I wouldn't hold it against them. For me, though, as an American encountering this album in his late 30s in the late 2010s, this album is nothing but a giant shoulder shrug; the other musicians are good but certainly not among the absolute top tier for this type of music, and Paul's voice is good for this material but pretty far from special. If you hear one track, you can predict almost perfectly how the other tracks will sound once you see the tracklisting, and while I certainly enjoy each of these tracks individually, there's nothing about these performances that can make me rate this higher than a 7. This is certainly a fun album to put on in the background, though, and it's not as if it tried to be anything more than that, so it least gets credit for that.
Best song: Put It There
The album starts pretty well, even if it takes a few tracks to really get going. The opener (written with Costello), "My Brave Face," was the album's most popular single, and it's a big shiny pop number that wisely slams the listener with the chorus right away (it's not an especially good chorus on its own but it seems more powerful with that initial presentation). "Rough Ride" (produced by Trevor Horn and Steve Lipson) is much more about mid-tempo swagger than about melody per se, but it somehow works, and there's a solid keyboard horn riff that annoyed me a bit at first but eventually grew on me considerably. "You Want Her Too" is another Costello collaboration, this time with Costello contributing vocals, and while the song isn't especially memorable in terms of melody, the effect that the singing produces of seemingly portraying an argument between McCartney and Costello is an interesting one for sure.
Where the album really starts to take off for me is with "Distractions," which is a little too chaotic to succeed purely based on memorability but nonetheless has a fascinating arrangement and wonderful atmosphere that makes me enjoy it plenty. Up next is "We Got Married," which starts off as a brisk downcast acoustic number and then turns into something that sounds lifted from A Momentary Lapse of Reason (which makes sense given that David Gilmour contributes guitar here) but strikes me as far more memorable and interesting than most of that album, and it's a highlight, albeit an atypical one for McCartney. The first side ends, then, with "Put it There," a 2-minute acoustic song that absolutely lives up to any similar songs he'd ever written in his entire career, including his time as a Beatle, and it shows that, even after spending years wandering in a creative desert, he still could really bring it if he put his mind to it.
Unfortunately, the second half doesn't come close to measuring up to the shockingly great first half. It starts off well enough: "Figure of Eight" (another Horn/Lipson production effort) is a fine pop rocker that finds the right way to balance "gentle" with "anthemic" without undermining either, and of all of the album's memorable and interesting moments, I find that "Is it better to love one another than to go for a walk in the dark" is the one that gets stuck in my head all the time. "This One" is another good one, a memorable and anthemic pop-rocker that is at most a tick behind "Figure of Eight," and "That Day is Done" (another Costello collaboration) is a nice anthemic gospel-ish number that would have made a solid closer to the original album (not least because it contains a lyric that references the album's name). Unfortunately, the side also has three massive duds, and they drag the album down considerably. "Don't Be Careless Love" is another Costello collaboration, and it largely sounds like one of the weaker songs from Spike (the 1989 Elvis Costello album that contained some McCartney collaborations and that I think is about as good as this one in aggregate, even if not all of it is good), and I'd be happy if they'd left this mushy ballad out. Much worse, though, are the last two tracks: "How Many People" (another Horn/Lipson collaboration) is a weirdly tacky reggae-inflected mid-tempo would-be anthem, and "Motor of Love" is six minutes of dull adult-contemporary quasi-gospel without anything in the way of a single interesting or memorable idea. Again, it cannot be stressed enough: after a delightfully solid first eight tracks, it's a massive disappointment to me that, out of the final 18 minutes of the album proper, only about 4 of them are good.
At least the close to the CD version is a lot of fun. "Ou Est Le Soleil" (the album's best Horn/Lipson effort) is a 4:45 sorta-instrumental (there are vocals from Paul, but they're in French and they're basically there for atmospheric effect) that sounds like a cross between something The Police would have done 10 years earlier (h/t George Starostin for that) and something Peter Gabriel would have done on So, and it's shockingly good: the late 80s production suits it very well, the underlying rhythmic pulse is very addictive, the different tones to Paul's vocals are fascinating, and overall it gives a perfect sense of a weird enigmatic encore to the album (which would be an even better effect had "That Day is Done" come right before it).
This album may be flawed, but if nothing else it has the decency to have its flaws almost exclusively concentrated in a small number of tracks that one can easily ignore, and the best material here is absolutely worth hunting down. This album by no means indicated that Paul had made it all the way back, but at least it showed that he had something left, and it should be treated accordingly.
Best song: uh
I like this live album for the most part, but this never had a chance of becoming one of my favorite live albums. I never had the opportunity to see Paul McCartney in person, so I can't speak to what the experience would be like in person, but McCartney (especially at this stage of his career onward) was just not the kind of performer whose performances were well-suited to live albums. Part of the problem is that his voice was starting to give way: this was understandable, given that he was in his late 40s at this point, but while he could make things work well enough in the studio, live performances were a different matter, and there's only so much he could do. More generally, so many of these songs (especially among the Beatles songs) had been so perfectly crafted and performed (including but not limited to the vocals) in their original forms that there was little room to modify them in live performance in ways that could be to their benefit; there are certainly noble attempts to change the material, like when "Things We Said Today" gets significantly lengthened, but these changes are at best lateral moves and at worst somewhat lessen the material. And finally, these live performances have the same sorts of intrinsic limitations that live performances from lots of older acts had around this time: some of this comes from the keyboards (which take the place of a horn section but not always especially well), but more generally there's an overall sense of sterility that's not entirely unexpected but still isn't especially welcome. In the end, the sense I get from this live album is "Yup, that sure is a bunch of classic Beatles and solo Paul songs done live in 1989 and 1990," and there's little more than that.
On the other hand, though, that description can get you a very long way. Paul and his band play their collective hearts out here, and there's certainly clear evidence that they put real thought into what to include here and where (for instance they include a performance of "Coming Up" and it's kind of a blast), interweaving material from all Beatles eras and also making sure that the Flowers in the Dirt material gets placed such that it feels like it belongs on par with all of those great songs. Plus, even if the execution isn't impeccable, I just can't get too down on a live album at this point in Paul's career that has a sequence of "Live and Let Die," "Hey Jude" (with a false opening), "Yesterday," "Get Back," and the Abbey Road medley from "Golden Slumbers" onward.
In the future, Paul would overdo it with live albums, and the tenuous balance between the quality of the material in its original forms, on the one hand, and the limitations in its modern performances, on the other, would eventually work against them. In this case, though, I'm inclined to be lenient, since it was his first time down this road, and the scope crossed with the good-enough performances is enough to leave me in a good mood. This and Unplugged are probably all of the live post-Wings McCartney you really need, if you need any of it.
Best song: uh
The album as I have it contains 17 tracks (the performance had 5 additional tracks that didn't make the album), and the setlist is diverse in a way that's both predictable and not. From his Beatles days, he brings out "Here, There and Everywhere," "We Can Work it Out" (which requires a charming reboot because Paul forgot the words), "I've Just Seen a Face," "She's a Woman" (a highlight in a stripped-down format quite different from the original) and "And I Love Her" (which is ok here but is also where Paul sounds the oldest). Among Paul's solo material, there are three tracks included from McCartney, which I enjoy a lot if only because tracks from that album (other than "Maybe I'm Amazed") hadn't made either of his last two major live albums: "Every Night," "That Would Be Something," and the instrumental version of "Junk" (which closes the album) are absolutely delightful. He also made the decision to break out the first song he had ever written, a ditty called "I Lost My Little Girl" that he wrote when he was 14, and, well ... it's a good song for somebody who wrote it when they were 14 (it's not actually good, but it's cute here).
