No artist alive has achieved so much.
No artist alive has achieved so much.
W ill Paul McCartney ever get his due? As the leading creative artist of his time in any field, perhaps not. Until there’s a Macca statue on every corner, until schools and hospitals are renamed after him en masse, he will remain sadly underrated.
Still, with the release last fall of two lavish volumes of his songs called The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, and before that the release of the six-part Hulu documentary Paul McCartney: 3, 2, 1, which celebrated his musicianship, the record is finally being corrected about this chap. Word is getting around about him. Talented, no? Maybe someday he’ll even make it to Ed Sheeran’s level.
McCartney turns 80 on Saturday and is not only still making music (as on its two predecessors with similar titles, he plays every instrument on his solid pandemic album McCartney III, released at Christmastime in 2020, with the exception of a track that uses previously recorded instrumentation) but is also energetically touring. Tonight he plays for me and a few others at MetLife stadium in the Meadowlands, on his Got Back tour. The reference is a typically celebratory one: It refers to his long battle, which he ultimately won when the Peter Jackson three-part documentary The Beatles Get Back was released last fall, to rework the public’s perception of how the Beatles ended.
As the documentary clarifies, McCartney’s demanding leadership was not (as viewers of the much shorter documentary about the same sessions, 1970’s Let It Be, might have come to believe) a significant element in the band’s dissolution, and nor was creative interference by Yoko Ono. The band broke up primarily because of disputes over which entity should manage the band (which had been without a manager since the 1967 death of Brian Epstein) and by John Lennon’s desire to spend more time apart with Ono.
Even if you started the clock on McCartney after the Beatles breakup, he would still have a strong claim to being the leading pop-rock creator of his generation. (To accompany this piece I’ve assembled this Spotify playlist, which includes all of the tracks I discuss.) It wasn’t till many years later that he confessed having sunk into a deep depression in the months after the Beatles’ breakup in the spring of 1970, and yet in those months, he ground ahead and recorded one of his finest ballads, “Maybe I’m Amazed,” along with several other filigreed tracks such as “Every Night” and (despite its unfortunate title) “Junk,” which later got its due when Cameron Crowe played its instrumental cognate “Singalong Junk” over an adorable love scene in Jerry Maguire.
My friend Charles C. W. Cooke claims that McCartney slipped badly in the waning years of Wings in the late Seventies, but this is unforgivably wrong. Back to the Egg (1979), Wings’ final album, is a wonderful record. It lacks a monster hit such as “Listen to What the Man Said” or “Band on the Run,” but “Getting Closer,” “So Glad to See You Here,” and “Again and Again and Again” are delightful rockers, “Arrow Through Me” combines cool, sparse R&B with a shiveringly off-kilter horn section, and the two double ballads “Winter Rose/Love Awake” and “After the Ball/Million Miles” are oddly fragile, haunting efforts.
In the Eighties, even as he recorded some of the songs that make his detractors’ teeth grind, McCartney never lost touch with the weird and the experimental, as displayed in the “Band on the Run” of the financial page, the five-part epic of financial and romantic loss “The Pound Is Sinking” (1982). Even on what might have been his worst album, 1986’s Press to Play, McCartney came up with a lilting piano ballad called “Only Love Remains,” in which he uncharacteristically considered the possibility of parting with his then-wife Linda. At that point, radio began to write off McCartney, and he became perceived as a nostalgia act, but he still had three absolute masterpieces left in him plus several more very good albums. I wrote an entire piece on the tour de force Flowers in the Dirt (1989), which is defined by a bitter missive from beyond the grave called “That Day Is Done” and a strangely foreboding track that contains one of my favorite David Gilmour guitar solos, “We Got Married.”
Eight years later, as Linda was dying from breast cancer, McCartney reached deep to find a reason to stay positive. The tension within, for instance, the subdued “Great Day” was noticed by Judd Apatow, who memorably used it to foreshadow a movie star’s terminal diagnosis in his great film Funny People. Though it has a cracking Jeff Lynne rocker in “The World Tonight,” the album leans heavily on gentle, reassuring ballads suitable for playing for someone in distress. Its lyrics confront suffering obliquely, and their full freight would not emerge until Linda’s death the following year: “Life as it happens / nobody warns you,” McCartney sings in “Little Willow,” and “When you’re fed up, shedding too many tears . . . I will come to you to ease the pain . . . everything is gonna come right in the end,” he offers in the gospel-charged rocker “Souvenir.” The glossy soft-rock ballad “Heaven on a Sunday” sounds like a Sting song from the same period, repeating as a kind of determined reassurance, “If I only had one love, yours would be the one I’d choose.”
Even after Linda’s death, McCartney behaved as though he held a job that required him to keep showing up at the office, and this century he has delivered an astonishing seven pop-rock albums (one under the pseudonym the Fireman), an album of covers (Kisses on the Bottom), and his fourth and fifth classical albums. At 63, he made perhaps the best pop album ever released by anyone past 60, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005), which eschews pop hooks in favor of a shivery and mournful feel. All 14 songs are strong, especially the standouts “English Tea,” with its touching refrain on “miles and miles of English garden, stretching past the willow tree,” and the unbearably beautiful “Too Much Rain”: “Make a vow that you’re going to be happy again,” he sang, seemingly attuned to the travails of his then-wife Heather Mills, who had lost a leg when she was hit by a police motorcycle.
It’s not unfair to complain that McCartney had a tendency to overvalue the sweet and the shiny, but those who dismiss him on the basis of those slick Eighties radio duets should look a little closer. Resist though he may the confessional mode, his lyrics do have substance if you care to look. As for the compositional genius, that has been a steady companion for 60 years. No artist alive has achieved so much. Happy birthday, Sir Paul.