When Paul McCartney is making his solo record, it’s usually best to stay the hell out of the way. Throughout his time with The Beatles and on a few of his greatest solo records, Macca was known for being just as good behind the board as he was in front of a microphone, occasionally making the kind of music that no one thought he had in him. But on the rare occasion where he didn’t see eye to eye, McCartney would crumble, and ‘Riding To Vanity Fair’ was the one moment where everything broke down for him with Nigel Godrich.
Then again, someone like Godrich working with the former Beatle should have been a slam dunk. He had already been through some of the best modern rock music with Radiohead, and the sounds he got out of them weren’t all that dissimilar to the more adventurous side of what the Fab Four had done back in the day.
Once McCartney actually got down to working on the record, Godrich didn’t really feel great about what the rest of his backing band was doing and ended up sending them away. He needed to work with McCartney as a songwriter before anything else, and that’s when the relationship became much more open.
Instead of treating him as a songwriting god, Godrich was known to tell McCartney when he thought that something was terrible. While it was a bit more rough behind the scenes, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard did manage to become one of the better albums in McCartney’s late-period renaissance.
That didn’t mean McCartney didn’t get a bruised ego on ‘Riding To Vanity Fair’, saying, “It was a very different song when I brought it to Nigel, and during one moment on the sessions he said, ‘I really don’t like that song.’ It really brought me down. It was one of our crisis moments. It totally did me in. I couldn’t do any more work that day. I had to go home.”
After cooling off, ‘Riding To Vanity Fair’ became the most revealing piece on the entire record. Since McCartney was about to go through his lengthy separation from Heather Mills, this song feels like him pouring his inner feelings onto the page, not necessarily being angry but just saying his side of the story and sounding genuinely hurt at the end of everything.
There are even a handful of chords on the track that McCartney doesn’t seem to use all that often. Given that the harmonic structure is a lot different this time around, ‘Riding To Vanity Fair’ seems to exist in its own little world when put next to the more jaunty numbers like ‘English Tea’ and ‘Fine Line’.
In fact, if you’re listening to McCartney’s albums in sequence before you get to McCartney III, this could have justifiably been called the third in the trilogy because of how much his personality shines through every track. For someone who didn’t need to release a drop of new music after 1999 and still be set for life, it’s commendable to see the ‘Cute Beatle’ turning in something that still sounds this emotionally earnest.
