Cool Websites

Browsing Category Paul

The McCartney/Costello Demos

March 27, 2015 · by solobeatles

The mid-‘80s saw a dip in McCartney’s career after the triumph of his 1982 album Tug of War. Pipes of Peace (1983) received lukewarm critical response, his feature Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) was a box office flop, and Press (1986) saw a significant drop in sales compared to his earlier releases. McCartney decided an overhaul was in order and reached out to Elvis Costello (born Declan MacManus).

Costello originally rose to fame as a member of the late ‘70s punk/New Wave movement due to his angry intellectual persona, but the sophistication of his snarky wordplay and torch song melodies made him a genre all to himself. Also, like McCartney he had a musician father, a Liverpudlian mother — and he had joined the Beatles fan club at age 11.

On George Harrison’s recent comeback album Cloud Nine (1987), producer Jeff Lynne cajoled him to get back in touch with the Beatle qualities he had suppressed in order to prove he could make it on his own. On Flowers in the Dirt, Costello did the same for McCartney, first by encouraging him to get his Hofner violin bass out of mothballs. Deciding the past was now far enough away, McCartney did so and from then on played it regularly.

McCartney relished working with Costello, whose cynical persona was reminiscent of Lennon’s. However, when Costello started answering back in song, as Lennon did in “Getting Better,” McCartney initially balked, fearing they were setting themselves up for too close a comparison. Still, he eventually relaxed, and Costello joined the tradition of singing partners with whom McCartney competes for a girl in a song. Lennon did so in “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl,” Michael Jackson in “The Girl Is Mine,” and Costello in “You Want Her Too.”

In 1987 and 1988, McCartney and Costello recorded an album’s worth of acoustic demos. Twelve were eventually re-recorded for various albums or b-sides, but to many hardcore fans the demos are actually superior to the slickly produced official versions. The high-pitched harmonies of the “My Brave Face” demo have the strength and purity of the Fabs in 1963.

The “Don’t Be Careless Love” demo recalls the heyday of British duos like Chad and Jeremy and Peter and Gordon, but on Flowers in the Dirt, McCartney dropped Costello’s voice in the mix and swathed it with ‘80s production gauze.

He did the same for “That Day Is Done,” but at the Concert for Linda’s Memorial in 1999, Costello knocked it out of the park accompanied just by piano.

Hopefully, Macca and Costello will officially release the original demos one day soon.

Probably their finest collaboration was “Veronica,” which appeared on Costello’s 1989 album Spike. A shimmering up-tempo number, paradoxically it was about Costello’s grandmother who suffered from Alzheimer’s. (“The Day is Done” was about her death.) It was Costello’s biggest hit in the US, making it to No. 19 on Billboard and No. 1 on the Modern Rock chart.

Of the twelve McCartney-Costello songs that have so far seen official release, the only ones on which the two sing together are “My Brave Face,” “You Want Her Too,” and “Veronica.” The others include: the fine “Back on My Feet,” b-side to McCartney’s “Once Upon a Long Ago” (on bonus reissues of Flowers in the Dirt), “Don’t Be Careless Love” and “That Day Is Done” on Flowers in the Dirt, “Mistress and Maid” and “The Lovers That Never Were” on McCartney’s Off the Ground (1993), “Pads, Paws, and Claws” on Costello’s Spike (1989), “So Like Candy” and “Playboy to a Man” on Costello’s Mighty Like a Rose (1991), and “Shallow Grave” on Costello’s All This Useless Beauty (1996).

McCartney Gets “Back on His Feet” with the Help of Elvis Costello

February 23, 2015 · by solobeatles

In the mid-’80s, the commercial drop off that had hit Starr and Harrison finally caught up to McCartney. First, his feature film GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROAD STREET (1984) was not well-received by the critics. For his follow up, 1986’s PRESS TO PLAY, he enlisted cutting edge producer Hugh Padgham (the Police, Phil Collins, Genesis, Peter Gabriel), but the record failed to go gold and was his worst-selling album to date.

