C/D Paul McCartney Solo

Though setlist.fm says he hasn't played it since 1976!

he has barely ever played anything from ram in concert so truly who knows what goes into his choices

"silly love songs" is a classic and one of the very best wings songs, i would have loved to have heard it. sometimes people throw about 'ram invented indie pop' which doesn't make much sense to me but "silly love songs" sure anticipated a fair amount of it

On Ram, when responding to its latter-day status among fans, he's said that he finds it hard to listen to himself as it was recorded at such an unhappy time for him.

i wonder if he'd like it more if it had been correctly acclaimed at the time

Ram's public embrace and rejection by critics was for years a point of pride for him.

I think SLS is OK apart from the bassline, which is right up there with “Michelle” for my favourite Macca. I can’t believe some of the stuff he played on the Fabs records.

xp well he should bring that pride back and play a bunch of it live

I agree with matt, the bassline on SLS is by far the best thing about that single, and it's a GREAT bassline. I could listen to that on loop for hours on end.

(just the bass part that is)

Even if the only song in his solo oeuvre was "Maybe I'm Amazed," that would be enough to make him a classic.

Fortunately, he also hasd "Press."

i really think it's a crime paul never did a whole album in the vein of tracks like "silly love songs" and "goodnight tonight"

I think you could put together an album length compilation of stuff he did with a similar vibe - those two, My Love, Arrow Through Me, Take It Away, Dress Me Up as a Robber ... maybe the version of No More Lonely Nights with the squelchy synth bass. I like Write Away, but but I think the mid-80s production make it sound too harsh to fit in with the above, not smooth or lush enough. Secret Friend has a different sound as well, but maybe the ten minute version would work as an outro

"blue sway" is another yeah

I’m kind of stunned to see Super 70s Sports on the case:

Name a song you love that doesn’t get played or talked about a ton. I’ll start: pic.twitter.com/EdEhEr60pS

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) March 23, 2024

i'm kind of having a Wings phase and will check this out. i just listented to Wild Life for the first time, which rules and has my wondering why i waited so long.

"Arrow Through Me" is by far the best tune on Back to the Egg.

haha, good to know. it's not too shabby

listening to Red Rose Speedway now. you know, i love Linda's voice. beautiful angel voice. when i think about how people went through the trouble to isolate her vocal tracks so they could shit on her and imply that she somehow didn't deserve to be making music with Paul McCartney -- god it makes me so fucking mad

Back to the Egg is an excellent album and yes, this song is great

Linda harmonies are usually A+

Red Rose Speedway might be underrated? I need to listen some more but it all sounds good to me.

Love Big Barn Bed and Single Pigeon.

Red Rose Speedway is an all-time favorite of mine. Side B is just about perfect. And personally I'll take Paul/Linda/Denny harmonies over those by Paul/John/George anytime.

https://www.stereogum.com/2257275/vinyl-artwork-rejected-by-paul-mccartney-for-being-too-unflattering-is-being-auctioned-for-charity/news/

hahaha that is horrific

Yikes

lmao

Watching Wingspan (on YT) which I haven’t seen since it aired in 2001 – it’s absolutely a love letter to Linda. He’s interviewed warmly by Stella, and it’s full of warm (at times treacly) remembrances of their relationship.

The opening 45 minutes that covers Paul and Linda’s unorthodox musical romance, the formation of Wings and rather brave tour of English universities is fascinating. Notwithstanding his own massive celebrity, Paul’s partnership with Linda (replete with open air tour buses with baby cribs on the roof and seafaring recording studios in the Virgin Islands) even now scans as a somewhat unlikely path to superstardom.

Have to imagine that it wasn’t a coincidence that he married Heather Mills a year later either.

Mary, not Stella, I think.

To his immense credit the world's biggest star tried to be as 'umble as possible.

