Builder finds rare psychedelic Paul McCartney piano designs in a skip

Credit: Paul McCartney

Listen to a stripped back version of the Paul McCartney classic ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’

Sat 29 October 2022 12:30, UK

Paul McCartney was all about simplicity in 1970. Frustrated by the overbearing enormity of The Beatles and their music, McCartney wanted to strip it all away for his solo debut. A similar frustration with the overindulgence in the studio led to the conception of the Get Back project, but when those sessions eventually saw the light of day as Get Back, McCartney’s songs were embellished to a garish degree thanks to Phil Spector’s involvement.

In contrast, McCartney is minimalist to the point of being unfinished. Brief song snippets like ‘The Lovely Linda’ rubbed elbows with improvised pieces like ‘That Would Be Something’ and ‘Momma Miss America’. The album was fully recorded and overdubbed by McCartney himself, adding a ragged edge and slightly amateurish quality to some of the songs.

McCartney would become an iconic pioneering work in the genre of lo-fi music, but initial assessments of the album lambasted McCartney for putting out such a blatantly uncommercial product. It would take a number of years for McCartney to regain his status as a critically acclaimed songwriter, but reviewers did find one bright spot on the album: the penultimate track, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’.

As one of the only songs from the album to be recorded at a professional studio, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ had a certain polish that the rest of the album lacked. It wasn’t released as a single, under McCartney’s specific instruction. “Sometimes we’re a bit daft here,” McCartney claimed. “We have a bit of a funky organisation, you know, which isn’t that clued into picking tracks off albums. At the time, we thought ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ was a good track and maybe we should do that as a single, which it probably should have been. But we never did.”

McCartney leaned into his pro musicianship on ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, overdubbing a classic guitar solo and settling into the pocket for his drums and bass performances. Even his harmonies are on point, blending together with his wife Linda in one of their loveliest recorded performances.

Despite having some of the most expertly-blended overdubs on McCartney, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ started out with simplicity in mind, featuring just McCartney on the piano. He eventually built it up from there, but McCartney’s original concept for the song, and indeed for this entire period, comes out loud and clear when the overdubs are stripped away. It’s McCartney at his simplest and most straightforward; it’s arguably also him at his best.

Check out a stripped back version of ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ down below.