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| July.07 Cover - Paul McCartney |
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| Written by Brent Dey | |
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Page 1 of 3  Some People Never KnowPaul McCartney's Ever Present Past In The iTunes Age "Dance Tonight," the song that kicks off Paul McCartney's new album Memory Almost Full is exactly the kind of track McCartney detractors sharpen their longest knives for. It's bouncy. It sticks in your head, and the lyrics are simplistic. But I would argue it ranks among the best songs Paul McCartney has ever recorded - and Paul McCartney has recorded a helluva lot of great songs. The song begins with the steady thump of a bass drum that sounds as if it were recorded in the front parlor of a country home. You get the impression that Mac has set up a drum kit by the fireplace and is encouraging friends and neighbors to bring out washboards and kettles. By the time the mandolin kicks in, you get the feeling that tables and chairs have been pushed away and the room is ready for some groove. McCartney's loose mandolin playing and slightly off-kilter whistling are the track's most endearing charms. He hasn't sounded this free in years. Singalong Junk Paul McCartney's interest in avant garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen pushed The Beatles to their grandest experiments, including the orchestrated coda that ends their crowning masterpiece, "A Day in the Life." Rarely has he been as adventurous since. The past twenty-odd years have seen him make a slickly polished set of records that are pleasant, but rarely take him or his listeners outside a carefully constructed zone of comfort. His personal eccentricities, fueled by a peculiar genius for arrangement and instrumentation, are often tempered by the taskmaster's quest for perfection. Unfortunately, that's where his new album Memory Almost Full finds itself on the irrepressibly kooky "Ever Present Past" and the overblown "House of Wax." This is not to say that Memory Almost Full doesn't have its moments. It's just that they're often over-produced and lyrically vacant. Calculated orchestral flourishes are fun, but they're diminished by a lack of lyrical intimacy - a disappointment considering that Memory Almost Full was billed as a "personal retrospective" of Paul's life. His life is, of course, marked by a timeless success that most of us can only dream about. But he has also experienced tremendous losses, including the loss of both his mother and wife to cancer, a period of strained relationships with his former bandmates and a very public and painful divorce. I would think that addressing these issues would be cathartic - both for Paul and for people who have experienced similar losses in their own lives. "It's just not one side of my character that interests me," he said when I asked why he doesn't spend more time in the personal space that gave us classics like "Hey Jude," "Maybe I'm Amazed," and "Here Today." "It can be [a] bright summer's day and I can just be in a happy-go-lucky mood and want to write something to dance to. And it's not as easy to write something like ‘Here Today' to dance to. You've got to be in the mood, and you've got to want to write like that, so I've got a choice to say, ‘OK, you're in a sort of fun-loving mood, don't write something. Just go and have a swim;' or, ‘Hey... write something and publish it and be damned. It doesn't matter.' So that's me. And it has led to that criticism that some of my songs will be more meaningful than others." |
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