The song Paul McCartney found almost too moving to revisit: “I’m not ashamed to be emotional”
Of the John Lennon and Paul McCartney songwriting partnership, there’s a strong case to be made that the latter was chirpier. A legend of the love song and master of the four-on-the-floor pop ballad, he often left the more dark and twisted takes for his mop-topped counterpart. Of course, that’s a somewhat reductive take, given the nuance of both of their work, but a fair one nonetheless.
From the minute The Beatles stepped foot on stage, McCartney was quickly assumed as the dewy-eyed lover boy who could pen a love song with charm, humour and profound sentiment. And as they developed into songwriting powerhouses, McCartney’s love songs were given appropriate compositional care, with harmonies and orchestral instrumentation introduced to pack a stronger sentimental punch.
But on Wings’ 1976 album Speed of Sound, McCartney stripped his approach back, penning a track for his wife Linda on the piano. While we’re no strangers to a lovestruck McCartney at his point, ‘Warm and Beautiful’ is a song that pits him at his most vulnerable. In fact, it’s a song he describes as “one of my favourite songs,” explaining, “It’s a ballad with a brass section, but it’s always felt Victorian in style to me. It’s very heartfelt.”
Sonically, it strikes the very chord of romantic sentiment, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that it’s McCartney in one of his most lyrically forthright moments. He expanded on his own appreciation for the words, in The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present, saying, “‘A love so warm and beautiful/Stands when time itself is falling.’ I like that idea instead of just saying, ‘It will go on forever.’ I got a good feeling writing this song, and listening to it now, I still do. ‘Love, faith and hope are beautiful.’”
When Linda died on April 17th, 1998, McCartney enlisted the help of Loma Mar Quartet, a group of freelance musicians, to perform rearrangements of his hits during her second memorial service in New York. Admitting that “It might have been some loud rock ‘n’ roll, or perhaps something of mine” when asked what songs Linda would want played at her funeral, McCartney decided to make a “list of songs” he “had written specifically with Linda in mind”.
The result was a collaboration with the Loma Mar Quartet and London Symphony Orchestra that eventually made the subsequent album Working Classical. On the record is a reworking of Wings’ 1976 ballad dedicated to Linda and an arrangement that sits fondly in the memory of McCartney: “My favourite arrangement is ‘Warm And Beautiful’. That always does my head in. It captures some of my innermost feelings for Linda. I’m not ashamed to be emotional. I used to be when I was younger, but I’m not anymore,” he said.
I don’t think as fans we ever acknowledged the inner shame of an emotional Paul McCartney, for he taught many a modern man how to articulate their feelings of romantic sentiment. But perhaps in keeping with traditional complexes of modern masculinity, it took a wordless reworking of his song to help draw it out.
