The one songwriter Paul McCartney would love to work with: “Keeps coming up”
Paul McCartney is one of the few living legends who can still claim to have done everything in rock and roll. He had already helped shape the trajectory of pop music once The Beatles, and even if people stopped after the first few years of his solo career, they would be selling themselves short on the best music that came out of every single subsequent decade. Although Macca could create some brilliant music by himself, he was always in his element when he had someone to bounce off of.
Granted, some of his best moments only came from him either guiding people on what to do or making his own take on rock and roll. His solo McCartney series of albums contains the best moments of him getting objectively weird behind the mixing desk. When listening back to some of his greatest hits with Wings, Band on the Run only came together after he started working on it with Denny Laine and his wife, Linda, in the background.
Still, was there anyone who was bound to replace John Lennon as his writing partner? From the minute that they broke up in the late 1960s, no other group has been able to have that musical sixth sense that Lennon and McCartney had, practically finishing each other’s musical sentences and finding the perfect way to balance the tone of every one of their songs. And for as talented as Denny Laine was, competing with Lennon simply wasn’t all that fair.
So that meant making the most of whoever he was working with. Although McCartney’s collaborations with Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder could have been anywhere from sweet to stomach-churning depending on your personal preference, tunes like ‘Ebony and Ivory’ sold boatloads of copies for a damn good reason. And when McCartney started working with Elvis Costello in the 1990s, he also got the closest thing to Lennon’s cynicism that he could have asked for.
For all of the great lyrics that Lennon could dish out, there was always Bob Dylan lurking in the background. Compared to every other artist in his time, Dylan was at the top of the pile for pointed and smart lyrics, which could have been a great way to offset some of McCartney’s tendencies.
Since Macca had his moments of making songs that were too silly for their own good, he said that Dylan was one of the perfect people for him to duet with if he had the chance, saying when asked about his dream collaboration, “Bob Dylan keeps coming up in my mind, but I don’t know if we’ll ever get round to it.”
Despite Dylan not looking like he plays well with others, his time in the Traveling Wilburys shows that he is at least aware of how to make the right call when it comes to working in a group environment. And looking at the handful of dud collaborations that McCartney has had under his belt, this could have been a welcome change of pace from when he worked with someone like Kanye West back in the day.
But since McCartney was keen to revisit his past when putting together The Beatles’ ‘Now and Then,’ it wouldn’t be a bad idea for him to start working with Dylan while they’re both still here. Dylan always had a knack for lyrics, but the idea of having a song with the tunefulness of ‘Penny Lane’ with the lyricism of ‘Murder Most Foul’ feels like it would have been made in the musical heavens.
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