The rest of the songs are covers, and while none of the renditions are especially remarkable, the aggregate effect from them is rather charming. The cover of "San Francisco Bay Blues" would be exceeded by Clapton in his Unplugged album, but it's still fun here, and hearing Paul take on "Blue Moon of Kentucky" is something I never knew I needed in my life until I heard it. The opening cover of "Be-Bop-A-Lula" is also welcome, not least because The Beatles had frequently performed it in their early days (and John Lennon had covered it on Rock 'n' Roll). The others are fine, and if I'll never seek them out, I'll never skip over them when they pop up in shuffle.
This album wasn't necessary by any means, but it gave a chance for Paul to indulge in a side of himself that didn't wasn't a regular part of his artistic persona, and I'm absolutely glad for this performance and for the decision to release it (initially as a limited release and later more broadly). If you set your expectations accordingly, you should enjoy this just fine.
Best song: nope
Holy hell this album is 100 minutes long and feels every bit of it. The singers do the best they can with the material, and it sounds fine in the background, but I've heard my fair share of oratorios, and this is thoroughly mediocre. There are a couple of attractive recurring themes that I enjoy, but it's a deeply unsophisticated work that wants to present itself as a full-fledged classical work (there's no element of pop-classical fusion here to allow it to carve out its own niche) and can't pull it off because Paul McCartney didn't really know what he was doing. I'm sure Carl Davis (who had a successful career in his own right, in particular in creating new scores for old silent films) did know what he was doing to a greater extent, but I also suspect that Davis did his best to defer to McCartney's general ideas as much as possible, which was noble of him but probably not for the better with this work.
I suppose I can understand why somebody would buy this and enjoy it; this seems like a reasonable purchase for somebody who thinks relevant music started with The Beatles and likes the idea of having something classical in their collection without having to become familiar with dead Germans and their rules. Then again, while this demographic was certainly sufficiently large to allow this album to chart fairly well, it's also a demographic that would inevitably tire of this album quickly, which would explain why I've seen so many used copies of it through the years. I suppose it's worth listening to once (or three times like me), but I can't imagine ever finding myself in the mood to hear this again.
Best song: Biker Like An Icon
I willingly concede that Flowers in the Dirt was a more important album in McCartney's career than Off the Ground could ever be, but I also firmly believe that Off the Ground is better. Well, sort of: it's roughly the same quality as the bulk of Flowers in the Dirt, maybe a little better, maybe a little worse, but it's also missing anything resembling the lowlights that ended up sinking Flowers a bit, and that means I enjoy it more. This one largely strikes me as an early 90s equivalent of Tug of War; a very classy, very self-assured album that relies primarily on McCartney's core strengths and, apart from some scattered production details, sounds largely removed from the era it was made in. Obviously, the comparison doesn't completely hold up due to the lack of a collaborating partner (let alone one as great as Stevie Wonder) or any major hit singles, but if all of the albums McCartney had made between these two albums were somehow wiped out, then I insist that Off the Ground would sound totally plausible as the follow-up to Tug of War.
In terms of individual song quality, this album may not have much in the way of all-time McCartney classics, but it's packed full of songs that I'd rate as good or very good. The opening title track has a terrific chorus (with those fun "la la la" verses mixed in with singing the title) that seems like an ideal match to the verses, which are interesting as much for the mix of thick guitars with a curious drum pattern as for the verse melody, and it's a really nice way to kick things off. "Looking for Changes" is an up-tempo rocker with more strong and varied guitars, and while the lyrics are a little eye-rolling when you read them carefully (as often happens with Paul's lyrics), I'm so attracted to that chorus and to all of the fun and memorable things the guitars are doing that I happily overlook them. "Hope of Deliverance" was the album's lead single, and while it tanked in the US and the UK, it did well elsewhere, and I'm glad it did, because it's a memorable and bouncy rousing anthem with subtle Latin percussion and another teriffic chorus. "Mistress and Maid" (a leftover Costello collaboration from the Flowers in the Dirt sessions) is weaker than the opening salvo, but honestly I'd probably like it more if Costello had kept it for himself, and it's kinda interesting how this song provides a glimpse into a failing marriage and sets it to a waltz that feels like it's going to trip over itself at any moment. "I Owe it All to You" is a nice melancholy pop ballad with a great arrangement of varied guitars over the drums and pianos, and I also like how, in the first ten seconds or so, it sounds like it's instead going to be something along the lines of the sparse keyboard ballads of McCartney II. And finally, the first half concludes with "Biker Like an Icon," a sorta-acoustic/sorta-electric pop-rocker in the verses with a MAGNIFICENT chorus, and while I suppose there's a case to be made that this might have worked better as, say, a Tom Petty song than as a Paul McCartney song (Petty might have found a way to make the story in the verses a little more fleshed-out), what's here is so memorable and so addictive that I'm not going to complain.
The second half begins with the gentle upbeat pop-rock of "Peace in the Neighborhood," and while the lyrics are once again somewhat eye-rolling, the song is still a rather fun one; the take that made it onto the album was originally intended to be a rehearsal take, and while the band intended to do a more "proper" take the producer rightly decided that the looseness of the recording was to its benefit (the piano, the drums, and the guitar all sound just wonderful here). "Golden Earth Girl" is a piano ballad (which eventually incorporates the whole band) with weird lyrics that Paul apparently originally wanted to do with a full orchestra (but no band), but then he decided he just wanted a flute and an oboe, and the decision was a good one, as they provide just enough color to the sound without overwhelming it. "The Lovers That Never Were" is the album's other Costello-collaboration leftover from the Flowers in the Dirt sessions, and while it's not quite on par with the demo version that later got released as part of the bonus tracks for Flowers in the Dirt (McCartney's vocal performance is WHITE HOT there), the song is still a good one with with a lot of passion and an organ part underneath that I enjoy a good deal. "Get Out of My Way" is a pretty basic rock and roll song, but it's got a lot of verve and serves as a great change of pace, not to mention that the horn stabs are fun as hell. "Winedark Open Sea" (a phrase that references line often used in the works of Homer) is a nice gentle anthemic ballad with a good balance between the guitars and the keyboards, and while it's a bit underdeveloped for how long it is, what's there is mostly just fine by me. And finally, "C'mon People" is a big giant piano-heavy anthem that very much sounds like Paul returning to the style of his giant Beatles anthems, and while the lyrics are essentially cotton candy, I'm just so impressed with the melody and with the sound of the orchestration (done by George Martin) and with Paul's vocal delivery that I get completely sucked in despite myself.
Again, nothing on here is impeccable, even the songs I really like, and I certainly wouldn't place this album on par with the very best albums McCartney has done solo or with Wings. As a second-tier McCartney album, though, this strikes me as nearly ideal; this album may only provide good songs without a whiff of experimentation or anything career defining, but there's room for that in my overall consideration of McCartney, and I would happily recommend this to anybody who's already bought a handful of the most famous post-Beatles McCartney albums.
Best song: uh
So why a grade as high as this? Because even in a severely compromised form and even when clearly presented for a cashgrab, so many of these songs are still f***ing awesome at their cores. I can't help myself, even a mangled version of "Magical Mystery Tour" or "Paperback Writer" is still "Magical Mystery Tour" or "Paperback Writer," and I get a thrill down my spine listening to this version of "Live and Let Die" every bit as much as I do with other versions of "Live and Let Die," and so on. Plus, the Off the Ground material holds its own well in the context of all of the older classics, and this speaks well to that album's quality.
And yet, that's still pretty faint praise. After this tour, Paul would take a break from proper solo albums and from touring for a little while, and this was probably for the best; this album sold terribly and it wasn't reasonable to assume that it wouldn't. As for me, I can't imagine I'll listen to this again anytime soon, and yet I just can't hate it.
