“That romantic image”: the songwriter Paul McCartney holds in the highest regard
To call Paul McCartney one of the greatest rock and roll musicians who has ever lived still would be doing a disservice to him.
The man is simply the living embodiment of pop music, and there isn’t a single instrument on the planet that he couldn’t get a half-decent tune out of if he committed himself to it. Despite not knowing any proper music theory, he has some of the best ears in the business, but he was also never afraid to work on the kind of music that was a little bit more fruity than your average rock and roll song.
While the rest of The Beatles were never that much of a fan of McCartney’s ‘granny shit’ ditties, it’s not like he was completely out of order for making those tunes. He had that natural charisma that made him the right person to deliver songs like ‘Honey Pie’, and while none of them was ever going to be considered “cool” by any stretch, that wasn’t what Macca was after. He wanted to make music that turned him on before anything else, and that included going outside of everyone’s comfort zone.
But painting him as the pop songwriter of the band isn’t really fair, either. If we’re being completely transparent, McCartney was the weird one long before John Lennon started venturing outside of rock and roll, and his experiments with avant-garde music were what helped shape songs like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. He could handle channelling his inner avant-garde composer just as well as he could inhabit the vocal prowess of Little Richard, but there was a lot more for him to explore when he started working in the professional field later in his career.
Taking on a full orchestral suite would have been unthinkable when the band first started, but even during his solo career, McCartney was trying to apply every single lesson that George Martin had to each when he produced records with him. He was always the Fabs’ musical translator when they were chasing down the right melody, and if McCartney could come up with those, it wasn’t that hard for him to make the transition to the world of Broadway.
He had already talked with Lennon about becoming a songwriting team on the same level as Gerry Goffin and Carole King, but after conquering the world, McCartney had a goal to become a proper theatre composer. And when looking at what people like Stephen Sondheim were doing in the field, it wasn’t that hard for Macca to visualise himself making his first steps into that arena.
Even when asked about his favourite collaborators like Michael Jackson, McCartney felt like Sondheim loomed large above everyone else, saying, “[I admire] Stephen Sondheim. Probably one of the best. You know, when we started with the Lennon-McCartney thing, you know, 50-50 with a handshake, it was like a Rodgers and Hammerstein trip. For me it was, anyway. That romantic image of collaboration.”
And while Sondheim’s productions are a much different animal than any of McCartney’s albums, it’s not like you can’t see the influence that each of them had on the other. McCartney’s sense of melody was already tailor-made for Broadway, and while the idea of him making a turn towards the more refined areas of the music business is enough for purists to dismiss him completely, there was nothing wrong with his contributing the odd tune to a classical piece or writing tunes for a ballet.
Because, really, those projects are what McCartney always envisioned when following in the footsteps of Sondheim. He was making the music that the Fab Four had always been pointing towards, and since he had spent years trying to get his next big chart hit, what’s the harm in making a tune that could stand with tracks like ‘Summertime’?
