C/D Paul McCartney Solo

The fragments on that album represent some of his most realized work, I think, partly because ordinarily his attention span doesn't let him think songs through, therefore the arrangements are supposed to solve the problem. Your point about those Paul songs as midway between TWA and '70s singer-songwriter rock makes sense. He didn't fit in with Mitchell, Taylor, Young, et. al, or even with the Richard Thompson faction in England. His attraction to whimsy and affect is closer to Ferry-Bowie.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, March 26, 2017 10:04 PM (yesterday)

i agree w/ this totally. for all its fragmented, half-finished nature, mccartney's first album has always been one of my favorites. the songs feel vibrant and alive the way a great artist's casual sketches sometimes do. i imagine a lot of paul's best songs began something like "that would be something" -- just a hint of a tune and a couple of lines he woke up singing to himself. i think what makes the album special -- and gives it a very different feel to anything he'd done with the beatles, or anything he'd do with wings -- is that there's no sense that paul's singing with an audience in mind. this feels like something he did entirely for himself. in a way it feels as personal as lennon's first solo album.

""Rough Ride" is dreadful. It is beyond comprehension to me that Trevor Horn, Steve Lipson and Paul McCartney would think otherwise all these years later."

things like this make me really wonder...when a bunch of people I toherwise completely respect, whose taste seems to be pretty on the mark...wtf. that song sucks. so does soliel.

I see it as McCartney's attempt to record his own multi-producer project, so common in the '80s starting with Private Dancer, but had been in control too long to cede it.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, March 27, 2017 12:24 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yup, this is the way that I see it too. This was a bit of a "comeback" record for him after Press To Play and was about to go on tour, so I guess he wanted to ensure that he had an album in the bag that was bang up to date sonically... and what better way of doing that than use the best producers available? Because he could, because he's Paul McCartney.

Also, this wouldn't be the last time he'd make a multi producer record. His last one had several, too.

And just like that my Twitter feed turns up this lucky penny:

https://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/never-like-this-paul-mccartneys-press/

ha! You inspired it all these years ago!

mccartney? poor man's emitt rhodes

Greg Kurstin is producing the new album.

"Ha, yeah. "Roots rock" is as much a collection of attitudes about recording music as it is a sound. Look at Froom's befuddlement about what constitutes '80s production -- he thinks it's "artificial" or something"

nah, folks who have issues with 80s production are usually opponents of gated reverb on drums and chorus effects on guitars. that's it, really.

that's my point!

My review of the reissue.

More interviews with Costello and McCartney about this

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/after-john-paul-mccartney-found-another-partner-to-get-the-most-out-of-him-the-proof-is-finally-emerging/2017/03/16/ae2fe91c-09a7-11e7-a15f-a58d4a988474_story.html?utm_term=.3c1c977a15a8

Costello did politely urge McCartney away from the instrument he was using, a modern bass with five strings. (“A perversion of nature,” says Costello.) He asked McCartney to pull out his old Hofner. The bass still had a Beatles set list taped to it.

Costello: I wasn’t being funny or being in any way sentimental. I honestly thought [the new bass] disguised his musical personality when he was playing. He actually played his Rickenbacker on a lot of the tracks. He played the Hofner on “Veronica,” that he played on my session [for Costello’s album “Spike”]. Because he knew I liked the sound of it. But he flew around on that Rickenbacker, and it was suddenly like, “My God, this is one of the great instrumentalists of the rock-and-roll era.” His voice comes through. It’s as if you gave Louis Armstrong a plastic horn to play.

I really, really, really will never understand the fascination with that fucking Hofner bass.

nah, folks who have issues with 80s production are usually opponents of gated reverb on drums and chorus effects on guitars. that's it, really.

― Darin, Monday, March 27, 2017 6:43 AM (ten hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and synths, and early digital recording, and producers making heavy use of the Fairlight CMI and/or Synclavier, and the obsession with keeping everything as perfectly in time as possible, and the way producers liked to minimise "bleed" on tracks to keep everything as pristine sounding and easy to mix as possible, and reverb on everything, and saxophones and fretless bass.

Not that there's anything particularly wrong with any of these things.

and synths, and early digital recording, and producers making heavy use of the Fairlight CMI and/or Synclavier, and the obsession with keeping everything as perfectly in time as possible, and the way producers liked to minimise "bleed" on tracks to keep everything as pristine sounding and easy to mix as possible, and reverb on everything, and saxophones and fretless bass.

man this is like Orson Welles reciting a list of Jake Gyllenhaal's yummiest parts

xp

things were far more out of sync in the 70s

i typically like gated reverb etc but listening to flowers in the dirt this morning I was really bothered by the snare sounds, they just sound shitty throughout the record.

