The song Paul McCartney should have never ignored: “Sometimes we’re a bit daft”
By the time The Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney was in serious danger of becoming the casualty of the band.
Since all of his bandmates were starting to work out their own deals with Allen Klein, Macca was the one who was cast out as the villain of the band for being the one who actually bothered to announce to the world that the group was ending. But even if he had to find his feet a little bit once he started making his first stabs back into the mainstream, he admitted that a few tunes ended up becoming way too overlooked once he got a full album under his belt.
If you look at where he was, though, most fans should be glad that we even got a new McCartney release at all after the breakup. There was a good chance that he wasn’t going to make music ever again, and even though he liked the idea of strumming away on his guitar while he was on his farm in Scotland, it wasn’t like he had the same ambition he did before. The Beatles had been his whole life, and in just a few months, the whole thing seemed to crumble around him.
So, really, the person that we have to thank here is Linda McCartney. Every other naysayer will be the first to comment that she can’t sing or play keyboards, but that’s really a poor-faith argument when it comes to her contribution to McCartney’s music. She was the one who convinced him to get back up on his feet, and even if she wasn’t the most technical singer in the world, there’s an absolute charm radiating off of everything that they made together, whether it’s them harmonising on RAM or the shots of them dancing in the music video for Wings’ ‘My Love’.
But when combing through McCartney’s first massive albums, McCartney does feel a little bit half-finished by comparison. In all fairness, the album wasn’t even supposed to come out like this, and half of the record feels more like listening to demos than any properly finished songs, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t have fantastic songs like ‘Every Night’ and ‘Junk’ scattered throughout the record.
Then again, putting ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ on the record was almost like finding a diamond-encrusted jewel in a haystack. The album wasn’t boring by any means, but having this as the penultimate track was like putting one of the greatest pop songs ever written at the end of a collection of folk-rock jam sessions. And what’s even more of a tragedy was the fact that McCartney never even thought about it being a single at that point.
Granted, The Beatles had started with the idea of making standalone singles before putting out album tracks, but given how well the song eventually worked with Wings, McCartney felt he didn’t know what he had on his hands with the original recording, saying, “Sometimes we’re a bit daft here. We have a bit of a funky organisation, you know, which isn’t that clued into picking tracks off albums. At the time we thought ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ was a good track and maybe we should do that as a single, which it probably should have been. But we never did.”
But despite the Wings’ version having a slightly different guitar solo and McCartney’s throaty vocal, the original is still the one that has most of the magic. The tune is beautifully woven together with his piano figure, and even if there are a lot of tunes on the rest of the album that don’t come across like this one does, hearing McCartney play the guitar solo sounds so much more natural than what turned up on Wings Over America.
Hindsight might have helped out quite a bit this time around, but McCartney didn’t want to get caught neglecting one of those songs again. He needed to still hold himself to the same standards he had with his old band, and that meant putting his best foot forward every single time he made a new record.