As workaholic as ever, McCartney immediately started the next record with Billy Joel’s band and producer Phil Ramone, and they created an early version of “Back on My Feet.”

Ramone was dead center in the mainstream, but to spruce up the lyrics McCartney turned to New Wave singer-songwriter Elvis Costello. In their first meeting, they both brought unfinished songs for the other to fill in, like McCartney did with Lennon in the old days. Costello immediately helped bring “Back on My Feet” into sharp focus with concrete, vivid details.

In the first two verses, the protagonist is an old man railing at the thunderstorm pouring down on him, vowing to bounce back in the face of bruising setbacks. The defiance turns into cheerful optimism in the final verse, as a resilient young girl becomes the new protagonist, yelling that she’ll be back on her feet to the passing traffic. The characters ask us for a hand but warn us not to pity them, as they’ve seen things we’ll never see.

McCartney was still in a movie mindset and sings that the song is “in CinemaScope.” Each verse begins with cinematic terminology: “Reveal a,” “Cut to the,” “Focus in on,” “Cut back again to a . . .” At the end, McCartney sings that the song fades out as he pulls down the shade.

The amazing thing about McCartney is the number of times he’s rebounded from flops that would have discouraged someone with less fortitude: MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR, WILD LIFE, BROAD STREET, Heather Mills. Perhaps the cost of producing so many successes was the inevitable dud, but the guy was a machine who never stopped.

“Back on My Feet” became a B-side that marked a moment of resurgence. The non album A-side “Once upon a Long Ago” featured an impressive orchestral lushness but also sappy lyrics about puppy dog tails, blowing balloons, and children searching for treasure, not to mention a Kenny G–like sax solo perfect for the corporate luncheon crowd. Costello arrived just in time to remind McCartney how not to be corny.

To Musician, Costello said, “There’s no denying that [McCartney] has a way of sort of defending himself by being charming and smiling and thumbs up and all the bit. I said once that I thought he should try and step from behind that, at least insofar as the music was concerned.”

Re-energized and refocused, with his next album (FLOWERS IN THE DIRT) and subsequent world tour, McCartney would indeed be back on his feet.

“Move Over Busker” was another fun track from the period that shared the movie imagery of “Back on My Feet,” along with its resolve to overcome the disappointment of GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROAD STREET.

A pub rocker refitted with a modern sound, “Move Over Busker” was akin to a surreal Bob Dylan tune in the sense that McCartney meets a famous actor from the past in each of the three verses.

The first is Nell Gwynne, an actress and mistress of King Charles II in the 1600s. She started out selling oranges in the theater as cover for the fact that her real job was to be a liaison between the male patrons and the actresses backstage, who were also prostitutes. Hence, McCartney sings to her that he’ll have one of her oranges, but she tells him to “Move Over Busker.”

In the next verse he sees Mae West. Quoting her famous catch phrase, McCartney tells her he’ll come up and see her sometime, but she tells him to “Move Over Busker.”

It’s as if, in McCartney’s subconscious, after BROAD STREET’S failure he keeps getting rejected by actresses and is reduced to playing for change in the street.

Finally, in the bridge, he beats his chest and asserts that no one can hold him back and his time will come again. We see both the desperation and steely drive that kept him working for the chart hits. He sings that he wants to stay with the action, knowing if he doesn’t “grab it now,” his “great illusion” will vanish, before busting out with a Little Richard howl.

In the third verse, he’s nursing his injured pride when he sees a satisfied Errol Flynn being called into his trailer by a lusty lady. Flynn’s getting the love now, but McCartney tells him to move over, busker, because Flynn’s day is done and McCartney’s is on the way.

In the tradition of his ’70s albums, the refrain “good times coming” echoes another song on PRESS TO PLAY, “Good Times Coming/Feel the Sun.”

Where Do I Start With Paul McCartney? My Latest Article in Slate.Com

October 15, 2013 · by solobeatles

To mark the release of Paul McCartney’s new album NEW (out today), Slate.com asked me to come up with his Top 10 solo songs. Impossible to do but I gave it a shot … I’m sure everyone has a completely different list!