Best song: lol
On an individual track basis, I genuinely like this, even though I'm also ill-equipped to provide detail as to why. The raw materials are well-chosen, drawn mostly from the Off the Ground sessions but also including samples from Back to the Egg and some other interesting bits whose origin I can't place (there are interesting funky guitar lines, some sitars, some bits of classical music, and various other things). Nothing ever coalesces into an extended stretch that even remotely resembles a tune, but the music feels sensical even if it's hard to consciously place why. The big problem, unfortunately, stems from the fact that this wasn't originally supposed to be an album: each of the album's nine tracks is a variation on the same basic set of raw materials, and while there are differences from track to track in terms of how the raw materials are organized, I find it essentially impossible to distinguish the different tracks from each other. Youth acknowledged later on that, had he known this project would end up as an album, he would have taken a significantly different approach and would have made the tracks clearly distinct from each other; as is, the album is 75+ minutes of the same themes repeated seemingly endlessly, and I end up feeling exhausted by the end.
In terms of rating, this is a case where I'm somewhat at a loss, and I picked the value I did based on the idea that, even if I'll never listen to this album as a whole ever again, I can absolutely envision myself wanting to come back to individual tracks from it repeatedly in the years to come. All in all, then, this was an imperfect beginning to McCartney's career as a purveyor of EDM, but he also didn't make a total ass of himself either, and that has to count for something.
Best song: The World Tonight
The standard critical line about this album says something like "The Anthology project reintroduced Paul to his Beatles past and inspired him to make a more stripped-down album along the lines of those recordings," but this needs to be taken with a boulder of salt. The Paul McCartney on this album, for the most part, doesn't come close to sounding like the Paul McCartney who had once been a Beatle (the one time where he tries especially hard to do so is the title track, which kinda sounds to me like an awkward rewrite of "Why Don't We Do It In The Road" and is kind of a clunker, even though I still kinda like it because I'm not very bright); putting aside the expected difference in style that comes from 30 years of musical development and changes in production (though in fairness Lynne's production style here is exactly like the production style of any album from his production heyday), this is not an album that especially emphasizes Paul's strengths as a tunesmith (which had absolutely been his primary strength as a Beatle), either in terms of vocal melodies or instrumental melodies. That's not to say there isn't anything memorable on here, but it is to say that, if you made the mistake of going into this expecting a clear return to the unstoppable melody machine of Paul's Beatles work, there's a chance you might feel incredibly disappointed. Paul's "By the way, this man was a BEATLE, show some respect" album already happened, and it was called Ram, and this is no Ram.
One of the things I've long liked about Paul McCartney, though, is that Ram was not the only model for what an appealing solo album from him could sound like; McCartney (and later McCartney II) showed that, when he chose to base an album around instinct and feel rather than craft, he could still come up with something worthwhile, and for me Flaming Pie continues this tradition at a level that I basically enjoy. Take for instance "The World Tonight," my favorite song on here: there's not an especially strong vocal melody in the verses, but there's enough of a skeleton in there (both from what fragments of melody the song does have and the rhythm section, entirely played by Paul) to allow for some terrific biting guitar lines to pierce through the mix, and the result of the song is one where, every time I hear it, I feel like I've had a great and exhilarating experience, even if I'm not necessarily sure of what specific elements most prompted that experience. The album's other rockers (such as they are) aren't quite as terrific as this one, but the only one I'd mostly dismiss is "Used to be Bad," one of the album's two appearances of Steve Miller (who has co-writing credits). Otherwise, "If You Wanna" sounds like Tom Petty and has a great recurring riff that I enjoy a lot, and "Really Love You," underwritten it may be, has that amusing scurrying guitar line and is decent as far as "throwaway song in the last quarter of a slightly overlong album" tracks go.
The rest of the album more or less falls into the category of ballads, and for the most part I'd slot these at the "maybe not great but definitely pretty good" level. The opening "The Song We Were Singing" strikes me as a little underwritten, but the swaying chorus (sort of) has a lot of charm, and the simple arpeggiated acoustic guitar parts under Paul's sorta-singing in the verses are more effective than maybe they should be. "Somedays" is a dark melancholy lightly orchestrated ballad with an acoustic guitar that almost sounds like a harpsichord in spots (as well as sounding very solemn in some of the instrumental breaks), and the moments when it becomes more upbeat almost manage to evoke the mood of "Penny Lane" without coming close to ripping it off. "Young Boy" has some pretty dumb lyrics, but it's the song on here that comes closest to the typical approach of McCartney as a songwriter, with probably the best vocal melody on the album and a pretty solid hook in the chorus (especially in the ending "And it might come looking, come looking for you") and some nice guitars draped around it (and a nice slow organ-driven coda). "Calico Skies" is a lovely and memorable acoustic ballad, not exactly on par with something like "Blackbird" or "Mother Nature's Son," but clearly written by the same person who had written those two songs and hadn't entirely forgotten how to write something roughly as good as those songs.
"Heaven on a Sunday," featuring some electric guitar work from Paul's son James, is more interesting as a mood piece (it was written while Paul was out on a sailing holiday, and the song really feels like it's lightly drifting along a sea of vibraphone) than as a guitar workout (the electric guitar parts are whatever, though hearing Paul trade acoustic licks with his son is pretty fun), but I definitely enjoy it as a mood piece, and it's a highlight of the album for me. "Souvenir" is a soulful R&B number (Paul wrote it imagining that somebody like Wilson Pickett would cover it), and while I'd hardly rank it as on par with something like "Let it Be," it's pleasant enough and has great energy in the vocals (and a fun detail of a 78rpm sound at the end), so it can stick around. "Little Willow" is another acoustic ballad, simple and affecting (written in response to the death of Ringo Starr's first wife Maureen), and even if there's not that much to it, it does have that great part at the end with Paul singing the melody in his falsetto. "Beautiful Night" (with Ringo on drums) is a decent enough would-be anthem that might make me roll my eyes a little bit if it ended around 3:30, but it does have that upbeat coda at the end that probably would be a ton of fun to hear in a concert. And finally, the acoustic "Great Day" (recorded before the Off the Ground sessions) sounds like something straight off McCartney (which makes sense, as it was first written back in the early 70), and if it sounds like a fragment of a more complete song, well, then it's a fragment of a potentially pretty awesome great song, and a fine way to wrap things up.
To be clear, I consider this album pretty far from a career highlight, and the immediate reaction at the time that this was one of his very best solo albums (or maybe on par with his Beatles work) strikes me as preposterous. For me, this is an album whose best listen is the first listen; this album is most interesting when taken as a whole without receiving close inspection, because close inspection reveals that, in some cases, there's less there than might be ideal. And yet, just as with McCartney, there's just something so very charming about this kind of album coming from Paul that I can't hold the weaknesses against it too severely, and in the end I like it just fine. Any McCartney fan should check this out, and hey, if that's you, there's a good chance you'll like this much more than I do.
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Best song: uh
And yet ... it kinda sucks me in despite myself. For instance, when I listen to the second movement ("He awoke startled") there's certainly a significant part of me that feels horrified at the ways he so transparently lifted from "La Mer" and "The Firebird," and yet the music within it works in terms of creating images and setting a mood, and I can't help but feel sucked in by the relentless energy of "Release" that closes the movement. More broadly, the piece really does provide a broad sense of contemplation of life, the world, and the universe, and even if the piece has no real sense of rhetorical closure (in terms of feeling like the end properly balances what came before) it creates an interesting journey along the way.
It's really hard for me to say anything else about this album: it's a freaking classical album from freaking Paul McCartney. It's a mess, but it's intriguing. It works pretty well in aggregate, and I can think of almost nothing to say about the individual tracks. It's best consumed as a whole, but shouldn't be examined too closely lest the weaknesses become clear. I've basically enjoyed it, and I'll probably never listen to it in full again. Take it as you will.
