‘McCartney II’: the best one man band album ever made
Making an entire album on your own is never an easy task. As much as people like the idea of having complete control over every aspect of the mix, asking them to be able to play every single thing that comes into their head is practically an impossible task if they don’t have the proper credentials for what they’re doing. While artists like Prince and Dave Grohl have put many of their peers to shame by the quality of material they’ve pumped out on their own, Paul McCartney still holds the record of being one of the greatest one-man bands in the history of pop music.
When talking about the pure McCartney experience, though, it always comes back to his trilogy of McCartney albums, where he played every instrument. Compared to every record he made with Wings and even his mainline solo efforts, every one of his self-titled records helps show a different side of him, whether that’s him grappling with his place in the world or trying to find some new and exciting medium to work in. And while McCartney certainly fits the bill for having a song like ‘Maybe I’m Amazed,’ that’s not what we’re looking for here.
As much as McCartney’s official debut is fun for what it is, there are parts of it that don’t exactly sound as good as what would come later. Since he would go on to release RAM with his wife Linda, there are a lot of moments on this record that feel like demos compared to where he would go next. What we’re looking for is something that acts as its own sonic statement, and there’s no better creative restart for Macca than McCartney II.
While Wings were still technically together when McCartney was putting the record out, there are bits and pieces that seem too wild for him to be associated with. He was already becoming known as the lighthearted solo Beatle who made tunes for the masses, but no one was prepared to hear him channel his inner Talking Heads on ‘Coming Up’ or make a primitive ballad like ‘Waterfalls’ using the most basic synthesisers money could buy.
Even though every one-man band project feels a bit ramshackle, the real power behind McCartney II is its refusal to stay in one genre for too long. The former Beatle contained multitudes, and listening through the album, everyone gets to see the different sonic faces he has, whether that’s him channelling his inner bluesman on ‘On The Way,’ making goofy new wave on ‘Temporary Secretary,’ or bringing things back to that signature tunefulness on the final song ‘One Of These Days’.
The album’s spirit might have been the same as his original outing, but McCartney II feels like someone who has grown well beyond their years over the course of one album. A lot of the appeal of a one-man band album is to make something from scratch, and despite having a lot of different moments with abnormal instruments, McCartney never loses that DIY spirit when working on many of the songs.
There have been a handful of occasions where McCartney has tried to equal this kind of zany energy, but it’s hard to repeat this kind of adventurousness again. McCartney III may have been a nice palette cleanser for everyone going through the pandemic, and Electric Arguments was a great way for him to let out his art-rock side, but doing what comes naturally like this is never going to go out of style.
He might have considered McCartney II as something that he did for fun in his downtime from Wings, but listening back to McCartney II, this is the result that everyone should strive for when making something that could be classified as ‘alternative’ music. It’s not necessarily the easiest listen from front to end, and anyone coming to Macca for the hits might be disappointed, but looking at it as the result of someone throwing together stuff in his house, there’s no other album that can touch it.