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/10/15/paul_mccartney_best_solo_songs_after_the_beatles_where_to_start_video.html

McCartney Declares War Then Peace On Lennon In “Too Many People” and “Dear Friend”

February 17, 2013 · by solobeatles

No song by McCartney captures the loneliness and anger of the Beatles’ feud as intensely as “Too Many People,” in which all his vitriol spewed out like an infected zit. The lyrics read as the anti-Beatles version of Starr’s “Early 1970.” McCartney is getting pushed around by Lennon going underground and letting himself be a mouthpiece for the Communist party radicals. One of them, Yippie A. J. Weberman, even took a break from harassing Dylan to stage a protest in front of Linda’s father’s Park Avenue residence on Christmas Eve 1970.11 McCartney also slams Lennon for sinking into heroin with Ono, losing weight, and just eating cake, as junkies have a notorious sweet tooth. Not only was Lennon preachy politically, Harrison was religiously preachy to the max as well. And all of them were trying to grab McCartney’s cake: under the groups’ contract, all the profits of each ex-Beatles’ albums go to the company and then the total is divided among them. (Although, truth be told, Harrison was the biggest seller at the moment, so the set up benefited McCartney in 1971.)

McCartney vows that he’s not going to hold back his feelings anymore, though he did temper the opening line. Originally it was “Yoko took your lucky break and broke it in two,” but he changed “Yoko” to “you.”

The performance opens with a malevolent groan that could either be an effects-treated guitar, a harmonium, or far-off horns. The sense of physical space in the recording conjures the dread of walking into a deserted mausoleum in a horror film, underscoring the “lucky break” taunt. No doubt it is meant to instill the unease in Lennon and Co. that they will never be able to measure up in the future without McCartney. It perfectly captures the eerie foreboding when partners are divorcing, with one wondering privately if he is making a mistake even while trying to scare the other that he will regret it. When Lennon heard it, did he have an inkling that he would only have one more number one record in his lifetime?

McCartney whips himself into a war dance, dancing around Hugh McCracken’s guitar pyrotechnics with falsetto shrieks and whoops, banging the floor tom drum.

Lennon would counter on his next album with “How Do You Sleep,” which would also be magnificently played and produced. But it is so overtly about McCartney that its subject can’t be separated from the performance, making it difficult to enjoy beyond the context of Lennon’s character assassination. By being lyrically just vague enough and played within an arresting sound scape, “Too Many People” transcends the backdrop that inspired it.

Ram’s back cover included the subtle snapshot of one beetle screwing another. The front featured McCartney holding a ram by horns, so for Imagine Lennon inserted a postcard in which he holds a pig by the ears, grinning. Lennon also continued to be a loose cannon in the press. He sent an open letter to McCartney via the music mag Melody Maker in which he wrote that McCartney had said to him, “‘Ringo and George are going to break you John’ . . . Who’s the guy threatening to ‘finish’ Ringo and Maureen, who was warning me on the phone two weeks ago? Who said he’d ‘get us’ whatever the cost? As I’ve said before—have you ever thought that you might possibly be wrong about something?” He then slagged off McCartney’s father-in-law.

Obviously, fighting with the vicious Lennon in public was like dancing around gasoline with a match. And while Lennon forgot the fact whenever convenient, to McCartney they had been best friends, which was why he had overreacted and botched the whole “dealing with Yoko” thing in the first place.

McCartney began working on the song that would become “Dear Friend” during the Ram sessions. For many critics it was the sole redemption of the Wild Life album. It was the record’s last song, showing the continued primacy of the feud in his life, as “Too Many People” had been the first song on Ram.

The disconsolate piano brings to mind a man walking through a dark cavern, as McCartney faced the precarious decision of whether to up the arms race of mutually assured destruction. His voice strains at the high end of his register, like a guy who has been bullied but knows he must speak up though he’s also afraid. He can’t believe they’ve come so close to the edge, and he’s shocked it all means so much to Lennon. Perhaps he’s referring to the money and how they were forcing McCartney to stay in the company to avoid paying higher taxes. Perhaps he’s referring to Lennon’s need to yell his side of the story through the press at everyone else’s expense.