Hmm, I disagree. The only time I ever think the snare sound gets a bit much is on 'Motor of Love', which is really heavily reverbed and sounds like a machine (although, I guess it suits the nature of the track) - otherwise, the drums in general sound fine to me. I'm less taken with the drum sound on Press to Play, tbh.

and synths, and early digital recording, and producers making heavy use of the Fairlight CMI and/or Synclavier, and the obsession with keeping everything as perfectly in time as possible, and the way producers liked to minimise "bleed" on tracks to keep everything as pristine sounding and easy to mix as possible, and reverb on everything, and saxophones and fretless bass.

yeah, I suppose some more extremists might extend their gripes this far, but usually, when I push someone to explain their distaste for this era of production, it comes down to chorus and gated reverb.

To me it's the alternately overstuffed mixes and too-clean recordings of individual tracks that merit another pass on this particular album. There's others where chorus and reverb are totally the boogeymen but the pushed snares only rankle in a few places. "Motor of Love" is like "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" slowed down and sucked dry of life. But, to be fair, I might like it a lot if you stripped Macca's lead vocals off, added some barely-intelligible recordings of household conversations and wordless vocal chants, and told me it was a new Memory Tapes cut. But to the extent that it's meant to be a song, it just feels like a not-very-good thirty-second nugget has been stretched out to six minutes with McCartney trusting the producers to add things to massage it all out.

"My Brave Face" is just a shade too trebley, too clean, lacking in mid-range or something... maybe I'm being too dogmatic about what I expect out of a pop-rock song. I don't necessarily want it to sound like "Young Boy" or "Hope of Deliverance" either. The thing is though with that one the songwriting and lyric are ace and so the 'period' elements are something I basically accept as part of the recording even if I can imagine it having more life and warmth at a different moment. It's like how I think the pre-Revolver Beatles albums are fucking great even if I will always wish they'd turned the drums way up.

xp
For me, the 80s stuff I don't like from McCartney that regards productions (and not the songs themselves) has to do w/a sterility that tends to rob the power of otherwise good songs (imo his '83-89 period suffers from this a lot). Lots of 60s/70s artists struggled with this in the 80s, and it's not really a matter of the production itself being inherently bad, but artists not really using it in a way that optimized what it could do. Like, no one is complaining that YMO used too much gated reverb.

wish they'd done just one roots alb tho

Martin Denny was their roots!

Motor of Love" is like "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" slowed down and sucked dry of life.

Chris Hughes of TFF produced it so

Lots of 60s/70s artists struggled with this in the 80s, and it's not really a matter of the production itself being inherently bad, but artists not really using it in a way that optimized what it could do.

Or ageing dickheads that are unable to embrace change wanting their favourite artist to be stuck in a time capsule and not make a record that sounds current.

I think albums like Now and Zen, Cloud Nine and Back in the High Life tried plenty hard to sound current AND play up the nostalgia card, but ymmv on those productions.

I'd say Shaken 'n' Stirred but point taken

Robert Plant sampling his old band -- was that a first?

lol from the interview:

In 1988, Costello and McCartney returned to the studio. The idea is that Costello would co-produce the new record. As they worked, they realized they had different ideas. One day, they were talking about “That Day is Done,” a gospel-inspired ballad. Costello wanted to use New Orleans brass. McCartney referenced the Human League. Costello left the studio to calm himself down.

McCartney: This is one of the rules of my game. I will say stuff, any idea that comes into my head. And if you don’t like it, you just tell me and I’ll probably agree. But my method is to throw out a lot of stuff and whittle it down. [Pause.] Actually, he was really not a fan of the Human League. I like “Don’t You Want Me.” [Hums the chorus.] I think that’s, like, a classic pop record. . . . I can now see now that me even mentioning the words Human League would send him off in the wrong direction.

Stuff like the snare drum sound on 'Motor of Love' isn't actually "gated reverb" at all. If we're talking about what "gated reverb" is on snare drums, it's a large amount of reverb applied to the source signal (the snare) and then a noise gate is applied so that the reverb only lasts as long as the snare hit and then cuts out completely, which results in a fattened drum sound without hearing the "decay" of the reverb. The snare sound on 'Motor of Love' is not gated, it's just a large amount of artificial reverb placed on the snare drum. It's the opposite of gated reverb in that it has a long decay time.

Now 'Strangehold', that's "gated reverb"!

Ok, good points. I still think the drums on Motor of Love are distracting and bad though!

Boiling it down to either embracing bold contempiraneity or forbidding all change is reductive. I like the sound of plenty of records from this period, I love some of Paul's experiments with new sounds (McCartney II for example), and even on this album I think some songs sound better than others. I just don't think he had a strong ear for those sounds, a sure instinct of when and how to use them in a song (or build a song around them), and his long-standing "hey that sounds neat, let's use it" instincts seem to be failing. The multi-producer approach speaks to this imho, he's looking for other people to sort it all out for him. Maybe it came from the label tho, idk.

xxpost Ugh man I knew there was a reason i could never stand EC haha

Listening to this album, I forgot how much I love "Put It There". My dad passed away last month and listening to this one made me tear up.

