“It’s growing on me”: the album Paul McCartney thought got better with time
It’s bound to be uncomfortable for any artist to return to some of their classics after a while. Since most of them spend hours peddling away, trying to get everything to sound right, the last thing they want to do afterwards is listen to everything for pleasure, lest they look either overly critical or one of the most pretentious artists in the world who enjoys listening to their own music in their spare time. While Paul McCartney does have opportunities to revisit his classics, there are only certain occasions where he can honestly claim to enjoy going back to his records.
Granted, a lot of his legacy may have changed, considering where The Beatles ended up in pop culture. Since he has spent over a lifetime with the group, putting on records like Rubber Soul and Sgt Peppers might bring to mind all of the good times that he had with George Harrison and John Lennon since they are no longer on this Earth. Then again, there are also bound to be some bad memories looking back at Let It Be, with Phil Spector’s overbearing production weighing everything down.
And once the band broke up, no one would have blamed Macca for not wanting to revisit anything that he had ever made. A lot of his legal troubles were still tied up with Apple Records, and considering how far the band had come since their inception, the idea of him casually turning on ‘Please Please Me’ was a thing of the past once he had begun working on his first solo tracks with Wings.
Then again, even the “cutting-edge” stuff that the former Beatle did in his solo years wasn’t always greeted with open arms. Press to Play is still one of the more dated pieces he ever made, and while it’s easy to support something like Liverpool Sound Collage in theory, in practice, it’s about as listenable as any of his fellow Beatles’ “experimental” projects like Electronic Sound or Two Virgins.
But McCartney had started with experimenting right out of the gate with his self-titled debut. A lot of the material on the record felt like nothing more than demos at the time, but when looking at it through a modern lens, his DIY approach was incredibly innovative for people who thought everything needed to sound perfect.
Even during the 1980s, when discussing Press to Play, McCartney admitted that McCartney is one of the few records he can listen to over time, saying, “I wish I was just a fan and I could genuinely like [my music] without seeming wildly immodest. I can’t be objective yet. I can listen to McCartney; I can just listen to that. I like that one; it’s growing on me.”
Looking at what he was doing circa 1970, McCartney also stands as one of the gutsiest records he ever made. You have to remember that he was known as the true perfectionist of the group, so seeing him throw caution to the wind and release something deliberately unsophisticated was far more interesting than hearing an album full of the whimsical songs that he adored and drove other people up the wall.
While McCartney would eventually find love for albums like RAM and Band on the Run for accomplishing what he set out to do, there’s a good reason why he might hesitate to talk up his own material. No one truly knows what their music is going to sound like until it’s gone through the mixing stages, and sometimes, it takes years for someone to fully comprehend what they were trying to do.
