10 songs Paul McCartney should not have released
Paul McCartney most likely doesn’t need to make any more songs for the rest of his life if he didn’t have the desire to. Going through his entire body of work, he has been responsible for some of the most adventurous music of the past century. He has only continued to experiment with whatever else he wanted to do. But going through his time both with The Beatles and beyond, there are still a few times when Macca doesn’t reach the same heights he set for himself all those years ago.
Then again, there’s a difference between outright terrible songs and ones that shouldn’t have been recorded in the first place. There are many moments in his discography where McCartney has made fine albums, but there is the occasional track that either doesn’t fully come together or is completely filler compared to all of the other great tracks sprinkled throughout an album.
When McCartney got ahold of a bad idea, though, some good material got completely thrown in the trash. Even though he may have been going from a more modern sound than what he had been doing or just going back to his roots, some of these entries are classic examples of the phrase “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”.
Granted, do the good moments outweigh the bad moments throughout McCartney’s career? Absolutely. What comes up here is far from McCartney at his absolute peak, but for someone who has been in the game for as long as he has, you need to muscle through these songs to truly appreciate what a masterpiece ‘Let It Be’ or ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ is.
Songs Paul McCartney should not have released:
10. ‘Used to Be Bad’ – Flaming Pie
Every artist has to deal with growing out of their youth eventually. As much as rock and roll has been a young man’s genre at the best of times, McCartney has found a way to still make catchy tunes no matter what decade he falls into. While The Beatles Anthology helped refresh him to work on Flaming Pie, some bad habits would creep in ever so slightly once Steve Miller got behind the microphone.
That’s not to say that Miller does that bad a job. If I were next to McCartney and was told to lay down some bluesy fills, this would be miles better than anything else I could have done, but having it included on this album makes the whole album feel lopsided. The whole premise was to have McCartney get back in touch with his roots, but this is the closest that he would ever come to outright dad rock on record.
While other albums like Driving Rain may be a bit more downtempo than this, it makes sense to have an album full of mellow material than to have one tune bring everything down on a pretty bouncy album. Because if ‘Calico Skies’ helped him hone the same standards he reached during The Beatles’ years, ‘Used To Be Bad’ is what happens when Macca listens to the pillowy side of Eric Clapton’s catalogue and decides he wants to have a go at it.
9. ‘Crossroads’ – Venus and Mars
Considering where McCartney had been throughout 1973, Venus and Mars could have been considered a musical victory lap. Everyone had counted him off, yet here he was, standing head and shoulders above all his fellow Beatles now that Band on the Run took over the world. And while the album’s successor delivered on all the stadium rock that we could have asked for, did we really need a kitschy piece of whimsy to close out everything?
Then again, me asking McCartney to be less whimsical is like asking Morrissey to lighten up; you can try, but it’s not going to happen. But despite having a great song to close out the album with ‘Trent Her Gently/Lonely Old People’, the inclusion of this subtle piece of British television soundtrack reeks of them being out of ideas and unsure of how to close up shop on the record properly.
But this is the first and last time you’ll see any of the instrumental interludes that McCartney loved to make on a list like this. Each of them has its place to tell the story of the album, but in the case of ‘Crossroads,’ it doesn’t feel necessarily in the slightest. Since it’s taking up space, it doesn’t feel like the album ends on a high but instead just whimpers to the end.
8. ‘Motor of Love’ – Flowers in the Dirt
Of all the periods of McCartney’s career, the late 1980s tended to have some of the most questionable material. He hit the ground running at the beginning of the decade, but when looking at where he ended up on record like Press to Play, it’s not like he was getting ready to make the equivalent of ‘Hey Jude’ when he walked into the studio. A shakeup was just what he needed, but in teaming up with state-of-the-art producers, ‘Motor of Love’ turned Flowers in the Dirt into a dirge right at the end.
Although the album was praised in its time as one of the strongest efforts of McCartney’s later career, the compliments feel like they begin and end with the Elvis Costello collaborations. Now that he was left to his own devices, McCartney’s work with the producers behind Tears for Fears made for one of the most lethargic songs he has ever made.