Sorry for your loss. That song has a real intimacy and warmth. And Martin's string arrangement is a deft touch.

I'm sorry to hear that, Darin.

I lost my dad last year, and that song has come into my mind more than once since then. I've always thought it was a really lovely tune, but I think as a teenager I found it a little hokey and distanced myself from it, whereas as an adult I can really appreciate the sincerity of an idea like that. Which also describes, in a small way, certain things about how I related to my dad. And he was generally, of the two of us, the one to make a point of reaching out and saying something useful like "don't be a stranger, stay in touch," even if generally he was pretty vague emotionally in that guys-who-don't-verbalize-feelings way. Which reminds me of the father in this song, making the choice to extend an olive branch when maybe his inertial tendency would be to stay silent. I was his youngest son, too.

So... tearing up, yeah. I'm with you.

Thanks to both of you. And sorry for your loss, too, Doctor Casino.

Appreciate it, Darin. For what it's worth, not knowing your situation at all, but for me at least it has gotten easier with time.

Hope I didn't sound too cavalier in my earlier post, Darin. I just meant that song hits such a perfectly warm note – I can only imagine listening to it thinking back to one's own relationship to their father after he's passed.

I continue to be really blown away by these Costello demos on this record. WaPo interview suggests that McCartney himself now believes these were the best things to come out of these sessions by some distance. I am inclined to agree.

That said, the whole Human League thing is both hilarious and instructive. For one, Paul was absolutely right to admire them as he did (as did Horn, which may explain the former's desire to work with the latter). Even if HL were about five years past their sell date while Paul was pimping them in 1988, Costello's purist reaction to the mere suggestion is exactly why he's kind of insufferable – and, I suspect, why Paul ultimately didn't want to keep working with him. Say what you will about Paul and whimsy, but "I didn't want to make an Elvis Costello record" cuts about as deeply as anything Lennon ever said.

LOL, just noticed that Spotify is missing the last three tracks of Press to Play. They're not unavailable or greyed out – they're not there at all.

Pretty sure I'm the only person in the known universe who has noticed this.

If you're referring to 'Write Away', 'It's Not True' and 'Tough on a Tightrope', then they never really were part of the album proper anyway.

Talking about Press to Play, I heard 'Move Over Busker' for the first time in ages the other day and actually found myself thinking it was pretty decent.

I think 'Move Over Busker' is the track on the album where the song and the production are least suited to one another, I can imagine it being recorded more like Smile Away from Ram or something. I like the production on Press for the most part though

this alternate mix of Angry is much better than the one on the album imo:

https://youtu.be/DX6rz64xNNY

I like the way "Rough Ride" sits in the album. McCartney goes to Propaganda-land. It definitely sounds like it was written in an afernoon but still pretty cool due to its Horn/Lipson glossiness. YMMV of course depending on how much you dig Horn/Lipson.

I love Propaganda, Horn and Lipson and feel confident in saying that song eats it.

Shifting gears, I'm digging into Pipes of Peace on Spotify. Notwithstanding its rep as "leftovers from Tug of War," this is a more interesting and experimental record than it is given credit for – certainly more interesting than its predecessor's somewhat unremarkable exercise in formalism and LA Express smooth jazz. Paul's melodic touch is in good form throughout – I've always been a fan of "So Bad" (which received pretty heavy airplay on MTV IIRC) and "The Other Me" is a minor hidden gem. "Average Person" could be straight off London Town were it it for the more modern production. Also both MJ collabs, "The Man" in particular, are high quality. All told, there's less filler on this than any other post-1975 Paul record I can think of.

Also, given that his slide into 80s survivor mode would otherwise feel almost too easy, I appreciate the left turns on this record: the Linndrum sound, the sawing Martin orchestrations on things like "Keep Under Cover," and the weird mashup that is "Tug of Peace."

Demos on the expanded version, particularly on oddball stuff like "It's Not On," show he was very much on his game – and point to some of the studio experiments he'd be exploring in the years ahead.

A pleasant if extremely belated discovery.

Hmm. I completely disagree, to be honest, especially about the comment about it having less filler than any of his post-1975 albums... I think Pipes of Peace is one of McCartney's weaker albums, although it has a fair amount of highlights on it. It's certainly down there near the bottom of the pile for me. What he really should have done was release the best of the stuff as an EP, and perhaps bundled it with Tug of War as the Pipes of Peace EP.

I'd say 'Pipes of Peace', 'Say Say Say', 'So Bad' and 'The Man' were the keepers. Destroy the rest without hesitation.

Yeah that's what I thought ... and then I re-listened to it. Far more holds up than I remembered.

I don't listen to Driving Rain as often as some of McCartney's other LP's, so it's been quite pleasant to revisit how fucking awesome 'Rinse the Raindrops' is.

'rinse the raindrops' is incredible, but you have to stop the album before 'freedom' starts playing

it's like following a banquet with shitty vanilla ice cream