Ranking the albums Paul McCartney called the greatest of all time
As one of the greatest psychedelic mind-benders to ever grace the Earth, Paul McCartney actually has a rather narrow view of music.
This is not an accusation of any kind of ignorance on his part, but it is interesting to witness how, in all of his 83 years, McCartney is still mentally living within that finite prism of his glory days: swinging spirits, a lack of inhibition, and the nub of what he considers to be the real genesis of rock and roll.
If you were to compile a soundtrack to fit this bill, The Beatles would invariably crop up somewhere – but for Macca himself, his own tunes don’t even come into the fray.
It’s perhaps also telling that, despite everything we hype the 1960s up to be in terms of the takeover of the British invasion storming across the Atlantic, it isn’t any of his British compatriots whom McCartney relies on to provide the records which have defined his life.
Instead, he occupies a decidedly transatlantic point of view, where all of the artists behind his favourite albums have a distinctly American persuasion.
It’s a testament to the fact that, in the craziest time of his life, McCartney sought escapism from his own shores and thus landed on the music of America to give him the most pivotal direction.
But it’s all well and good justifying the context of this – the real question is, are his picks even worth such a prolific title? We are just about to find out.
Ranking Paul McCartney’s three favourite albums:
Music From Big Pink – The Band
To be clear, this is not a suggestion that The Band are the runt of the pack. After all, with an album that inspired Eric Clapton to quit Cream and dictated the trajectory of Pink Floyd, there’s no way of arguing against its pretty seismic influence.
It’s also understandable why Macca would single it out – it’s 1968 release coincided with some of his most hair-raising moments of psychedelia, and it’s only natural that he’d want something to capture that elixir.
But for the sheer comparison of Music From Big Pink to his other picks, it does unfortunately have to come in last place. While the album somewhat became a musician’s blueprint for the expansiveness of Americana and the new horizons this could bring, it perhaps hasn’t nestled its way into the permanence of the public heart quite as much as the other two, hence taking away just a hint of its iconic gleam.
Harvest – Neil Young
As we all know by now, Neil Young is a mixed bag of emotion – on one hand, there’s the melting heart of a wizened old soul, and on the other, there’s a blazing man who’s often too cynical and blistering for his own good.
Somewhere in the middle of that vast traverse of the spectrum, you find the sweet spot that is his 1972 record Harvest, which managed to strike just the right tone with the whole world, it seems, as well as McCartney evidently.
However, what shines through Harvest to make it such an iconic record is not just the fact that it can stand on its own two feet, but also transcends as a North Star through the rest of Young’s discography.
Take a song like ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’ as the prime example – not many artists can say that a track which appeared on one album inspired an entire next era, as Young can in this case with Tonight’s The Night, but that’s just the power it can behold.
Pet Sounds – The Beach Boys
But as a cut above all the rest, it has to be the album that the whole world says changed their lives, not least McCartney among them. There is a satisfying full circle in the fact that Brian Wilson was inspired to create Pet Sounds off the back of The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, but what he then went on to cultivate was a complete kaleidoscopic world that no one could have ever imagined.
McCartney has described the record as “unbeatable” and admitted that he has often cried at the majesty of it, and in many ways, this is the only apt summation of something which changed the music landscape unmistakably forever.
Within his lifetime, Wilson would have been more than used to hearing this type of praise from the everyman, but when it came from both a peer and a hero – well, not only was he grateful, but it made all the rest start listening too.