The song is famously known as a conciliatory make-up song. With surprising honesty, McCartney sings that he’s in love with his friend and wishes him the best with his marriage. But McCartney also asks Lennon if he’s a fool and if he’s afraid, which sounds like a bit of a provocation, even as his voice is timid in the gloom, a passive-aggressive Gemini as always. Probably it was hard for McCartney to be the guy stepping back saying, “I don’t want to fight,” even though he had been the one who started it.

McCartney plays the same ruminating piano chords for almost six minutes, mirroring the emotional obsession he couldn’t shake. But he uses what he learned on the Thrillington instrumental album to sustain interest through a subtle build in accompaniment with forlorn strings and foreboding horns until everything recedes except the quiet, lonely piano, and then it finally stops as well. Wild Life was released in the United Kingdom in November 1971 and in the United States in early December. At some point, McCartney called Lennon, and shortly afterward Lennon sent McCartney a Christmas gift, a bootleg of the group’s audition for Decca Records. A little after Christmas, the McCartneys dropped by Lennon and Ono’s Greenwich Village home, and the former bandmates stopped attacking each other in public. Eventually, the postcard in Imagine was changed to one of Lennon playing the panpipes.

McCartney’s Anthem to Optimism “Hope of Deliverance”

December 30, 2012 · by solobeatles

The lyrics of the single from 1993’s OFF THE GROUND album recall the stiff upper lip of World War II–era Britain. They’re married to bossa-nova percussion, an accordion, and a twelve-string acoustic guitar vaguely reminiscent of Trini Lopez’s “If I Had a Hammer” or a relaxed take on the 1940s Latin hit “Besame Mucho,” an old standby of the Beatles in their Cavern days.

The storyline of McCartney’s 90-minute classical piece LIVERPOOL ORATORIO followed his own life, beginning with his childhood in Liverpool. When he returned to Liverpool to write it, he was flooded with memories from the 1940s. Perhaps the same memories informed this song as well. Maybe the 1987 feature HOPE AND GLORY also inspired him. The film was based on director John Boorman’s experience as a little kid in London during the Nazi bombings and how his family tried to hold together during the chaotic times. The film’s title came from the 1902 patriotic British song “Land of Hope and Glory.”

McCartney’s song expresses the same unsinkable determination not to give into despair despite the encroaching darkness. As it sprang from English history, the song resonated more in the United Kingdom, making it to number fifteen there but only number eighty-three in the United States. (It did reach number nine on the US adult contemporary chart.)

Despite the possible World War II connotations, it became the most played record on German radio ever. It was one of McCartney’s biggest-selling singles in Europe, with sales of over 4 million, helped by a colorful dance remix video in which it looks like the crowd is all on really good ecstasy.

Today’s Excerpt on Rolling Stone.com: Paul and “Silly Love Songs”

August 16, 2012 · by solobeatles

Paul reconquered America in 1976 ten years after the Beatles’ last tour with the help of this classic single.

Please click the link below to check out the article:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/book-excerpt-paul-mccartney-goes-from-eleanor-rigby-to-silly-love-songs-and-back-again-20120816

McCartney Revisits the Heady ’60s Nights in “The Song We Were Singing”

July 24, 2012 · by solobeatles

In 1997, two years after the Beatles Anthology documentary was released, McCartney released an autobiography covering his youth and the Beatles era called Many Years From Now, co-written with longtime friend Barry Miles. No doubt the Anthology process produced surplus memories that couldn’t fit in the group version of the story. Some critics of the memoir complained McCartney was obsessed with correcting the image that Lennon was the avant-garde Beatle by portraying himself as the group’s original radical artist who created the tape loops in “Tomorrow Never Knows,” among other experiments. But regardless the book is a terrific account of what it was like to live such a charmed life. Some of the most compelling passages come when he describes his life in mid-‘60s Swinging London. On a day off, he’d make a bunch of wild tape loops, then go over to a friend’s place, light a joint, have a glass of wine, listen to all the fantastic music everyone was discovering, old and new, and talk into the night.