Best song: Watercolour Guitars maybe
The most curious thing about the album for me is how long the individual sections of the album are. The opening pairing of "Watercolour Guitars" and "Palo Verde" is formally split into tracks that are 5:48 and 11:56 respectively, but the division between the two is largely arbitrary, and they're essentially a single (roughly) 17-minute track. Likewise, the following "Auraveda" is 12:49, the tracks "Fluid" (11:19) and "Appletree Cinnabar Amber" (7:12) are essentially two presentations of the same general ideas (expressed over about 18:30), and "Bison" (2:40) + "7 a.m." (7:45) is about 10:30 (the album ends with "Watercolour Rush" at 1:45, which essentially serves as a reprise of the opening section). These large-scale sections are by no means compelling in every moment that they're playing, and the amount of repetition sets a pretty hard cap on how much I can ultimately enjoy them, but I also find that I enjoy the sense of long-range cohesion that the repetition provides (and I like that this repetition isn't overdone to the extent that it was on SOSF). I end up hearing this album largely as a series of musical depictions of dreams, with ideas circling around each other that make sense in relation to each other more than they do in a broader sense, and it makes for very enjoyable listening.
As far as the individual sections go, I'm most inclined to enjoy the opening "Watercolour Guitars" / "Palo Verde" section, centered around treated acoustic/electric guitar lines floating in and out of very subtle yet colorful synths, but every section on this album has something at least a little delightful. "Auraveda" has hints of sitar and tabla to give the music an Eastern feel that makes me think of the "Meditation" tracks from the Eno / Laraaji collaboration Ambient 3: Day of Radiance; "Fluid" / "Appletree Cinnabar Amber" has a nice combination of gentle keyboards and moody guitars (plus some unsettling sex moans but ehn I guess if this is depicting a dream that could make some sense) that would make excellent music for unwinding from a difficult day; and "Bison"/"7 a.m." is a decent combination of a lumbering bass/drums rhythm section with well-placed bits of mellotron amidst the more modern keyboards and production effects.
As with most techno albums, I'm largely at a loss to know how to describe this album in the detail that I might ideally want to provide, but even if I have trouble getting a sufficient grip on what exactly I'm hearing, my grip here is sufficiently solid for me to know that I think it's legitimately good and worth hearing. If you like McCartney, and if you didn't totally hate SOFS (which in turn means you're not totally opposed to ambient and techno), you owe it to yourself to give this album a listen (CD copies are nearly impossible to find, but it's easily available online in perfectly legal forms). For what it's worth, Youth later declared this as the album from The Fireman he was most proud of, and I can completely understand that.
Best song: Run Devil Run or No Other Baby
As mentioned, McCartney also contributed three originals to the album, and they're good enough overall. "Try Not to Cry" and "What it is" fit in perfectly with the general sound of the songs they were covering, with a little bit of McCartney tuneful magic sprinkled in to give them some kick, and the title track is a blast of energetic pure rock'n'roll that I'd have to imagine would absolutely blast the roof off the place if performed in a small club. Who would have thought that he still had something like this in him?
This is by no means an essential release in McCartney's career, but even if it lacks the historical importance of its predecessor it's a lot more fun, and it feels like an entertaining detour rather than a labored attempt to jump-start a career through a deliberate "back to basics" exercise. Get it if you find it cheap.
Best song: Maybe I'm Amazed
The works for string quartet are a lot better, though, even if the new compositions clearly sound like the work of an amateur. "Haymakers" and "Midwife" are each short and brisk, with a wistful bit of melancholy woven into the latter, and while I still hold to my position that writing for a string quartet is nearly the hardest thing a composer can do (it's the composing equivalent of an acrobat working without a net), these have enough charm for me to forgive them. And finally, there's all of these brief reworkings of old solo+Wings McCartney material, and they're pretty fun. Regarding the Wings choices, picking two of the weaker tracks from Wings at the Speed of Sound is a bit of an eyebrow-raising choice (neither "Warm and Beautiful" nor "She's My Baby" is much better here than before), but I don't mind the rework of "My Love" at all, even if it sounds like something you'd expect to hear as background music from a string quartet hired for a wedding reception. As for the solo work, the later-period is predictably represented by two tracks from Flaming Pie ("Calico Skies" and "Somedays" which both sound nice here) and not-so-predictably by "Golden Earth Girl" from Off the Ground, which sounds really lovely. And finally, McCartney gets the prime positions of the album: the opening ("Junk," which retains all of the quiet wistfulness of the original), the middle ("Maybe I'm Amazed," which only lasts 2 minutes here but is probably the best 2 minutes of the album), and the end ("The Lovely Linda," which lasts about as long as the original and ends the album with me smiling).
This album has its charms, but in the end I'm not entirely sure who its audience should be. The string quartet versions of older solo material are worth hearing a couple of times, but I'd still rather hear the actual versions, and for somebody who legitimately enjoys classical I can't really get why they would turn to such a watered-down version of it like this album provides. Still, it's ok enough, and if you can find it for a couple of dollars it's not the worst way to spend money.
Best song: Free Now I guess
Best song: Heather or Rinse The Raindrops
The album starts off pretty strong, even if I wouldn't go so far as to put any of the songs into his upper tier. "Lonely Road" is much more interesting for its bass line and the growly desperation the arrangement exudes (with a great build in intensity, especially in Paul's vocal delivery) than for an especially interesting vocal melody, but at the very least it's a good dark mood-setter for the album. Better are "From a Lover to a Friend," a nice piano ballad that feels like it could have been written at any point in roughly the last dozen years but that has little flickers of genius that help remind me why I like McCartney so much, and "She Given Up Talking," a sort of trip-hop/soul slow-burn with a great guitar arrangement that loosely sounds like "Welcome to the Machine" in spots without any direct lifts. The guitar-heavy title track is also good, with a very solid chorus that somewhat offsets the very lightweight verses, and to the extent that it sounds somewhat effortless I tend to enjoy that he could churn out something like this without effort.
The next several tracks (from "I Do" to "About You") are somewhat of a slog; they're not bad by any means, but I do find my attention drifting quite a bit, as Paul churns out songs that more create the illusion of doing something interesting than of doing anything that I can actually identify as interesting (for what it's worth, this is the stretch that reminds me the most, for better or worse, of Elvis Costello, especially in "Tiny Bubble" and "About You"). I guess that I find some of the melody turns in "It Must Have Been Magic" and "Your Way" striking, and I'd certainly never skip these or any of the other songs in this stretch, but it's only with the terrific mostly-instrumental "Heather," with one of the best arrangements on the album (a great mix of piano and guitar, with the vocals only appearing in the last minute) that I find myself clearly paying attention to the album again.
From here on the album is much more on par with the start of the album than the middle of the album in terms of aggregate quality. "Back in the Sunshine" is another mid-tempo number that basically feels like something from Flaming Pie with a fuller arrangement, and if it's basically adult-contemporary with pounding drums and attractive guitars and a great jazzy piano part, then so be it. "Your Loving Flame" is an anthemic ballad that is basically the "yeah I could still rewrite 'Maybe I'm Amazed' if wanted to" number of the album, but I'll be damned if I'm not drawn in like a sucker every time, especially when the brief guitar solo emerges that just plays part of the vocal melody.
And then things get weird. "Riding into Jaipur" is a completely unexpected foray into Indian-influenced psychedelia, full of sitars and the like, and while it may not be especially good, it's a fascinating detour given everything that's come before and given its placement as the penultimate track. What emerges next, then, is an absolute shock: "Rinse the Raindrops" is a ten-minute noisy blast of cathartic release, centered around a nagging electric piano part but with angry guitars and drumming laid on top, and when the band shifts the track into a totally new direction at about the 2:45 mark, it's absolute bliss for me. McCartney's bass is fantastic throughout, and while the track sounds like a jamming exercise a group would put together while getting used to each other rather than something that would actually be released as a closing track, I'm totally into it.
Well, at least it would be the album closer if my version didn't include "Freedom" as a bonus track. Originally unveiled at The Concert for New York City, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the song would feature prominently in the live tour for this album, and it is a boring underwritten jingoistic POS. I get the inclination to write a song like this, and I don't find the words especially objectionable in and of themselves, but I find it gross and tacky in the same way that I find something like "God Bless the USA" gross and tacky, and I don't want something like this on a McCartney album.
