Made while he was tucked away in his Sussex farmhouse, his latest album is full of beautiful melodies and heartfelt lyrics.
Paul McCartney spent lockdown on his farm in East Sussex. During the day he would head to his nearby studio to make the music that would end up on his new album, McCartney III. "We were very careful," the 78-year-old insists. "With masks, social distancing — always super-aware of the danger." Delightfully he has christened this time "rockdown". In the evening he would go back home for dinner with his daughter Mary and her family. "And she's a great cook!" he says, beaming, of his firstborn, the photographer who took the snaps for his latest record and is also the baby on the front of his first solo effort, McCartney, nestled snugly inside her father's big coat.
That album was a double act between McCartney and Mary's mother, Linda. The Beatles had split and Linda was his anchor in an all of a sudden Fab Four-free life. "She is a shoulder to lean on; a second opinion," he said of Linda in 1970. Linda died in 1998 and, 50 years after Paul made that statement, Mary fulfilled that role.
"It was a strange coincidence," he admits. "I could run things past Linda, and here I was, all this time later, running it past Mary and her family." Over dinner he would play them his new songs, from upbeat raw guitar tracks to delicate ballads. The family's surprise favourite? The eight-minute, intense, mantra-like Deep Deep Feeling, which McCartney's youngest grandson, nine-year-old Sid, would sing along to with his grandfather.
Essentially, then, the richest pop star on the planet spent this weird year like the rest of us: working and seeing a lot of those he was in lockdown with. He also, like us all, watched television. "I've just caught up with Peaky Blinders!" he blurts. "My wife, Nancy, is super-current, but I'm backward in that respect. Still, I do other stuff. I even read books!" For what it's worth, he is not a fan of audiobooks — "listening books" as he calls them — and was shocked to find, after hours of Peaky Blinders, that Cillian Murphy is actually Irish.
McCartney loves sharing such details of his life. Details inspire him. And the clear delight he had in discovering that Paul Anderson — Arthur in the Brum-set Peaky Blinders — is "a Lahn-dan boy" makes you wonder how he would react to something truly momentous. Like, say, when a man walked on the moon, which happened when the Beatles were together.
Domesticity, though, is the man's comfort zone. He has, he is reticent to say, spent a good year stuck at home and his voice seems even more buoyant than usual. In 1971, when John Lennon released the lofty Imagine, McCartney wrote Eat at Home, about how great it is to stay in — and he has been doing a lot of that. "Home, family, love" was the theme of the album he recorded with Linda on their farm in Scotland — "That's still very close to my heart" — and it is the same for McCartney III. The glue between this album and its predecessors McCartney and McCartney II (released in 1980) is that the singer plays all the instruments himself, but that is just the means to the mood — which is as unadulterated and loose as he gets.
We have met before, in his Soho office in 2018. But the second lockdown scuppered an in-person meeting, so we spoke by phone. No matter. It is like picking up with an old, very unlikely friend, given how personable he is. He is one of life's great welcomers and, crucially, empathisers: a lover of everyday life, fond of penning a sort of lighter take on the kitchen-sink playwright tales of the late 1950s and 1960s that he grew up with.
"Well, it's a rich vein, ordinary life," says McCartney, the songwriter who managed to magic up the sublime She's Leaving Home from a story in a tabloid. "And the task is to make it sound not ordinary, but to celebrate it. It is good for me to draw on things like that. It's one of my big areas of exploration. Going back I think of Penny Lane. The minute I started to think of that area, all the stuff in that song just spilt out — I had such an affectionate feeling for it."
During the pandemic many musicians struggled with working from home. McCartney, though, wrote and recorded an entire album. How? How was he able to find inspiration from inertia when so many could not? "You know inspiration can come from anywhere," he explains. "Not just interaction with others. Truth is the main stuff that comes from my overactive brain, which is always switched on, but my songs don't have to be about current events. It's not like I knew someone called Eleanor Rigby. That was my empathy for lonely old ladies and, in that case, there was one near where I lived in Liverpool who I did the shopping for. We had long conversations. Years later that inspired Eleanor Rigby."
Which brings us to Women and Wives — the prettiest song on McCartney III, with yet another of those timeless melodies he has been knocking out since 1956. It is one of his favourites, sonically inspired by a book he read about the blues icon Leadbelly. At this point he sings, "Well, I been . . . " down the phone in a deep, bluesy story-telling voice. "You see?" he says, delighted, back to his speaking voice again. "How trivial things are able to inspire me?"
