For most artists, no song can truly be considered complete. Even though you may have recorded it once and have been praised by millions worldwide for that one version, songs usually take a while to gestate before they even make it into the studio. Some might spend months getting a tune, and some might take years, but Paul McCartney unveiled a song that he started back in his Beatles days at the tail end of Off the Ground.
By the time McCartney made his way into the 1990s, though, he had already gone through one of the stranger patches in his career. After becoming one of the biggest pop stars in the world all over again, thanks to his collaborations with Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder in the early 1980s, projects like Give My Regards to Broad Street weren’t exactly what he needed to be hip with the kids.
Although McCartney came dangerously close to sounding like a toothless middle-aged musician on albums like Press to Play, he found his muse again when working alongside new wave icon Elvis Costello. Working on the album Flowers in the Dirt, Costello would often be playing the cynical foil to McCartney, with the former Beatle remembering that it was one of the closest collaborations he had since John Lennon.
Despite trying to run away from the legacy of The Beatles ever since 1970, McCartney found himself back in fashion again around 1993. While grunge was still as relevant as ever, the emerging Britpop scene was on the horizon, leading to many new bands like Oasis and Blur considering The Beatles as one of the coolest bands in the world again.
Throughout Off the Ground, you can hear McCartney coming back to familiar territory, writing the kind of pop-rock songs that wouldn’t have felt out of place around 1966. Costello may have been helping out on a handful of tunes, but songs like the title track and ‘Hope of Deliverance’ were a bit more in tune with what McCartney was doing in his glory days, the latter of which sounded closer to Wings’ finest moments.
After bringing the album to a close with the song ‘C’Mon People’, there’s a little bit of silence before the slow strains of the hidden track ‘Cosmically Conscious’ start playing. Compared to the other new songs on the record, this track got its start all the way back in 1968 while The Beatles were on their meditation retreat in India.
Studying under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, McCartney took the title of the song from one of the guru’s teachings, sounding like a mix between the psychedelic pop of the 1960s filtered through the modern production of the 1990s. While fans only got to hear a short snippet of the song at the end of the album, the deluxe edition of the album included a full run-through of the song, which serves as a lost Beatles song fans never heard.
But the lingering question remains: would this have been included on The White Album? Considering George Harrison’s penchant for writing spiritual songs, hearing McCartney try his hand at introspective lyrics about life would have been a lot more interesting than having to slog through ‘Wild Honey Pie’. The Beatles may have always been about compromise, but most fans would have gladly taken this on the double album experience instead of ‘Revolution 9’.