Still, I can pretend "Freedom" doesn't exist if I want to, and if that's the case, then what I have is a pretty good McCartney album. Inexplicably, it sold horrendously, even though it received good critical reviews (the only explanation I can think of is that aforementioned Concert for New York City didn't do him any favors; I remember thinking in the moment that his performance was weirdly underwhelming and anti-climactic), but today, it deserves to be heard every bit as much as Flaming Pie does. If nothing else, give it a listen to hear McCartney occasionally dabbling in his artsier inclinations again.
Best song: lol
And yet, I enjoy it. Paul's voice is hardly at its best, but he doesn't sound especially worse than he did a decade earlier, and I kinda think he might sound better here than he did on Paul is Live (which I consider way more crass and pointless than this). His scripted interactions with the audience are often cornball (like when he has the crowd split by gender in singing the coda to "Hey Jude"), but they're sometimes cornball in a way I like (such as when he pretends to forget the words in a version of "You Never Give Me Your Money" that segues into "Carry That Weight"), and besides, it's Paul McCartney, of course he's going to be a little cornball. The selection of older solo tunes is a little safe, but at least he includes "Coming Up," "Every Night," and "C Moon," and if I have a sour taste in my mouth from hearing "Freedom" again, at least it's wiped away through hearing "Live and Let Die" again. As for the Beatles songs, he draws from their early and late periods amply, and it's interesting to hear him try to make numbers like "The Fool on the Hill," "Eleanor Rigby," and "Here, There and Everywhere" work in this setting. He also throws in a rendition of "Something" with Paul playing ukulele not especially well, and if I'm a sucker for enjoying it, then so be it.
In short, nobody needs this album, and listening to this album is somewhat the equivalent of eating a snack food from Hostess or Little Debbie, but sometimes junk food just hits the spot (even if you need to have something with a little more substance later to balance it out). I don't know when I'll listen to this stupid live album again, but I'm glad to have listened to this stupid live album as much as I have.
PS: There was a companion live album released called Back in the World, but I'm not reviewing it here because most of that album is literally the same tracks taking from the same performances as on here. The differences are as follows: (1) "Hey Jude" is from a different show; (2) "C Moon" and "Freedom" are dropped; (3) "Calico Skies," "Michelle," "Let 'Em In," and "She's Leaving Home" are added. Whatever.
PPS: There was a big kerfuffle around this time because the album changed the various Beatles writing credits from "Lennon/McCartney" to "McCartney/Lennon," and both Yoko Ono and Ringo Starr were publicly upset about this. I find everything about this and the ensuing controversy ridiculous, and everybody comes out of it looking bad.
Best song: Coming Up
The album's tone is immediately set with the opening "Really Love You," a decent but underwritten relative throwaway from Flaming Pie, but reworked here to loop one part of the bassline to make it sound like an intense and noisy dark dance number. The next track is named "Long Haired Lady (Reprise)," but it's actually a clever exercise in combining "Long Haired Lady" with "Three Legs," and the album maintains its fun level from there. There are a couple of additional tracks where he sticks with recent material ("Rinse the Raindrops" is boiled down to 3 minutes, and "Lalula," originally a B-side of "Really Love You," makes an appearance as well), but for the most part he draws from older material, and the results are just fascinating. The big hits portion of his career is represented by "Live and Let Die" (which emphasizes the "when you were young" line while looping over audio of people talking about what young Paul meant to them) and the closing "Maybe I'm Amazed," which finds a way to make an engaging 6+ minute track even though it sticks with the opening line and piano part almost exclusively. Side three (this was released as a 2-LP set) is bracketed by "What's That You're Doing" (which actually doesn't seem that different here from the original) and "Mumbo" (which THRIVES here; who would have thought that that dumbass opener to Wild Life was secretly just waiting for a techno remix??), and in the middle is a track that's labeled as "Oh Woman, Oh Why" (the B-side of the "Another Day" single) but that significantly incorporates elements of "Rock Show" and "Band on the Run" into it. And finally, the album includes three reworkings of McCartney II material, and I kinda love them here: "Darkroom," "Temporary Secretary," and, in an absolute triumph, "Coming Up," which gets merged with "Morse Moose and the Grey Goose" into a mashup that I now realize I always needed in my life.
I suppose that, in a certain sense, I could give this a higher grade given how much pure entertainment I get out of it, but as impressed as I am by this, the raw materials ultimately did all begin somewhere else, and I feel it necessary to exercise a little restraint. Still, I enjoy the hell out of this, and while I can imagine a McCartney purist feeling somewhat horrified (especially if they're the kind of McCartney fan who doesn't like McCartney II), I think that every McCartney fan should hear this at least once.
Best song: Riding To Vanity Fair maybe
The key word here, for me, is 'almost', and while listening to this album can often make me think that I should bump the rating up one or maybe even two points, there's just something about it that sounds a touch too Botox'd, a touch too embalmed for me to embrace it quite as warmly as many people did when this came out. There are certainly some tracks that I genuinely enjoy, such as the opening "Fine Line," a bouncy and instantly memorable piano-based music hall number (with nice touches of guitar) that ranks with anything Paul ever wrote, or "Riding to Vanity Fair," a song that Paul originally intended as briskly paced but that he slowed down at Godrich's request, making it into a moving and atmospheric highlight (full of 60s-style neo-psychedelic strings). "How Kind of You" is the closest the album gets to the "Paul McCartney does Radiohead" approach one might have theoretically imagined, and it's quite lovely, with a subtle dark majesty and some great synth and production touches throughout. The closing (sort of) "Anyway" is a very solid piano ballad, with vocal parts (both in the lead and in the background) that are both haunting and lovely, and the hidden bonus track instrumental "I've Only Got Two Hands" starts as a jolly way to finish things before leaving the album on a note of uncertainty.
Much of the rest album, though, makes me feel what I can best describe as a stupor of thought, even if I also feel warmly disposed to it both when listening to it and after it's done. I'm not even necessarily sure it's the nagging feeling that he's repeating himself that bothers me most, even if there is that sense from time to time (for instance, "Jenny Wren," as lovely as it is, sounds like what you'd get if you fed every known McCartney acoustic song into a computer program and asked it to create a new one based on the data). Mostly, it's the way that these tracks don't prompt any significant reaction in me beyond "I kinda like this" and a short matter-of-fact description (like saying "English Tea" is a twee music hall number in the tradition of twee McCartney music hall numbers, or "Friends to Go" sounds like George Harrison because Paul tried to sound like George Harrison). Try as I might, I simply cannot think of anything incisive about tracks like "Too Much Rain" or "A Certain Softness," and while I wouldn't tend to hold this sense of being dumbstruck against the best songs Paul wrote with The Beatles, here the songs aren't obviously good enough to make me ignore that there's a lack of especially prominent features to make me go beyond "yeah sure I like this whatever."
In short, I can absolutely understand loving this, but I can also absolutely understand thinking this album is secretly undercooked trash with a tastefully modern sheen thrown over it to throw people off the scent. I fall in the middle, and while I genuinely hoped this album would eventually grow on me as much as I initially thought it could, I have to offer a more tempered overall assessment. If you've gotten this far with late-period McCartney, then it's absolutely worth hunting down, but don't necessarily buy into the hype.
Best song: Interlude (Lament)
Unfortunately, even if there are some clear standout moments (the end of "III. Musica" is genuinely rousing, and if he had ended the work with this music rather than following it with the 15-minute title track I might like the piece more), the piece is ultimately held back by the main flaws that come with pop musicians trying to write orchestral music (care for surface elements but no sense of long-term rhetorical structure). As a result, it generally feels overlong and rambling, and once again, even if I have some respect for the effort, the amount that I can enjoy the work is limited. At the same time, though, I'm impressed that, between this and Standing Stone, he was able to put together multiple large-scale orchestral works that I honestly like in a certain sense, even though his creative process relied almost entirely on instinct and lacked formal training. If you liked Standing Stone, there's at least a pretty good chance you'll like this.