It is the lyrics of Women and Wives that hit home — especially this year. The gist is that even though laughter can turn to sorrow, it will be OK. There is after all a tomorrow. It is an optimistic song, sung by someone whose signature salute has always been two thumbs up and a big smile.
"Well, I am an optimist," he says. "Generally speaking I do believe things are good, and we screw them up. In fact, a lot of people during lockdown would say, 'Oh God!' And I'd say, 'Yes, but there's a silver lining.' It was a phrase I used a lot. I was loath to say it because a lot of people had it bad, but suddenly we saw more of the family than ever, and I was able to do recordings. That was my silver lining. It's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking things are bad and getting worse. Which, I don't know, may be true, but I know I'd then be bummed out by that, so I say to myself, 'Well, it's not that bad. Think about the other day. That was good!' I am always trying to find the good in things.
"It always occurs to me," he continues, "that, a million miles away, on the other side of the earth ..." He stops himself, ever the perfectionist. "That wouldn't be a million miles, would it?" He laughs. "Anyway. A long way away there will be people proposing to each other to get married. And the majority experience that sort of thing. I love humanity and people. So if I can write a song like Women and Wives, advising parents to give good advice to younger people, I like that. Let It Be was inspirational to people. Songs like that touch people and fill them with the feeling things are all right. I've always found that with beautiful music. Even if it's making you cry, it makes you feel better. I'm lucky. People are very grateful that my music helped them. I often get people saying it helped them through cancer."
His voice croaks a little. "That is so powerful." How does it make him feel? "That you're doing something right," he says quietly. "That what you're doing is worthwhile. More than worthwhile really. It's going out in the universe and helping people …" He loses his thread a little, even mumbling, which is very rare. He seems genuinely overwhelmed. "It makes you feel very good, I must say."
This is what McCartney is really: a tonic for a nation for almost 60 years. It is very impressive to be in the public eye for that long and be unifying rather than divisive, but from day one it is as if he knew his role was to entertain rather than, like many of his peers, be difficult. But it must have been hard. All that pressure. Now of course the discussion around mental health is the norm for singers and other performers — especially during lockdown — butback in the 1960s, when his fame was unprecedented, nobody talked about their feelings.
With hindsight, did the Beatles experience any mental health problems? "Yes, I think so," he says. "But you talked about it through your songs. You know, John would. 'Help! I need somebody,' he wrote. And I thought, 'Well, it's just a song,' but it turned out to be a cry for help. Same kind of thing happened with me, mainly after the break-up of the band. All of us went through periods when we weren't as happy as we ought to be. Ringo had a major drinking problem. Now he's Mr Sober of the Year! But you know there were a lot of things we had to work through, but you're right — you didn't talk about mental health. It was something really that, as four guys, you were more likely to make fun of than be serious about. And the making fun of it was to hide from it. But having said all that, we were reasonably well adjusted, I think."
The most McCartney line perhaps on McCartney III comes on Seize the Day. "It's still all right to be nice," he sings, which could be a T-shirt slogan, given how many public figures forget that these days. Two years ago the singer said that "violence and arrogance are back". I mention that line again, but he argues, as an optimist would, that the "pendulum", as he calls it, has already started to swing back with the election of Joe Biden. This is the way of the world, he insists. "In life, in nature," he says calmly. "There's winter, there's summer."
Once or twice on McCartney III, though, the burdens of lockdown seem to overcome him. Find My Way is fraught and talks of being "overwhelmed by your anxieties", while the excellent Deep Deep Feeling is a deliberately repetitive song for an accidentally repetitive year — with a lot of use of the word "pain".
Which is not optimistic. "That's true," he says. "But even if you're an optimist you know plenty of people who aren't. So a line like, 'You're overwhelmed by your anxieties' — well, I know people like that. And I go on to say, 'Let me help you. Let me be your guide.' So again it's this idea of trying to do something in your work that can actually make a difference to people."
Lennon was killed on December 8, 1980 — 40 years ago this week. He would have been 80 in October. Despite falling out with McCartney while the Beatles imploded, the friends made up long before Lennon's death. They would hang out in New York; the last conversation they had, McCartney says, was great.
Does he think they would have worked together again? "We made a decision when the Beatles folded that we weren't going to pick it up again," he says. "So we switched off from the Beatles. You talk about something coming full circle that is very satisfying; let's not spoil it by doing something that might not be as good. It was a conscious decision to leave well enough alone, so I don't really think we would have. But who knows? We could have. We had certainly got our friendship back, which was a great blessing for me, and I now will often think, if I'm writing a song, 'OK, John — I'll toss it over to you. What line comes next?' So I've got a virtual John that I can use."
