“I know there must be other ways of feeling free,” he postures in full-on overdrive. Most free of all, perhaps, is Slidin’, a muscular blues-rock dirge that serves as a reminder of McCartney’s masterful heaviosity. Rather, it’s a meditation on an overwhelming emotion that cuts deep and destabilises, one so intense it hurts. McCartney’s theme here is love, but this isn’t a cliched treatment. The album’s flowing centrepiece, Deep Deep Feeling, by contrast, fills eight and a half minutes a collage of vocals and backing vocals augmented by boxy percussion and piano. The vocals don’t break the spell too much. The album’s opening shot, the mostly instrumental Long Tailed Winter Bird, is a tremendous, raga-like track that could have gone on for far longer than its allotted five minutes-plus. If III suffers a little from the patchiness endemic to the mission statement, musical freedom – a sense of unfettered “let it be”-ness – is the chief draw here. If revenge is a dish best served cold, that one might have stayed in the barn’s chest freezer a while longer. This particular throwback jars rather than charms, however, when a woman from McCartney’s past gets her comeuppance. Watch McCartney III (Official Album Trailer # 2)Įchoes of previous Beatles character sketches, such as Polythene Pam, register, too, on the playful-sounding Lavatory Lil. He is in no doubt of his purpose here: “It’s still all right to be nice,” he beams. Naturally, you can often hear McCartney’s past loud and clear – never more so than in the jaunty progressions and bittersweet Beatle whimsy of songs such as Seize the Day. Here, in common with the more recent Chaos and Creation in the Back yard (2005), McCartney is following instinct, not tidying up too much and playing an array of instruments, including the acoustic stand-up bass once owned by Elvis Presley’s original bassist, Bill Black. But the main objective – experimentation – remains. The threads that connect McCartney III to its synth-heavy 1980 predecessor are, perhaps, less obvious than those leading back to his debut. The remainder of the tracklisting hops around in time, tying off iPhone voice notes that McCartney had on the back burner. “Now you’re overwhelmed by your anxieties,” McCartney sings, “let me help you out, let me be your guide.” Even better are the song’s various gently arpeggiating instruments, supplementing the words with persuasive loveliness. Find My Way, the song on III that most clearly reveals its 2020 origins, offers up a shoulder to lean on. We know by now that the author of Hey Jude and Let It Be remains a really decent guy to turn to in a crisis. It recurs as a theme on a work that mostly privileges love and positivity – although not exclusively. On this varied record, abounding in chiaroscuro, light is both literal and metaphorical. But as a man who was once married to a photographer, McCartney can bring nuance to the study. As one of the most snapped humans on the planet, it’s easy to hear “meet the pretty boys… objects of desire” as a rumination on the Beatles as a boyband. Photography is uppermost in McCartney’s mind on a song called Pretty Boys, a meditation about fame. We know by now that the author of Hey Jude and Let It Be remains a really decent guy to turn to in a crisis She was the b aby peeking out from McCartney’s big coat on the 1970 album’s flipside. In 2020, daughter Mary McCartney fulfilled that role. There are a few more resonanceswith ’69-’70: then, Linda McCartney took the pictures. This strand of numbered solo albums is, famously, looser and more experimental than McCartney’s more nipped and tucked commercial work. It seems to ask: what are the chances?Īs with both previous self-titled McCartney records – McCartney II followed in 1980, as Wings were folding – the former Beatle wrote, played and produced everything himself on III. The rogue element of fortune is echoed in the album’s artwork, an Ed Ruscha commission that shows a die poised on its point, three dots to the fore. Much of his 2020 should have been filled with a Glastonbury headline slot and other touring engagements, but instead resulted in the unscripted McCartney III. Sheltering in place, at one remove from a difficult world, contemplating some gardening – it’s not hard to find parallels with what McCartney calls “rockdown”.
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