‘My Love’: The Paul McCartney song that saved Wings from failure
When Wings started out, Paul McCartney seemed to be throwing caution to the wind and going all in on whatever mad ideas came to him. After the breakdown of the Beatles and the emergence of this new act, he clearly didn’t want the band to just be a carbon copy of the one that came before, resulting in a far more left-field approach. However, left-field doesn’t always sell well. Right as the group was on the brink of failure, one song saved them – ‘My Love’.
“How do you follow The Beatles?” Paul McCartney remembered asking himself in the early 1970s when he decided to form Wings. Alongside his wife Linda McCartney, drummer Denny Seiwell and Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine, the ex-Beatle now had a new band and wasn’t sure what to do with them. “Do you just try and get a bunch of great musicians around you-which is probably the most logical thing to do — and just pick up where you left off?” he continued, knowing this would be the easiest option. But it wasn’t the option he wanted.
“I didn’t fancy that,” he said, “I thought that to get a real band and to get a new direction, you’ve got to start at the bottom, square one — start there.” So that’s what they did. Ripping everything up and starting again, McCartney approached this new band with a whole new energy and sound, reflected in their debut album Wild Life.
However, in a mission to differentiate themselves from The Beatles, he failed to bring with him the hit-making skills he’d honed in the band. Nothing about Wild Life is as catchy or universal as any of McCartney’s Beatles hits, and while that was purposeful, it did not make for good business.
Immediately, they started out on the wrong foot. Faltering at only number 11 on the UK charts, the band didn’t make the splash they wanted or commercially needed to make. But luckily, McCartney had a trick up his sleeve.
“This was early days for me and Linda,” he said of that era. After meeting in 1967, the couple married in 1969. When the Beatles broke down, and McCartney fell into a period of depression, he retreated back home to his new wife and their family, being rebuilt and bolstered by their love. It was still the honeymoon period when they decided to collaborate on Ram and then start Wings together, so the songwriter had no end of gushing tunes to write about his partner. Both dizzyingly head-over-heels in love but also beginning to settle into the bliss and security of their domestic life, ‘My Love’ captures that moment. “It’s a love song to her,” he said simply about one of the grandest romance songs he’s ever put to tape.
In a beautiful act of love saving the day, the song saved Wings. As the lead single for their second album Red Rose Speedway, the track was a hit. Bagging the number one spot in the US and sending the album into the UK charts, it put the band back on track.
But it put them back on track in the off-kilter way McCartney wanted. It’s clear that the couple still wanted the band to have a kookier, more liberated sound than simply putting out radio-ready ballads. “So you’ve got ‘My Love,’ and that’s a proper song,” he said. But as that track led to sales of the album, they hid their wilder sounds within it as he explained, “You’ve got some other proper songs on the album. But then we’ve got something like ‘Loup,’ which was sort of a bit of fun for us. It’s pretty experimental. But we didn’t ever play it live, it was just something fun that only existed in the studio.”
With ‘My Love’ putting the band back on people’s radars and reminding them of McCartney’s unbeaten songwriting talent, it opened up doors for Wings to break down barriers. After finding this golden balance of hits and more experimental tracks, it guaranteed their success moving forward until they lost the balance again.