Best song: Dance Tonight or House Of Wax
The opening "Dance Tonight" might have done all that it could to irritate the entire world with how ubiquitous it became around the time of this album's release, and I admit that I rolled my eyes at it for a long time, but now I consider it roughly on par with "Silly Love Songs," and that means I love it. Lyrically, the song is as empty and unconcerned with "serious" lyrical topics as could possibly be, but they end up a large part of the song's charm, and in conjunction with the effortlessly bouncy and memorable melody, the delightful arrangement (especially the ukulele), and the lovely vocals (especially when Paul starts whistling), the song is a late-period classic that could have sounded at home at any point in the previous 40 years.
There's a lot more to the album than just the opening single, though. One of the most fascinating aspects of the album as a whole, for me, is the way that I keep coming back to Sparks, and in particular late-period Sparks, as a comparison point; aside from the way that (the endlessly catchy) "Ever Present Past" has a line that can't help but remind me of one of the best Sparks lines ("There's far too much on my plate / Don't have no time to be a decent lover" is basically a PG-version of "No time for relationship / Skip the foreplay, let 'er rip" from "Beat the Clock"), I also hear a good deal of Sparks in "Mr. Bellamy" (largely in the piano parts but generally in the specific way that music hall elements are integrated with other aspects) and in "Gratitude" (especially in the way that Paul sings the title in falsetto, even if the rest of the song is Paul doing one of his soul-ish slow-burners). Yes, there are lot of reasons that these couldn't actually be Sparks songs (The Maels would have punched them up a bit lyrically), but it's very interesting to me to Paul tapping into a similar vein that Sparks was tapping into around this time, and this approach works well for him.
Beyond these tracks, the album has a nice amount of variety, both in style and mood, and it does a great job of keeping me engaged. "See Your Sunshine" reminds me in the slightest bit of "Take it Away" (from Tug of War), but never actually does anything to directly crib from it, and it's just a really nice poppy song that may not have a single great hook but has lots of little elements that are memorable and classy (the high-pitched backing vocals in the beginning and throughout are a really nice touch). "Only Mama Knows," after a somewhat overlong synth strings introduction, turns into a surprisingly (given what the album had provided thus far) energetic and gritty rocker with a solid chorus (as well as an unexpected "Hold on ..." slow section that works well in context), and it would become a highlight of Paul's live shows over the coming years. The following "You Tell Me," then, is a dark and melancholy acoustic ballad (with some slow electric guitar here and there for mood), and I'll be damned if it doesn't sound 10 times more impactful than "Jenny Wren" did (I suppose that in a certain sense "Jenny Wren" would fit in better on this album, but it's not nearly as good).
After the short stretch of songs that remind me of Sparks, a six-song stretch emerges that impresses me as much as any six-song stretch from Paul in recent memory before this. "Vintage Clothes" freely pulls in little details from Paul's Beatles past (the Mellotron using the flute setting from "Strawberry Fields Forever," the guitar sounds that sound straight off the Sgt. Pepper reprise) and uses them to flesh out a chaotic-yet-memorable song, which in turn segues effortlessly from its own acoustic ending to the fun-as-hell "That Was Me," a mid-tempo rocker with tons of swing and a wordless vocal part in the middle (doubled by a synth) that I can practically guarantee you won't get out of your head for hours after hearing it. The following "Feet in the Clouds" is weaker, as it has a section involving Melodyne (a program similar to Autotune) that I'm not thrilled with, but there's something about how effortless the song sounds on the whole that makes me forgive it; it shouldn't be possible for a part with "and I find it very very very very very very hard" sung with minimal notes to be so oddly affecting, and yet here it is, a key part of quite a nice song.
The last three songs, then, are a real treat. From the opening piano chords, it's clear that "House of Wax" is going to be the album's one burst of relative darkness, and it's spectacular in the way that, say, "Beware My Love" was about 30 years earlier. When Paul sings "Buried deep below a thousand layers lay the answer to it all" over chords that live in pitch-black until a glimmer of light peeks in at the end, it's a deeply cathartic moment, and the solo that Paul gives out in the middle (yes that's Paul!!) is a howl of despair and anguish with almost no parallel in Paul's recording history (except for, again, in "Beware My Love"). The following "The End of the End" is somewhat anti-climactic coming right out of "House of Wax," but it's still a very rousing piano-heavy ballad on par with "Come On People" (which, dammit, I still really like), and it's just so nice to hear Paul whistle again. And finally, rather than finish with "The End of the End" as one might reasonably expect, Paul ends with "Nod Your Head," a 2-minute simplistic and noisy rocker (with Paul playing all of the instruments) that's dumb as hell on first listen and gloriously stupid fun thereafter. Most people (including Paul most of the time) would have relegated this to a bonus track or maybe into the middle of the album or might not have released it at all; Paul put it at the end, and it helps give the album another twist of character and personality it would otherwise lack.
As with all of Paul's albums beyond a certain age, this doesn't fundamentally add to his career or to my collection in an earth-shattering way, and there are enough little details here and there that don't entirely thrill me that I can't give this a higher grade. And yet, this is just about the ideal of what I could reasonably hope for and expect from late-period Paul, in terms of individual song quality and album construction, and it's so damn memorable and fun (but with enough downbeat material in place to keep the cheeriness from becoming annoying) that I have to tip my hat. This is the kind of album that makes me glad that I routinely force myself to listen to late-period releases with serious intent.
Best song: I'll Follow The Sun maybe
If you've been faithfully slogging along with McCartney's solo career and picking up his live albums on release, but somehow missed this one because it's an archive release, you absolutely owe it to yourself to hear this one. It's by no means a spectacular live album (Paul's too limited of a live performer to have that in play), but in terms of flow, and song selection, and using the performing venue to his advantage, this is an utter delight.
Best song: Sing The Changes or Light From Your Lighthouse
In a few tracks, McCartney manages to come through with some very impressive material, especially in a six-song stretch near the beginning. "Sing the Changes" is a giant U2-like anthem, something that could have been a strong highlight on Flowers in the Dirt, and the instrumentation and backing vocals do a great job of carrying the load for a song that doesn't actually have much of a primary vocal melody. "Traveling Light" is a dark atmospheric ballad that I like quite a bit, something that I could easily imagine appearing on a contemporary Steve Hackett solo album (Steve would have featured his guitar, of course, but the foundation sounds a lot like it could have been on Wild Orchids); "Highway" is a fun bluesy stomping anthem with great harmonica and "do ya do ya do ya" backing vocals that I like a lot; "Light From Your Lighthouse," a cover of an old gospel/blues song, features Paul making one of his vocal tracks very high-pitched and another one into a clone of Tom Waits, and the end effect is both hilarious and instantly memorable; "Sun is Shining" starts slow but becomes very uplifting by the time the chorus hits; and "Dance 'Til We're High" basically sounds like Paul imitating Ray Thomas (at least in the verses) singing a Flaming Lips song circa The Soft Bulletin, and it kinda rules. The album also ends on a strong note, with the six-minute "Don't Stop Running," which somehow simultaneously sounds like something from Trespass-era Genesis (in the guitars) and from late-period Peter Gabriel (especially once it gets to the chorus), before giving way to a somewhat forgettable atmospheric bonus track ("Road Trip").
So if there are all of those good songs, why don't I give this a higher grade? Because the rest of the album, while not bad, somewhat lets it down. The opening "Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight" is amusing on first couple of listens, in that it's a noisy bluesy rocker in which Paul is transparently lashing out at Heather Mills (the once happy couple had recently divorced), but as novel as it may be to have a track like this on a McCartney album (especially with him playing all of the instruments), it's not really much of a song. Likewise, "Two Magpies" is a quiet contrast to the loud opener, but it's almost insulting to hear how half-baked it is; by this point, Paul could churn out acoustic songs about birds in his sleep, and in this case it sounds like he actually did. Later in the album, then, is a three song stretch ("Lifelong Passion", "Is This Love?", "Lovers in a Dream") where I always end up losing focus; there are some fun combinations of sounds ("Lovers in a Dream" sounds a lot in spots from Pink Floyd in the More era, for instance), but these aren't enough to prevent my overall impression of the album from dropping a bit.
