“I liked it so much”: the track that took Paul McCartney back to being a teenager
Memory Almost Full is the name of Paul McCartney’s 2007 album. The rationale behind the name was speculative. Eagle-eyed fans realised it was an anagram of “For my soul mate LLM.” However, while McCartney likes the idea, he admitted the album title came from a message that flashed on his phone screen, telling him he needed to delete some items.
“It struck me as quite poetic,” he admitted when discussing the album title. “In modern life, there is so much sensory overload. There’s so much coming at you these days that you have to delete something to make room for something else. And it applies equally to a 20-year-old as it does to me.”
It’s true that we all live incredibly eventful lives, and as a result, our memories can grow quite full to the extent that we struggle to pinpoint specific memories very well. No one can attest to this better than Paul McCartney, who has had one of the most eventful lives on the planet. From a young age, he started a band with some friends, and the rest is history.
Luckily, we have music that can help us make sense of these memories and keep them in some kind of order. This isn’t just the lazy declaration that certain songs take you back to certain moments; there is scientific evidence that music can be a very specific trigger for specific memories.
In Hilde Østby and Ylva Østby’s book, Adventures in Memory, they expand upon this idea that music can be a sufficient trigger for certain memories: “Memory research is perfect for functional MRI studies. It can be carried out without any special equipment – beyond the MRI scanner – and the research participants perform a mental activity they are highly familiar with, without any outer influence. All we have to do is ask the test subject to retrieve a memory, perhaps with the help of a keyword.” They also say that regarding sound, “Remarkably often, music is mentioned as a trigger for a personal memory.”
How fitting, then, that the album Paul McCartney was named after the idea of filling our memory so much we need to get rid of stuff. McCartney had a moment that took him back to being a teenager. Interestingly, this wasn’t the result of playing a song or writing a new one; rather, it was the result of learning to play a new instrument.
The track ‘Dance Tonight’ came from McCartney, who bought a mandolin and tried to make sense of it. “I was on my way to a meeting, but before I got there I went for a walk, to experience life for a minute,” said McCartney. “There’s a guitar shop I like to visit and so I went there and got chatting to the guy who works there. He said he had a left-handed mandolin to show me, and I ended up buying it.”
McCartney spent the rest of the day trying to make sense of the instrument, and with that, the transportive power of music took full effect. “The great thing was that I didn’t know how to play it – it’s tuned like a violin, so I had no idea what the chords were,” he noted.
Concluding, “It took me back to when I was a teenager being presented with an instrument. I had to figure out how to play it. I found one chord, then another, and then a really strange chord. I still don’t know what it is, but it sounded great.”