Just before we spoke, McCartney had been watching footage from a film by Peter Jackson, The Beatles: Get Back, about the band's last year. The director had sent his star footage grabbed from hours of previously unseen video from the Let It Be sessions. The film is planned for next year, and McCartney is thrilled. It is, he tells me, buzzing, brimming with humour — the four men who changed the world messing about and making each other laugh. One scene he saw has Lennon and McCartney singing Let It Be's opening track, Two of Us, as if they are ventriloquists. Another has the two friends jiving together.
"It was so reaffirming for me," he says. "Because it proves that my main memory of the Beatles was the joy and the skill." The friendships rather than the falling out? "Really, yes. The proof is the footage. I bought into the dark side of the Beatles breaking up and thought, 'Oh God, I'm to blame.' I knew I wasn't, but it's easy when the climate is that way to start thinking so. But at the back of my mind there was always this idea that it wasn't like that, but I needed to see proof. There's a great photo Linda took, which is my favourite, of me and John working on a song, glowing with joy. This footage is the same. All four of us having a ball."
Let It Be was released in 1970; the same year McCartney, when asked what his plans were, said: "My only plan is to grow up." He was 27. Half a century on? He insists he is still growing up. "I'm definitely trying to get the hang of being a grown-up," he says with a laugh. "Because at the same time I prefer to hold on to a lot of childishness." Childishness suits him, I think, since it allows wonder in, and he still has a lot of that. And do not suggest he is about to retire, even though McCartney III has been called the final part of a trilogy and the closing of a circle — and he is nearly 80. "Hang on," he says, bullishly. "What if I do a fourth? I'm not planning on shutting the door just yet."
We end with God. When we met before, McCartney told me of the time he took the psychedelic DMT and saw the Almighty. "Aha, here he is again!" McCartney bellows in mock exultation, pretending to have seen God again. "Or she," he adds, ever the people-pleaser. There is a line, though, on the new song Find My Way that goes: "I've walked towards the light." Is that God again, that light?
"No," he says, bluntly. "In truth it's just a phrase I like, and I actually had a little wooden sign up in Liverpool, which I bought in an antiques shop. A carving that said 'Walk into the light'. Or something." Again, typical McCartney — opting for the earthy over the ethereal. "I always liked that phrase. The idea of it." He pauses. "I'd rather walk towards the light than the dark." That is, I suggest, much safer after all. "I suppose so. Unless you've got a torch."
Track by track: McCartney III
Long Tailed Winter Bird
The opener has echoes of Helter Skelter melodically, albeit with a calmer vibe than the Beatles' heaviest song. Largely instrumental, intricate guitar.
Find My Way
Fraught, high-pitched talk of anxieties makes way for lyrics about the hope of love in a song of many guitar noises — a sign of McCartney having fun in the studio.
Pretty Boys
Mid-paced and lilting storytelling from the king of evocation — "Oh, here come the pretty boys/ A line of bicycles for hire" — has Macca multi-tracking his vocals.
Women and Wives
A gorgeous peak as McCartney and his piano break hearts during this tough year. "What we do with our lives/ Seems to matter to others." File under "classic".
Lavatory Lil'
Straightforward garage rocker and possible sister to Abbey Road's Polythene Pam on which McCartney rails against a woman who did wrong. Uncharacteristically catty.
Deep Deep Feeling
The album's centrepiece is eight minutes of mood containing many moments when the floor seems to fall through the music. Sounds feverish. Will be terrific live.
Slidin'
A fantastic, filthy rock song that would not sound out of place on The White Album; squalling guitars build and build as McCartney wails about feeling free. A highlight.
The Kiss of Venus
A lovely, delicate and simple number — and one of Mary and the family's favourites — with one of those turns in melody McCartney does so well.
Seize the Day
Jaunty and feelgood with love in spades; the song sounding most like his recent output. Its middle eight is bliss: "I bless the day/ When you came into my life."
Deep Down
A second long and repetitive timely one, dark in mood, as McCartney sings about partying every night — something nobody has been doing since February.
Winter Bird — When Winter Comes
The album ends with a pretty acoustic song listing necessary work. "I must dig a drain by the carrot patch," he sings, and it's unclear whether it is a metaphor or fact.
McCartney III is out on December 18.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London