A couple of months ago, in honour of McCartney’s eightieth birthday (!), a number of music publications set about compiling “best of” lists, ranking Paul’s lifetime of compositions and opining on the relative significance of the songs. I figure that I’m about as well placed as anybody else out here among the unwashed laity to pen such a thing, so here’s my own list of what I feel are Paul’s best songs, one for each year of his life, spanning his entire career. I’m not going to attempt a ranking, and the songs appear in no order at all, not even alphabetical or chronological, much less according to any impossibly concrete assessment of relative merit, though accompanying comments will, I’m sure, indicate when I think a given song is certainly among his very best; but the astonishing thing to appreciate, even after absorbing the plain truth of it over a lifetime of listening, is that everything on this long list is at a minimum a pretty frickin’ good song, and it wasn’t even hard to find eighty tunes that fit the bill. In fact, it was tough to stop at just eighty, and I’m sure others would find many of their own favourites inexplicably excluded. It’s also surprising to note how many post-Beatles tracks make the cut, challenging the received wisdom that nothing which came later can quite match the output of his younger days, and how many of those most worthy solo works were written in the 21st century.
The selection criteria were simple: it had to be written solely, or at least mainly, by Paul (admitting that during the Beatle years, any McCartney song might have touches of John in it, just as any of John’s could have been helped along by Paul) – so fantastic songs that are known to be 50/50 collaborative efforts with Lennon, like A Day in the Life, are excluded – and…well, that was about it. I was trying, of course, to single out one or another of Paul’s special gifts in making the selections, especially his singular talent for melody, but with a catalogue like his that wasn’t much of a filter. Thus it was all gut feeling. Throughout listening to all these tracks, it’s hard not to marvel at McCartney’s sheer fluency, the apparently off-hand ease with which he makes the most wonderfully intuitive compositional leaps in the dark, repeatedly demonstrating, as writer Adam Gopnik once put it, his “grasp of the materials of music”.
What’s most impressive, do you think, apart from the amazing compositional acumen? Paul’s routinely extraordinary vocals? His expert playing of just about anything a body could strum, pluck, bang, or blow into to make music? The breadth of musical styles, as McCartney, slipping into different idioms as easily as changing jackets, veers from hard rock to baroque ballad, from folksy country and western to English music hall, employing, along the way, tricks of the songwriter’s trade absorbed variously from just about everybody who ever fashioned a tune, from Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly to the unknown composers of medieval hymns and Anglican plainsong? You’ll find plenty of all of that below, and more besides. Curiously, though, few of the selected Beatles era songs highlight McCartney’s superlative bass playing, second, I’d say, only to Motown’s James Jamerson as an overall body of work (and then not by much). Paul seems generally to have reserved his best playing on his signature instrument for the songs written by Lennon and Harrison, though I’ll note the exceptions as we encounter them.
I must apologize in advance for the inevitable repetition of certain thoughts and turns of phrase, e.g. “soaring melody”, “deft arrangement”, “perfect formal construction”, “brought home expertly with a trademark plagal cadence”, etc. I’ll try to mix it up and say it differently, but after all, the frequency with which such descriptions are applicable is really the whole point, isn’t it?
So, drawing the titles out of a hat, as it were, here we go:
Martha My Dear
Paul’s ode to his beloved and apparently quite silly English sheepdog, an almost insanely clever little masterpiece, deftly arranged (see?), tightly constructed, and featuring both nifty key changes and surprising time signatures. The track features violins, cellos, and trumpets on top of the usual rock & roll instrumentation, all used rather sparingly and to great effect, but the backbone is provided by Paul’s piano, which introduces the irresistible melody. Here’s Paul during one of my favourite interludes within Peter Jackson’s sprawling Get Back documentary – without any of the other musical elements, that piano, all by itself, immediately captivates the listener:
Songwriter Seth Swirsky, explaining why McCartney is his favourite popular composer, had this to say:
He could do so many things, and he could do things that are hard to quantify. Some people might say, ‘Well, I like Hall and Oates as songwriters,’ let’s just say. But they do that 8th note thing where they’re just banging on the piano, like ‘Kiss On My List,’ so you could kind of copy their sound a little bit, or copy their style of writing. Very hard to copy McCartney, because you just don’t come out with ‘Martha My Dear,’ where it changes keys in the middle. That comes from a different kind of mind.
My Valentine
One of only two self-composed ballads off 2012’s Kisses on the Bottom, a collection of Paul’s covers of old standards from the Great American Songbook. Written in the melancholy key of C Minor, Paul knocked this out on a piano in the lobby of a hotel, while waiting for new flame Nancy Shevell to come downstairs, and it’s as gorgeous a melody as he ever composed. American Songwriter magazine did a whole piece on it, well worth a read:
…in which author Rick Moore writes that the song was as effective and timeless as any of the other great songs written by the masters he covered on Kisses On The Bottom, putting him squarely in their ranks. Nobody but McCartney could combine those lines with a killer melody in a minor key, of all things.
