The album Paul McCartney considered a throwaway: “That was the whole idea”
To think of any piece of Paul McCartney’s legacy feels almost disrespectful. As one of the world’s most revered songwriters, it feels like even his scraps would be golden. But even for a figure as looming as him, self-doubt creeps in, making him question the worthiness of his creations, especially during one difficult era.
“I was depressed. You would be,” Paul McCartney said of 1969. When John Lennon essentially announced that he wanted a divorce and The Beatles, who had been racing towards the now inevitable end for quite some time, finally split, it was a devastating blow. Anyone who watches the Get Back session footage would see in McCartney, a man who is desperately holding on. He’s the one trying to keep it all together as he never wanted the split to happen. But it did, and he was left reeling.
It was so heavy that he was even left wondering “whether I was still going to continue in music”. For a moment, he wondered if that might be the end of that as he doubted if he could make music, or at least make successful music, without the group he’d grown up with or the songwriting partner, he took his first steps with. As all four members went off to their own solo projects to lick their wounds, they all seemed to be more confident than him. Both Lennon and Harrison launched into solo careers, seemingly overjoyed with the newfound freedom, while McCartney appeared more cautious and unsure.
He went off into hiding. “I was like a professor in his laboratory. Very simple [set-up], as basic as you can get,” he said of the moment when he set up a home studio and attempted to coax himself back to work.
McCartney was the result of that. To many, it’s the best of his solo work as the debut landed as an undiluted triumph of his talent, made solely by the man himself. But to him, it was a collection of tracks that would’ve been forgotten otherwise.
“They were almost throwaways, you know?” he said, “But that’s why they were included.” On a mission to not overthink or overcomplicate things, to trust himself and simply get back to business, he stuck with these songs. “That was the whole idea of the album: all the normal things that you record that are great and have all this atmosphere but aren’t that good as recording or production jobs,” he said.
To him, this is where the lifeblood of his passion lived as he let himself return to that and to the excitement of working on these rough, low-stakes ideas in a simpler way. “Normally, that stuff ends up with the rest of your demos,” he said, “but all that stuff is often stuff I love.”
That love is definitely heard on the record. Imbuing tracks like ‘Every Night’ and the epic ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, they’re simple songs that take interesting and unexpected turns and risks, clearly motivated by nothing more than McCartney’s artistic fancies as he let himself follow his heart all the way.