Some of the best McCartney tunes benefit from being a slow-burn, but rather than a song that slowly builds over time, the climax of this song is not worth the payoff in the slightest; it just sounds the kind of song that would be played by an out-of-step Christian band trying to make a secular tune. McCartney could get a bit sappy on his tunes, but when the dance track ‘Ou Est le Soleil’ comes on afterwards, it’s almost an act of mercy to get everyone out of their musical coma.
7. ‘Heather’ – Driving Rain
Out of all of McCartney’s middle-aged sounding records, Driving Rain is by far the dreariest in his catalogue. It’s not necessarily his fault, either. He had been coming off the death of Linda, so it’s not like everyone was expecting him to be optimistic right out of the gate. It’s impossible to keep the ‘Cute Beatle’ down for too long, though, but having this glorified tribute song to his new wife just feels uncomfortable knowing what we know now.
Considering the massive tabloid stories from McCartney’s relationship with Heather Mills, hearing him create a song that’s nothing but a tribute to her feels like a bad omen of things to come in retrospect. It’s also kind of sad considering that the song ‘Magic’ from the same album is about the night that he met Linda, so hearing him moving on to another woman within one album inadvertently put Mills on equal footing with Linda for one album.
And despite McCartney’s attempts to work around their issues, hearing tracks like ‘Riding to Vanity Fair’ after the fact makes ‘Heather’ feel like a song that should have never happened. There was definitely love there starting out, but the further away that we get from those years, the more dated and strange it becomes hearing McCartney sing about the supposed queen of his heart. It’s unclear whether he was singing it to himself or the rest of the world, but it’s not convincing either way.
6. ‘Bip Bop’ – Wild Life
Not much of Wild Life really needed to be thought about all that much. Everything that McCartney was aiming for revolved around trying to make the best record that he could in a jam session, and the lion’s share of the best moments on the project come from when he’s just kicking back and playing for the hell of it. Everything was meant to be simplistic, but there’s a fine line between simple and stupid, and even McCartney had to admit that line got crossed on ‘Bip Bop’.
Since the album kicked off with ‘Mumbo’, most people knew not to get their hopes up for another massive orchestral masterpiece, but listening to McCartney talking about going to see a band and throwing together some nonsensical chorus is one of the most ill-advised moments on the project. If the first song was the proof of concept, then this was when people realised that the whole operation was incredibly flimsy from the get-go.
And it would be a little bit more forgivable if it didn’t go on for the length of a full song, which means that some decent jams got left on the cutting room floor. Even if he had to delve back into his backlog, putting something like ‘Another Day’ or ‘Oh Woman Oh Why’ onto this album instead would have been much better than what we ended up getting. Hell, I’ll take ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ at this point over this.
5. ‘Ob La Di Ob La Da’ – The White Album
It feels downright dirty having to measure bad McCartney songs compared to the ones he made with The Beatles. His work with the Fab Four is borderline untouchable for many people, and some of the greatest moments in their catalogue come from when he was collaborating with John Lennon. There were those moments where it just didn’t work, though, and once McCartney dialled the whimsy up to 100, ‘Ob La Di Ob La Da’ became the dopiest song that he ever wrote.
Then again, it’s not that I disagree with the song in theory. The idea of them trying out reggae sounds on an album that was all about throwing everything at the wall is an inspired choice, but McCartney tackles it with the same kind of sing-song approach that he gave to ‘Penny Lane’. And while that works great there, hearing it in practice here just makes the entire song feel like a parody version of what a lighthearted McCartney romp is supposed to sound like.
By the end of the sessions, though, no one wanted to argue anymore, so ‘Ob La Ob La Da’ had to stay as a little black mark on their history. There are many more lighthearted songs in McCartney’s solo catalogue, but whereas his songs for Rupert the Bear were meant for children, this felt like him trying to sell a lighthearted family movie to someone who wanted to see a suspenseful drama.
