KEY POINTS:
Paul McCartney is such a relentlessly chirpy, glass half full kind of songwriter that I fear we will never see the musical reinvigoration that might have been hoped for as a result of his acrimonious divorce from Heather Mills.
In fact, he has said as much
already, last year insisting he didn't want his personal life influencing the tone of his songs.
"It's actually the opposite. For me, music is an escape. It always has been. You're in a bad mood or have an argument, you go off in a corner and write a song. It's a form of therapy. I don't see it as anything to do with my personal circumstances."
So, he'll give us uxoriousness (The Lovely Linda on 1970's McCartney), but not its opposite.
Too bad.
The marriage break-up album is usually a highlight of any musical career - by which I mean the album born of a marriage or relationship break-up, rather than just about a break-up.
Entire country careers have been founded on the latter, while those writing and performing the songs have remained in happy and stable relationships - or at least what passes for a happy and stable relationship in Nashville.
The albums created during, or shortly after, their makers' divorce or relationship break-up are fewer and farther between - but seldom to be missed.
Perhaps the most famous example is Fleetwood Mac's Rumours - on the surface as chirpy as anything McCartney has produced, but beneath, in its lyrics, testimony to the break-up of band members John and Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham. Just to complete the picture of turmoil and woe, Mick Fleetwood was also divorcing his wife (though she, at least, wasn't in the band).
Other classics of the genre include Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love and Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear.
Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights is invariably mentioned in this regard, too, but perhaps erroneously so.
Like divorce itself, the divorce album will always be with us - witness this review from last year by Andy Whitman on the Paste Magazine website:
The Mendoza Line - 30 Year Low/Final Remarks of the Legendary Malcontent: Maybe it's twisted, but divorce albums frequently make me very happy. Here are a few that have brought me great joy in the midst of profound relational misery: Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights, Van Morrison's Hard Nose the Highway, Exene Cervenka's Old Wives' Tales, and Bruce Cockburn's Humans. And now we can add The Mendoza Line's 30 Year Low to the list. Co-leaders Tim Bracy and Shannon McCardle recently split up after ten years of marriage, but they left a scorcher of a record in their wake, equal parts poetic grace and bitterness and recrimination. Bracy handles the poetic grace department, and his spare, Dylan-inspired folk songs are fragile and delicate and achingly sad. But it's McCardle who stuns here, unleashing a snarling, barely contained rage on tracks like "31 Candles" that is frightening in its wrathful intensity. Don't mess with this chick. Final Remarks of the Legendary Malcontent, the accompanying odds 'n sods collection of live tracks and covers, is just fine, but it's 30 Year Low that is truly worthy of your intention. Hurts so good.
Whitman isn't the only aficionado, either: Jim Burns gets into the subject on the Perfect Sound Forever.
He adds Beck's Sea Change`, Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker and Nick Cave's The Boatman's Call to the list.
Music writers are self-protectively cool about the names they drop in print, so you're less likely to find a mention of the late period Abba albums Super Trouper and The Visitors - the former containing The Winner Takes It All, both of them wonderful.
Of course, there are divorces and there are divorces.
After his experience with Heather Mills, Paul McCartney could be forgiven for abandoning songwriting altogether and just releasing an album of screeching noise along the lines of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.
Or, if he really wanted us to feel his pain, We All Stand Together Part Two.
(This blog was written to the following soundtrack: No surprises here - Shoot Out the Lights and Rumours. By the way, despite the absence of a soundtrack at the bottom (I forgot), this week's Paper Chase was indeed written to music - you can't compile something like that without help. The music in question was: Lalo Schifrin's Strings and Bossa Nova; Modern Art: The Best of John Foxx; and Editors' An End Has to Start.)