Still, even if this album doesn't end up living up to the promise of the best material, it's still another good Fireman album and another good late-period McCartney album, and it's definitely worth hearing a couple of times. I'll admit that part of me wishes he'd made just one more electronic music album, good or bad, but it's neat to hear the Fireman pairing trying something different by trying something more conventional.
Best song: LOL
Best song: that's not really how this works
Best song: The Inch Worm
Best song: Save Us or Road
The easiest way to group these songs is by producer, so I'll start with Paul Epworth, not least because his material starts and ends the album proper (there's a bonus track that I'll mention later). The opening "Save Us" has a driving sense of urgency in the guitars and a pulsating piano part buried in the mix, and Paul's vocal melody only magnifies this urgency, especially in the great "save ... us ... now" that ends the verses and gets sprinkled in elsewhere. It's an absolutely powerhouse of a song, and what's more it packs all of this wallop in a mere 2:39. "Queenie Eye," one of the album's singles, is inspired by a game he used to play as a kid (called "Queenie, Queenie, who's got the ball?"), and it's a fascinating exercise in Paul finding new ways to channel his music hall instincts: there's mellotron in the big anthemic verses and chorus (where the melody is punctuated with shouts that would have been fun as hell in concert), there's a quiet mid-section full of gentle Moog parts and lap steel guitar, and overall it's just a delight. The closing "Road," then, is a near late-period masterpiece: the verses start off as quiet uneasy tension, eventually swallowed up by a menacing piano that takes over the breaks, and the song continually interweaves these quiet and intense portions together until Paul sings the line "heading for the light" and the piano returns and makes the song pitch-black. I don't know if Paul was thinking he might die after this or what, but if he had this would have been a hell of a way to end things for him.
Mark Ronson takes production duties on two songs, and while they're not as jarringly impressive as Epworth's, they're still fine. "Alligator" has a fascinating synth line popping up underneath it from time to time, but the bulk of the song is a decent guitar-driven song that occasionally goes into slower atmospheric section to mixed effect, and in the end I largely find myself wishing for more of the synth line. Ronson also gets production duties on the title track, which is clearly meant to be the album's big uplifting feel-good number, and for the most part it succeeds. It's very bouncy in a way that only McCartney can really get away with (and that even he can't always get away with), and there's a high note Paul repeatedly hits that's completely irresistible, so it can stick around. Plus, the instrument list on this one is hilariously long, and mostly played by Paul: just among the keyboards, there's harpsichord, piano, electric piano, and mellotron, but he also plays bass guitar, bouzouki, congas, and maracas.
Ethan Johns also gets two songs, and they're pretty good for the most part. "Early Days" is an upbeat acoustic guitar song (with other instruments added for support as needed) that doesn't feel like Paul is recycling his older upbeat acoustic guitar songs, and while I wouldn't put it in his upper tier of such songs, it's nice enough. "Hosanna" is a darker acoustic guitar song, without an especially clear strong melody but a low-key urgency that I find attractive, and while it's also not an album highlight, it's a nice inclusion nonetheless.
Finally, Giles Martin gets five songs, plus a bonus track, and the tracks that bear his mark are a varied lot that do a good job of fleshing out the remainder of the album. "On My Way to Work" is a pleasant mid-tempo pop ballad at its core, but there's an interesting noisier bit that pops up a couple of times (without the song losing its beat), and on the whole it strikes a good balance between cohesive and varied that I really admire. A few tracks later comes "Appreciate," which goes for very contemporary choices in production (especially in the production and the effects placed on Paul's voice), and while it's not one of my favorites on the album overall (it was one of the tracks that tricked me initially into thinking that Paul had gone way too hard into trying to sound contemporary on this album as a whole), it does have an interesting mood on the whole, and there's enough bizarre and noisy parts stuffed into the mix to keep my interest. "Everybody Out There" starts off as a big, somewhat empty anthem without much to it beyond a decent guitar line (and it keeps coming back to the big empty stomp), but then it has one of the album's very best hooks when Paul sings "There but for the grace of god go you and I" over a descending melody, so the song can definitely stick around it. "I Can Bet" is a terrific combination of stomping mid-tempo rock with dance pop (there is SO MUCH stuffed into this song in terms of interesting melody lines, piercing guitar lines, and tight dance beats), and "Looking at Her" is slinky pop that knows when to get a little noisier and never stops being catchy, and this pair does a great of setting up "Road." And finally, there's a lovely and melancholy bonus track called "Scared," with just Paul on a keyboard as he pours out a confessional without forgetting to keep it tuneful, dissolving in a whisp after the lines "how much you mean to me now."
I really resisted the idea initially that this stretch of Paul (minus a throwaway like Kisses on the Bottom) could have just kept going and going at such a relatively high level, but if songs are strong enough they're eventually going to break through, and that's what happened to me with this album. This is hardly an amazing album in the grand scheme of things, but I don't have to find an album amazing in order to find it impressive, and for Paul to make this album at this age is flat-out impressive.
Best song: Despite Repeated Warnings or Hunt You Down/Naked/C-Link
After a brief opening ambient (!) instrumental in "Opening Station," the album gives way to "I Don't Know," a lovely mid-tempo wistful piano-heavy number (with bits of mellotron flute buried in the mix behind the acoustic guitar and the drums) that becomes gradually more optimistic as the song goes, and it's a great way to enter the album. The following "Come On to Me," then, goes in a completely different direction with a stomping mid-tempo keyboard-heavy guitar-rocker (and great drums, and bits of sitar, and horns) with a multitude of punchy hooks and a false ending + extended coda, and it's just a ton of fun. After a delightfully spry acoustic number in "Happy With You," and the fascinating mid-tempo pop-rocker "Who Cares" (which is mostly conventional in the main section, albeit with some fun delivery choices, but has a noisy introduction that almost sounds like the beginning of something like "There There" by Radiohead), the album comes to "Fuh You," which ... I don't hate. I mean, hearing it everywhere at the time of release was pretty annoying, and initial casual listens made it seem like Paul had written something like his own version of "Soul Sister" or something like that, and the whole idea of making the title a cross between "for you" and "f**k you" was pretty eye-rolling, and yet ... I mean, I love the build in the chorus, and I love how the chorus culminates in Paul going so high when he sings "I just wanna fuh ... YOOOOOOOOOOU" like he was still in Wings or something (I'm sure there was more than a bit of studio help at play, but it's not obvious that there's studio help, and that matters at least some). He absolutely could have written something like this back in his initial post-Beatles hey-day, albeit arranged in a very different way, and I find it a lot of fun.
After a thoughtful acoustic ballad (with well-placed effects on his acoustic parts in just the right spots) in "Confidante," the three-minute "People Want Peace" comes along and sounds like a modern consolidation and update of some of the best parts of Tug of War, and while Paul's up-with-the-world anthems always have at least some eye-rolling built into them, this is a case where I'm more than willing to overlook that in favor of the playful music hall introduction and the rousing (but without overdoing it) chorus. "Hand in Hand" doesn't quite live up to the potential in the initial piano chords, but if the song drags a little, at least it only does so for 2:35, and it's good enough that I don't consider it anything like a bad track (and the bits of recorded in the second half are a nice touch). "Dominoes," on the other hand, is really good, building on a terrific initial acoustic guitar line into a gentle groove that doesn't really develop that much over its 5 minutes but manages to get by on vocal melody and charm, and it's an album highlight.
