The song Paul McCartney was convinced people would hate
For all intents and purposes, Paul McCartney has free rein to do whatever he pleases nowadays.
It is difficult, after all, to denounce the credentials of a former Beatle, especially after so many decades of artistic genius and commercial success. Even still, Macca himself still troubles himself with the public reaction to his output.
Perhaps that fact shouldn’t come as much of a shock. After all, McCartney has been penning tracks for the masses since his teenage years, and it is a tricky habit to knock. Even during the most far-out, experimental days of The Beatles, when Macca and the gang were immersed in a seemingly endless acid trip, he was always the member attempting to imbue their work with a more widespread appeal, which is perhaps why his solo career has been so much more commercially successful than any of his former bandmates.
Nevertheless, that sense of duty to the musical masses does come with its limitations. It isn’t as though, for instance, McCartney is less inclined to experimenting than any other musician, but his self-titled McCartney album from back in 1970 is routinely (and wrongly) cited among his worst efforts, so you can understand why the songwriter tends to spread his more experimental works apart by a few decades.
McCartney was, in fact, responsible for a lot of The Beatles’ famous adoption of new technologies like the Mellotron, which became an integral part of tracks like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. In the many years since that single, the songwriter has never lost his appreciation and intrigue for those new inventions, and in more recent years, he found himself infatuated with auto-tune.
An integral part of mid-2000s pop, auto-tune (as the name would suggest) allows vocalists to artificially tune their vocals, either to make up for a lack of ability or as a means to achieve a specific vocal sound. “I had a mess around on an auto-tuner,” McCartney once revealed.
He already knew, however, that his use of the technology would be controversial. “I knew all my mates would go… People I knew were going: ‘Oh, no. You can’t do that.’ Because of that, I’d never even gotten near one,” he said.
After quite a while of intentionally putting himself off using an auto-tuner, McCartney finally gave in to its charms after seeing a certain rapper employing one onstage. “But I went to see Kanye and he’s using one live, and I thought: ‘You know what, that’d be fun,’” the songwriter recalled. “On this ‘Appreciate’ track I did some stuff, but in the end we didn’t use it.”
Even without the auto-tune, ‘Appreciate’ is still among the most experimental efforts of McCartney’s recent solo material, featured as one of five singles from 2013’s New, and the rather bizarre accompanying video fittingly features Macca alongside a humanoid robot.
Admittedly, the idea of hearing McCartney’s voice heavily filtered by auto-tune is, at the very least, intriguing. On the other hand, though, there is no shortage of tracks from circa 2013 that now sound painfully dated as a result of their overreliance on the technology, so perhaps it is best that McCartney was peer-pressured into abandoning his Kanye-influenced adoption of auto-tune.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.