Over half of the albums Paul McCartney put out throughout his lifetime have been etched in gold at this point. No matter if it was his time with The Beatles or his second wind with Wings, every piece of Macca’s history feels like looking at the rock and roll equivalent of the works of Shakespeare half the time. Not everything is perfect in McCartney’s mind, and when looking back on his first albums in retrospect, he thought his debut was a bit more ramshackle than it should have been.
Since the very last album that fans had heard from him at this point was Abbey Road, listening to McCartney for the first time was a bit of a shock. McCartney had already gotten the reputation of being the real perfectionist in the studio, so hearing him creating the kind of dishevelled recordings on the album was far different from what everyone expected.
Outside of ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, most of the music was recorded at McCartney’s house because he didn’t want any interference from anyone who might be peeping in. It sounds like it, too, especially when he adds song fragments like ‘The Lovely Linda’ into the mix or creates an entire rhythm section with his mouth and slapping different objects on ‘That Would Be Something’.
When talking about the album later, McCartney was sure that a lot of people would have been disappointed in hearing something so lacklustre right out of the gate, telling Rolling Stone, “I realise it was more kind of throwaway and done at home than any of the previous ones, but that wasn’t a reason to worry about it. You never know what people are going to think about a record anyway”.
While the press had a field day bashing McCartney’s debut and his follow-up RAM, his first offering is a lot more charming to return to over time. Since there’s no rhyme or reason to where every song goes, it actually veers closer to indie rock than anything else, as if McCartney brought that same DIY mindset to a mainstream rock record.
McCartney was more than just a demo record, though. In fact, what came out of the McCartney trilogy of albums may be the most interesting music that McCartney ever made. The first one may have just been a proof of concept for what he could do in the studio, but McCartney II took it one step further by playing around with different electronic music, resulting in some of the wildest recordings he ever made, like ‘Temporary Secretary’ and ‘Coming Up’.
Even in his later years, when rounding out the trilogy, McCartney III still has that homey feel of the previous two efforts. A lot of it was recorded during the lockdowns during the pandemic, but hearing McCartney having fun in the studio at least showed us that he knew how to lift people’s spirits when everything looked dark.
This kind of mindset was bound to be mocked in its time, but looking back on it now, McCartney was the start of a whole new approach to McCartney’s music. Instead of working within the confines of The Beatles, this was McCartney front and centre without any bells and whistles, and yet he still managed to sound like one of the greatest artists of his time.