Yep, Mary

I always thought Junior's Farm was nonsense lyrics, but it's actually a clever little thing about capitalism, isn't it? Looking forward to One Hand Clapping coming out.

whenever people ask him about his lyrics he tends to respond with stories about his life at the time which seem only vaguely relevant at best - which makes me think he writes based on his current vibes first and if some meaning coalesces out of it he just sort of shrugs and moves on if he even notices

so frustration with the business end of the beatles could end up with a song that is anti-capitalist almost by mistake

I also have a whole thing about him being neurodivergent and linda giving him permission to stop masking around her and just be his weirdest self which combined with the drugs ended up producing some of the loopiest lyrics of all time (which even at their most nonlinear tell you more about him than he ever will in plain language - much like how his off script ramblings in interviews are his most revealing moments but are easily dismissed)

I'm not the first person to make this argument, but only the most famous white pop star on earth could've written "Another Day," "The Heart of the Country," and these other rumpled, lived-in songs celebrating domesticity and hanging out at home with the wife and kids. Because this was Paul McCartney, it's as much a public pose as Lennon's radical chic period but no less convincing. Maybe more.

"Another Day" stands out because it isn't really a happy song - there's an interview somewhere with Paul saying it's kind of apiece with "For No One," which is a different story but also has melancholy and less specifically heartache at its core. I'm not sure how much of "Another Day" was done by 1969 (just the music or the lyrics too), but I don't think it was that common for a major male rock star at that time to write a song that's about a woman's existential dread, and even when you came across one of those, it's likely it wasn't all that sympathetic to the character involved.

maybe it would have helped him if he'd politicised his back to the land smoke weed every day thing in the same way lennon politicised his beatles withdrawal existential crisis heroin dick flick thing - but it's never been paul's way. instead he did the look how happy I am without you thing which was much more effective at pissing off his intended target but gave nothing for the radical chic rock intelligentsia to chew on

"Another Day" stands out because it isn't really a happy song - there's an interview somewhere with Paul saying it's kind of apiece with "For No One," which is a different story but also has melancholy and less specifically heartache at its core. I'm not sure how much of "Another Day" was done by 1969 (just the music or the lyrics too), but I don't think it was that common for a major male rock star at that time to write a song that's about a woman's existential dread, and even when you came across one of those, it's likely it wasn't all that sympathetic to the character involved.

― birdistheword,

I belive him, but his arrangement is so cheerful!

rock critics were like there goes paul with his happy sappy another day because they don't listen and don't care about women and were like who needs to listen to this pussy whipped sadsack when we have real feminists like john lennon to tell us what's up

honestly the way paul writes about women is so striking and unusual for a rock star in a way that I've only seen people starting to acknowledge recently and it's so weird considering how clueless he can be IRL about gender and feminism related things

I think Linda and "Linda" as concept are the only prisms through which he understood women as anything other than groupies, though Jane Asher was her own woman too.

mother mary, lovely linda, famous groupies

he's also loved old ladies since he was young but maybe they're all mary too

actually maybe if he *doesn't* want to fuck them they suddenly become more interesting to him as human beings which is a weird kind of sexism but he's a weird person

It was noticeable, seeing him live at Glastonbury, that there wasn't a single woman on stage, and only one in the long list of worky thanks (the one in charge of the big screens). It got me thinking how rarely he has collaborated with women in his solo career other than with Linda. Maybe he just doesn't trust himself, the old horndog.

i definitely don't hear "another day" as cheerful or celebrating domesticity, it's more ambivalent than that, there's some melancholy to it as paul apparently claimed

every time this thread gets bumped i just think about how "silly love songs" is one of the greatest songs ever recorded

i definitely don't hear "another day" as cheerful or celebrating domesticity, it's more ambivalent than that, there's some melancholy to it as paul apparently claimed

― ufo,

The bridge for sure.

Yep - “sad, so sad, sometimes she feels so sad / alone in her apartment she dwells, till the man of her dreams come to take her hand”. It’s all existential dread and quotidian numbness. Nothing remotely domestic about it.

oops “comes to break the spell” is it?

the most remarkable thing is how he's taking the perspective of so many women he fucked (over) for whom he was the man of their dreams

for no one is kind of like a bridge between another girl and another day in terms of perspective and empathy and I like to think it demonstrates real growth