Actually, there’s one other songwriter I can think of who pulled it off marvellously, the great Richard Rodgers, whose extraordinary melodic gifts rivalled Paul’s, and whose own (perhaps unconsciously inspirational) My Funny Valentine was also written in C Minor. That’s the sort of company Paul keeps. So often, you have to look beyond modern Pop/Rock, and compare him to Gershwin, Rodgers, Porter et al. This is one for the ages.
Mamunia
An unassuming, charming little acoustic number that kicked off side 2 of 1973’s monstrous Band on the Run, Mamunia was inspired either by the name of a hotel in Marrakesh, or of a house in which Paul was staying in Lagos, Nigeria, where the album was recorded (sources vary, with the majority citing the hotel) – the word “mamounia” means “safe haven” in Arabic. It appears here mainly on the strength of its excellent guitar playing, its generally pleasing tunefulness and harmonies, and its elegant, soaring conclusion, played tastefully on synthesizer, which provides one of McCartney’s myriad clinics in how to bring a song to a tidy, satisfying conclusion.
I’ve Just Seen a Face
Sometimes, a young fellow will spot a girl across a crowded room, and bang – that’s it. Besotted. Paul channeled that feeling into one of the standout tracks on 1965’s Help!, though the rapacious Americans at Capitol Records, butchering away as was then their wont, excised it for later release on the stateside version of Rubber Soul, a much different record upon which, one has to admit, this energetic acoustic love song fits in surprisingly well. Compact, tightly constructed, and full of unexpected nuance, I’ve Just Seen a Face captures perfectly that breathless, heady rush of youthful infatuation, while managing, in the manner of so many of Paul’s songs, to pull off being a major bit of songwriting while masquerading as an accessible little pop toe-tapper. In 1965 McCartney was just hitting his stride, beginning that golden era when everything just came to him so easily.
Too Many People
One of the best songs from Ram, alternatively scorching and almost sullen, while also by turns positively spooky – the big studio echo, those ominously strummed chords, the ghostly horn floating overhead while Paul sings, in a tone oozing contempt that might even be called threatening, that was your first mistake – it’s enough to induce goosebumps. It’s widely interpreted as a dig at Lennon, particularly on account of the lines Too many people preaching practices / Don’t let ’em tell you what you want to be, as well as the acid sentiment that you took your lucky break, and broke it in two, which presumably refers to John’s determination to put an end to the Beatles and run off with new muse Yoko Ono. The hard rock electric guitar is amazing, as is McCartney’s immaculate production throughout (Paul had apparently paid close attention to what George Martin was doing up there in the booth all those years). Mixed in with a chorus that sounds uncharacteristically bitter are verses that are simultaneously full of inherent menace, yet graced with a typically compelling vertical melody. Note as well the back-up vocal contributions by Linda, always maligned, who does a creditable job of adding to the ethereal mood.
Funny thing: Ram was panned by just about everybody (save the purchasing public) when it was first released. Critics, often downright vicious, lambasted it for being “comfortable” and unpleasantly redolent of (God forfend) “domestic bliss”. Yeah, well, the impression I gather from Too Many People isn’t exactly blissful, but anyway, the young Turks in the rock press absolutely despised it, and proclaimed it an artistic disaster, an embarrassment, and even, impliedly, some sort of betrayal. You’d have thought they’d just figured out that Paul was actually Mengele in a clever disguise, the Nazi bastard. For years after, decades even, the album was singled out as a low point, until a few years into this century, when younger listeners forced a dramatic re-evaluation. Five decades on, it’s now considered brilliant, chock full of fascinating musical ideas and infused with a defiant indie spirit as Paul doggedly sought to go it alone after the break-up and prove his independent worth. This gushing tribute from Salon, marking the record’s 50th anniversary repackaging, typifies modern opinion:
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another album by any other artist that’s undergone such a radical reappraisal.
Put it There
From 1989’s Flowers in the Dirt, this neat, pretty, and thoroughly moving little gem is one of those latter day pieces that could easily have slotted in on one of the late-period Beatles albums, I think especially the White Album. Paul has said that it was inspired by Buddy Holly’s Every Day, though this isn’t obvious on a casual listen – it’s in the cadence of the plucked acoustic guitar, and the general lightness of tone, although, as so often with Paul, there are tears lying just beneath the happy surface. Touchingly, Put it There is a tribute to his departed Dad; in times when Paul was troubled as a kid, feeling, as kids do, that the weight of the whole world was suddenly upon his shoulders, his father would reach out his hand in a pledge to share the burden, saying “put it there son, if it weighs a ton”. Some of us are lucky enough to have had dads like that.
the needlefish 