4. ‘Singalong Junk’ – McCartney
It’s hard to really critique anything that McCartney put together for his first solo outing. Much of his best work had still been with The Beatles, so most of the records that he laid down were nothing more than just a demo recording of what he had done previously. That didn’t amount to a full album, though, so hearing him play certain tracks over again just seemed unnecessary for an album that already didn’t have a lot of meat on its bones.
At the same time, ‘Junk’ is far from a bad song. The first time around, hearing this spare acoustic song with certain jazzy chords sounded like it would have been great had the Fab Four been able to work on it, but once McCartney dusted it off for this album, his choice of putting another version of it on the flipside with the vocals taken off just feels lazy considering what he had to work with.
Outside of not working as a song, it’s strange to expect someone to hear one of the deep cuts and then suddenly know all the words enough by the time they get to the record’s flipside. While the idea would have been a nice palette cleanser if it were made elsewhere in his career or even on one of his classical albums, putting it on the next side of the record is more or less just a reaffirmation that McCartney didn’t have anything left to work with.
3. Everything from Give My Regards to Broad Street
First things first: we are not talking about the plotline of Give My Regards To Broad Street. If we were, then we would be here all day trying to decipher just what McCartney was getting at and why he chose to incorporate his own original music updated for the modern times. What I’m looking for is to judge it as an album, and looking at the raw material, there’s hardly any reason for most of these reimagined songs to exist.
At the same time, I can understand why McCartney wanted to do it. Since the ownership of his tunes were up in the air, the idea of him recording new versions was light years ahead of what Taylor Swift has been doing with her back catalogue. In the case of this album, though, McCartney’s new versions do absolutely nothing new with the concept and don’t improve them in the slightest. So when listening to a track like ‘For No One’, it just sounds like a slightly older version of McCartney without any of the magic of his old vocals.
The pieces of a good idea are hidden somewhere in Give My Regards to Broad Street, but unless you’re a diehard fan of the song ‘No More Lonely Nights’, there’s little reason for anyone to spend their time trying to hunt down any songs from this. The Beatles already did it better, so what makes you think a quarter of them would do them justice?
2. ‘Wild Honey Pie’ – The White Album
The entire concept of The White Album meant that the final product was bound to be messy. There’s always been the common belief that the entire record was just four solo artists cutting tracks together for one album, but that inherently means that the whole thing will have virtually no cohesion whatsoever. While there’s something to respect about making an anti-concept album, McCartney’s decision to make experimental music was the kind of thing no one with human ears should be subjected to.
Because ‘Wild Honey Pie’ doesn’t really feel like it should be a song, per se. Listening back to the track, it’s already the length equivalent of an interlude track, but if ‘I Will’ worked within a short timeframe, this sounds like McCartney taking a few cues from Yoko Ono’s playbook by screeching at the top of his lungs and playing pieces on an out-of-tune guitar just to see what comes of it.
Although McCartney said that he put it on because George Harrison’s wife was a fan, there had to be some quality control somewhere along the line. Most people realise that Harrison got a bad reputation for not being included as much on Beatles tracks, but there’s no one in their right mind saying that ‘Not Guilty’ deserved to be heard less than this.
1. ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ – Abbey Road
Saying anything critical about Abbey Road feels like desecrating a piece of fine art. Even if it’s not to your taste, it’s still hard to deny one of the greatest pieces of work that the 1960s ever spat out. If there is one little fly in the ointment, though, it would be how much momentum gets killed when McCartney comes roaring in with ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’.
Since the group had said they wanted an album done in their classic style, that meant getting all of the whimsy all at once, which led to McCartney’s delightful little ditty about assault with a deadly weapon. It’s far from being his worst song, but in terms of tracks that shouldn’t have been released, the fact that ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ landed on his solo album and not this is honestly baffling.
Then again, all perfect things must have a few imperfect qualities, right? As much as McCartney did lay on his schmaltziness a little too thick on this song, it’s still worth muscling through to get to the power behind ‘Oh Darling’ or the raw prettiness of ‘Here Comes the Sun’. Abbey Road is still a masterpiece outside of just one song, but it does feel strange to go from ‘Come Together’ to ‘Something’ and then take a nose dive into corny territory.
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