Since the Beatles officially broke up, in 1970, Paul McCartney has released more than thirty original albums and dozens of singles. They have included ragged, folksy home recordings; propulsive, glossy rock; children’s music featuring singing frogs; covers of fifties R. & B. favorites; duets with Carl Perkins, Michael Jackson, and Stevie Wonder; collaborations with members of Led Zeppelin and the Royal Liverpool Symphony Orchestra; and excursions into disco, ambient techno, and cut-and-paste soundscapes. By comparison, the Beatles released only twelve full studio albums—about nine hours of music. They made statements with their records, but McCartney seems to be perpetually sketching, pursuing a career of whims and compulsions. In 1971, he and his then wife, Linda, formed a new band, Wings, perhaps so that their family could spend more time together. “It was just something we wanted to do, so if we got it wrong, big deal,” he said. He characterized an album in the eighties as having started as “a mess-around.” Even when he compiled “Pure McCartney,” a 2016 retrospective of his post-Beatles career, he shrugged off any grand purpose, saying that it was simply “something fun to listen to.” No doubt McCartney takes his craft and his career seriously. But he’s a living legend who seems less interested in tending to his legacy than in scratching a chronic itch.
He recorded his solo début in secret, in 1969 and 1970. The Beatles were in the process of disbanding, and he was reportedly sullen; the album, called “McCartney,” is a breakup record, though its heartache manifests less in the songs’ lyrics than in their tattered edges. The record is filled with gorgeous half-finished melodies that eschew the perfectionism to which Beatles fans had grown accustomed, baffling listeners. “The Lovely Linda,” for example, starts off as a pretty ode to his wife but then ends suddenly, as McCartney dissolves into giggles. In the eighties, as Wings was breaking up, McCartney recorded a sequel, “McCartney II,” on which he ditched rock classicism for synthesizers and drum machines. Perhaps it wasn’t a masterpiece, he told an interviewer, but it was “total freedom.”
This year, as the pandemic swept across the world, McCartney and his family retreated to his farm in East Sussex. He turned his prodigious work ethic to home recording and started tinkering with a scrap of a song he’d begun in the nineties. He ended up with an entire album, “McCartney III,” which comes out on December 18th. The opener, “Long Tailed Winter Bird,” summarizes the one-man approach. He begins by casually strumming his guitar, almost as if he’s tuning it, and then works out a raga-like pattern. He adds layers: a friendly bass line, background coos, electric guitar, pounding drums, strings and woodwinds. It goes on a bit longer than necessary, as if he were just noodling around. “Deep Deep Feeling” opens with McCartney riffing about the highs and lows of love, exhausting the rhyming possibilities of the word “emotion” with “devotion,” “ocean,” and “motion.” He adds an ethereal synth line, a stretched-out blues guitar; together, the instruments convey a storminess that his words never quite capture.
In the popular imagination of the Beatles, John Lennon was the anguished, hard-driving dreamer, the one plumbing his psychological depths or reaching for the impossible vision. McCartney was the simpler one: he was congenial and silly, pathological only about songwriting. He came up with melodies and left them unfinished because there were always more to write. There are a few moments of “McCartney III” that recall this sense of delight. “Lavatory Lil,” a trifling blues boogie, echoes the childish, character-driven songs of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road.”
Since the nineties, many of McCartney’s albums have been produced in a way that seems conscious of his glory days, and his effect on British music. Sometimes it sounds as though he were singing over a simulacrum of a Beatles song, and at other times as though he were sharing in the fun of disciples like Oasis or Adele. The most affecting moments of “McCartney III” are when his age and his limitations show. (He’s seventy-eight.) He works his way through a lovely acoustic ballad called “The Kiss of Venus” slowly and gingerly, his voice carefully tracing an ascending guitar line. On “Women and Wives,” he sounds warbly, as though he were losing control of his instrument. “When tomorrow comes around / You’ll be looking at the future,” he sings sternly. “So keep your feet upon the ground / And get ready to run.”
A few years ago, there was a trollish online debate about whether the Atlanta rap trio Migos was better than the Beatles. A version of it took place in my college dorm in the nineties; the challenger then was Boyz II Men. I’ve since decided that there is no way for the upstart to win this argument. One gets the sense that it simply entrenches the Beatles as a cultural monolith. Invoking their name connects us to the possibility of some universally agreed-upon standard of greatness, a kind of consensus that no longer seems within reach.
In this way, McCartney can sometimes seem like a symbol rather than a person. Currently, his most streamed song on Spotify is “FourFiveSeconds,” a 2015 track featuring Rihanna and Kanye West. (It has seven hundred million listens, nearly two hundred million more than “Here Comes the Sun.”) Kanye and Rihanna are the stars of the song; McCartney’s presence seems gestural, a way for them to link themselves to the canon. But McCartney appears to relish these brushes with the Zeitgeist. In 2016, when Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles” (streamed a hundred and thirty million more times than “Here Comes the Sun”) became the soundtrack for a viral “mannequin” challenge, McCartney took part, filming a video of himself frozen while playing a grand piano. “Love those Black Beatles,” he wrote on Twitter. In recent years, McCartney has sung on a track by the E.D.M. producer the Bloody Beetroots and performed with the surviving members of Nirvana. He is on this month’s cover of Rolling Stone, alongside Taylor Swift. Such moments give younger artists a bridge to history; McCartney satisfies his curiosity about kids these days.
But it may be impossible for a septuagenarian ex-Beatle to grasp the anxiety-filled world that his musical descendants have inherited. The pandemic has provided an occasion for younger artists, including Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, and BTS, to release work that touches on the isolation and loneliness of contemporary life. By contrast, there’s something incredibly “Paul” about McCartney’s approach to the pandemic album: cheery, resilient, forever looking forward. It’s a reminder of one of the Beatles’ most powerful messages to baby boomers: life gets better. It’s getting better all the time.
McCartney’s optimism feels vintage. In “Seize the Day,” he reminds us, over warm electric keys, to stay in the moment: “When the cold days come / When the old ways fade away / There’ll be no more sun / And we’ll wish that we had held on to the day.” For the album’s splendid closer, “Winter Bird—When Winter Comes,” he returns to the album’s opening guitar lick. The song then morphs into a folk tune that doubles as a to-do list of tasks around his farm: fix a fence, dig a drain, plant some trees. Time passes, he notes, and someday the trees will cast shade. The implication is that McCartney won’t be around to see them, but, by doing his part, he has helped a future visitor. The sentiment is lovely, and it harks back to a different generation’s sense of what’s possible. We’d all like to believe that love will prevail, that the earth will heal itself, and that we’ll leave things better than we found them. He’s written this song countless times. But it sounds a little different now. ♦