Up next is "Back in Brazil," and while I'm not sure if I quite love this one, it definitely makes for a fascinating 3:21, with a very curious bossa nova rhythm that the song overlays with a vocal melody that doesn't do much and yet does just enough in the right spots, and that benefits from a repeated sparse synth pattern and an unexpected chant of a Japanese word ("Ichiban!") in the middle. Neither "Do it Now" (a piano ballad that might be the album's one real dud) nor "Caesar Rock" (which has a bunch of ideas dumped into it that are each individually promising but that don't really gel) are especially strong, but at least the album then proceeds to end on an extended high note. Over the course of 7 minutes, "Despite Repeated Warnings" goes from a promising fragment of a ballad that never really goes anywhere into a kinda dance-ish anthemic stomper, and then there's these great disco-ish downward synth string patches, and the song turns into a full-fledged dance anthem (where it's all I can do not to sing "YES WE CAN DO IT! YES WE CAN DO IT NOW!!" along with Paul) before turning into something like the ballad at the beginning, and the effect is fantastic. Afterwards, "Station II" then seems like it's going to be another brief, fully ambient track, acting as a balance to the opener, but then its true nature as an opener to the actual final track is betrayed when the roaring guitar riff emerges, and another medley emerges. "Hunt You Down / Naked / C-Link," should it be such (and as of 2020, that looks pretty likely), is the perfect potential close to Paul's career: "Hunt You Down" is a catchy-as-hell mid-tempo rocker with dance-y effects and all sorts of instruments dumped into the mix, "Naked" is a wonderfully goofy waltz with a piano underpinning it, and "C-Link" is a moody, bluesy guitar-heavy instrumental with some bits of eerie strings in the background. There's no big statement here, and yet weirdly that feels like the point, and I really dig it.
No, this is not one of Paul's very best post-Beatles albums, yet I feel like it almost has to be in the top 10, and for this to happen at an age when his creative candle almost certainly should have burned out (and when it felt like it had burned out many times over the previous decades) gives me one more thing to feel awe about in examining Paul's career as a whole. If you decided to avoid this because "Fuh You" scared you off, please reconsider for your own benefit.
Best song: very difficult to choose
Choosing a favorite track on this album is incredibly difficult for me and largely depends on what kind of mood I'm in (I feel like every track on here is one where I could come up with a plausible argument to put it in this album's top 3). "Pretty Boys," "The Kiss of Venus," and the closing "When Winter Comes" (a leftover from 1992, with George Martin producing) all represent the quiet, acoustic, tuneful side of McCartney well, providing a nice sense of variety to the album without feeling like they're close replicas of Paul's best acoustic songs from earlier years. The opening "Long Tailed Winter Bird" (which gets a brief reprise at the beginning of "When Winter Comes") never bothers to come up with a vocal melody of consequence, but that's largely irrelevant when the main instrumental groove (primarily driven by a fascinating acoustic guitar part, with some grumbling electric guitar and pounding drums burrowing up from the ground eventually to give it some heft) is so addictive. "Lavatory Lil" and "Slidin'" are the album's big dumb catchy rockers, both of which somebody could dismiss as beneath Paul if they wanted but that I find so memorable (and well-placed, immediately surrounding the album's major centerpiece in "Deep Deep Feeling") that I give them each a big dumb thumbs up. "Deep Deep Feeling" (which lasts over 8 minutes) and "Deep Down" (which lasts almost 6 minutes) are the album's big moody atmospheric statements, courtesy of very moody keyboards (largely piano in the former, largely organ in the later) and very hypnotic drum parts underpinning mantra-like vocals, and while I certainly don't consider them masterworks of any sort, I also find myself strongly admiring them when they're on.
"Find My Way" is almost the opposite of those two tracks, an extremely upbeat song that I wasn't at all surprised to learn got nominated for a Grammy, and at the very least it would have fit in very well on the more overtly commercial New or Egypt Station (both of which I like plenty, so this is a compliment); it sticks out a little bit on this album, but not too badly, and it certainly doesn't hurt the album's flow. And finally, "Women and Wives" and "Seize the Day" are each very good up-tempo piano-heavy ballads, maybe a little more overtly poppy in "Seize the Day," but both plenty enjoyable on their own and, again, terrific inclusions in context.
In short, for a collection of material that originated as a bunch of free-floating spare parts, this holds together shockingly well as an album, and in many ways it's that successful contradiction that impresses me the most about it and makes me rate it a little higher than the individual tracks might merit. Maybe this ends his career, maybe it doesn't, but it extends his late-career winning streak even further, and I'm glad Paul decided to spend his COVID lockdown on this instead of just binging Downton Abbey or something like that.
McCartney - 1970 Apple
B
(Very Good)
*Ram (Paul McCartney And Linda McCartney) - 1971 Apple*
E
(Great)
Wild Life (Wings) - 1971 Apple
6
(Mediocre)
Red Rose Speedway (Paul McCartney And Wings) - 1973 Apple
9
(Good)
Band On The Run (Paul McCartney And Wings) - 1973 Apple
D
(Great / Very Good)
Venus And Mars (Wings) - 1975 Capitol
C
(Very Good / Great)
Wings At The Speed Of Sound (Wings) - 1976 Capitol
7
(Mediocre / Good)
Wings Over America (Wings) - 1976 Capitol
9
(Good)
London Town (Wings) - 1978 Capitol
8
(Good / Mediocre)
Back To The Egg (Wings) - 1979 Columbia
8
(Good / Mediocre)
McCartney II - 1980 Columbia
9
(Good)
Tug Of War - 1982 Columbia
B
(Very Good)
Pipes Of Peace - 1983 Columbia
5
(Mediocre / Bad)
Give My Regards To Broad Street - 1985 Columbia
6
(Mediocre)
Press To Play - 1986 Capitol
6
(Mediocre)
CHOBA B CCCP - 1988/1991 Melodia
7
(Mediocre / Good)
Flowers In The Dirt - 1989 Parlophone
9
(Good)
Tripping The Live Fantastic - 1990 Parlophone
9
(Good)
Unplugged (The Official Bootleg) - 1991 Parlophone
9
(Good)
Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio (Paul McCartney & Carl Davis) - 1991 EMI
5
(Mediocre / Bad)
Off The Ground - 1993 Parlophone
A
(Very Good / Good)
Paul Is Live - 1993 Parlophone
7
(Mediocre / Good)
Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest (The Fireman) - 1993 Parlophone
7
(Mediocre / Good)
Flaming Pie - 1997 Parlophone
9
(Good)
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Standing Stone - 1997 EMI Classics
8
(Good / Mediocre)
Rushes (The Fireman) - 1998 EMI
9
(Good)
Run Devil Run - 1999 Parlophone
9
(Good)
Working Classical - 1999 EMI Classics
7
(Mediocre / Good)
Liverpool Sound Collage - 2000 Capitol
6
(Mediocre)
Driving Rain - 2001 Parlophone
9
(Good)
Back In The U.S. - 2002 Capitol
8
(Good / Mediocre)
Twin Freaks - 2005 Parlophone
9
(Good)
Chaos And Creation In The Backyard - 2005 Parlophone
9
(Good)
Ecce Cor Meum - 2006 EMI
8
(Good / Mediocre)
Memory Almost Full - 2007 Hear Music
B
(Very Good)
Amoeba Gig - 2019 Capitol
A
(Very Good / Good)
Electric Arguments (The Fireman) - 2008 One Little Indian
9
(Good)
Good Evening New York CIty - 2009 Mercury
8
(Good / Mediocre)
Ocean's Kingdom - 2011 Decca
8
(Good / Mediocre)
Kisses On The Bottom - 2012 Hear Music
5
(Mediocre / Bad)
New - 2013 Hear Music
A
(Very Good / Good)
Egypt Station - 2018 Capitol
A
(Very Good / Good)
McCartney III - 2020 Capitol
A
(Very Good / Good)