The one song Paul McCartney thought was too over the top: “I started goofing around”
At this point, Paul McCartney has earned the right to do whatever the hell he wants when he walks into the studio.
His legacy as one of the finest songwriters in the world is already secure, and even if not every song is a winner in his later years, it’s much more interesting to see him take chances in his later life than try to rewrite ‘Penny Lane’ all over again. Then again, anyone who has followed Macca’s career for a long time knows that his trademark whimsy is something that everyone needs to get used to.
Because if you look at the best McCartney albums, there are usually a few cheeky moments on the record that keep people coming back for more. No one would have called schmaltzy songs like ‘Bluebird’ their favourite when Band on the Run first came out, but the more that McCartney has been around, he seems to have been put on this Earth to make people smile through the love songs that he wrote.
However, there is a point where it can go from sweet to too sweet to downright sickening. Many people have tried to justify a song like ‘Ebony and Ivory’, but outside of a decent vocal performance from McCartney and Stevie Wonder, there are way too many saccharine moments in the song for it to be considered a classic alongside the likes of ‘Let it Be’ or even ‘Isn’t She Lovely’. By the 2000s, though, McCartney had a much greater balance of what his fans wanted.
Chaos and Creation in the Backyard had some of the finest songs he had written in years, and ‘English Tea’ managed to give everyone a glimpse of the version of McCartney that everyone knew from the days of ‘You Gave Me the Answer’. So when he worked on Memory Almost Full, he had a lot more confidence in making a record that was more in line with what he had done back in the 1970s.
It’s not exactly the best McCartney album ever made, but it does serve as a great successor to what he had been doing during his Wings days, especially on the uptempo tracks like ‘Only Mama Knows’. But for all of the dramatic moments on the record, McCartney felt that the song ‘See Your Sunshine’ featured a few moments that were a bit too dramatic even by his standards.
The song is an archetypal McCartney ballad, but he felt that his bass work on the song was a bit too out there for what he was used to, saying, “I did a fairly straightforward bass track and then I was messing around. For my own pleasure, I started goofing around. I ended up playing too much, too over the top. [The producer] said, ‘That’s great.’ So that was dangerous, so I said, ‘Right here we go,’ and I pulled out every lick in the book and had fun playing over the top. Looking back it all seemed to make sense.”
Considering the rest of the song is a bit more morose compared to everything else on the record, the bass work is exactly what picks everything up. It’s not McCartney’s greatest written song, but it does at least highlight how great a bass player he has always been, usually throwing in the kind of lines that most artists wouldn’t have even thought of when he pulled out all the stops.
Is it giving off the same energy as someone like Chris Squire or even John Entwistle? Absolutely not, but McCartney’s style of playing has always managed to do the one thing that every musician should do: serve the song. Because as long as it fits well in the mix and enhances the tune, there’s nothing to complain about.