McCartney released Flaming Pie the same year as his memoir, and its opening track, “The Song We Were Singing,” is the aural equivalent of such reminiscences. McCartney and disciple Jeff Lynne play all the instruments, including — for that “We Can Work It Out” touch — a harmonium, capturing the intimacy of Rubber Soul songs like “Norwegian Wood.” McCartney and friends talk about composers, the cosmos, and how to fix the world, but always come back to playing the guitar and singing more songs. It captures those heady nights when anything seemed possible and the hip young actually changed the trajectory of the world.

One almost craves more lyrics, but looking back over the classic early Beatles songs (and even the late), they’re often made up of only a few lines (see “I’ll Follow the Sun”). Thus in its structure it further fits its subject matter.

McCartney and Jimmy Fallon Spoof “Yesterday”

June 19, 2012 · by solobeatles

Originally performed on the Jimmy Fallon Show December 10, 2010, McCartney and Fallon’s duet has been included on Fallon’s new album “Blow Your Pants Off.”

One You Tube clip noted:

Fans will be aware that Paul woke up with the melody for ‘Yesterday’ in his head having dreamt it in his sleep. Whilst working on the lyrics for the track he used ‘Scrambled Eggs / Oh, my baby how I love your legs’ until he came up with the words we now all know and love. Paul and Jimmy build on these original lyrics in their duet.

Another You Tube clip quoted Lennon:

“The song was around for months and months before we finally completed it. Every time we got together to write songs for a recording session, this one would come up. We almost had it finished. Paul wrote nearly all of it, but we just couldn’t find the right title. We called it ‘Scrambled Eggs’ and it became a joke between us. We made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit, we just couldn’t find the right one. Then one morning Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way, we’d had so many laughs about it.”

McCartney Cherishes His Last Years with Linda in “Beautiful Night”

June 16, 2012 · by solobeatles

McCartney originally attempted “Beautiful Night” with producer Phil Ramone in 1986. Musically it is reminiscent of their big song together, “Once Upon a Long Ago,” and lyrically it has the same fairy tale feel with visions of castles in the sky and missions to Lorelei. But while McCartney liked the song, he felt it hadn’t really come off.

A decade later, dark clouds gathered on the horizon. Linda was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995 and it spread to her liver. When Starr’s first wife Maureen died of leukemia, McCartney recorded the gentle elegy “Little Willow” for her kids. Perhaps he was having a premonition of the rough times ahead for his own family. After writing “Little Willow” in February 1996, he took a break from recording the Flaming Pie album.

He had almost completed the album by February 1997, but wanted to work with Starr again after the Beatles Anthology project. Thus Starr finally appeared on a McCartney solo album, even though McCartney had appeared on Starr’s many times. Before bringing Starr into the studio, McCartney went back to “Beautiful Night” and revised the lyrics.

Starr accompanies McCartney on drums as McCartney sings at the piano. With the knowledge that he might not have much time left with Linda, McCartney sings that nothing feels as good as being with her, even being knighted. He feels helpless in the face of Linda’s worsening condition and can’t understand why such horrible things happen. But he resolves to make their last nights together beautiful and just celebrate being with her, and not think about the whys.

The song takes a tense turn as he confronts the fact that things can go wrong in life – but, he quickly adds, things can go right (the cancer could go into remission). In the middle of the night, death looms, but McCartney vows to always be at her side for all the time they have left.

Then Starr and the band kick up the tempo, determined to make it the best night possible, with Starr taking a turn singing “Beautiful night!” as George Martin leads a 38-piece orchestra of strings, flutes, trumpets, and horns, ringing the halls of Abbey Road like 1967.

The song was released as the third single from Flaming Pie in December 1997, accompanied by a classy video directed by Julian Temple, featuring Starr and Linda in her last video appearance.

Paul Inducts John into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

March 26, 2012 · by solobeatles

Paul’s touching speech inducting John into the 1994 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Page 2 of 3 « Previous 1 2 3 Next »