Two of Us
When you’re bringing Get Back, Long and Winding Road, and Let it Be to the table, a song like Two of Us is bound to seem at first blush like a bit of an afterthought, but for anybody else this would probably be the album high point. By Paul’s account, it was inspired by getting lost on a road trip with Linda Eastman, the new love of his life, but true as that may be it’s impossible to hear it as anything except a paean to his precious artistic partnership with John, soon to be shattered forever. The two of them harmonize closely throughout, and Lennon contributes a lovely little whistling part to cover the outro. We now understand, following the release of Peter Jackson’s comprehensive Get Back documentary, that the supposedly horrid and contentious Let it Be sessions weren’t anywhere near as full of strife as Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s selectively edited film made them appear, and here, as frequently during the recording, the Beatles’ titans remain in perfect sympathy.
In the “everybody’s a critic” department, one Tyler Golsen, writing in Far Out magazine, allows that Two of Us is “undoubtedly a beautiful song with some lovely imagery and vocal work from both Lennon and Paul McCartney” and was indeed “sublime”, but concludes that “it makes for a poor album opener”. Oh yeah? Says you, Tyler.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/difficult-history-the-beatles-song-two-of-us
Paul Zollo over at American Songwriter gets it right:
One of the sweetest moments in the movie Let It Be, and the album, is this song. “Two of Us.” It’s a beautifully tender ballad written by Paul with a gentle lilting melody, and rendered with acoustic guitars and Ringo’s galloping drums. But it’s the way Paul and John sing it in perfect harmony, just as they sang so many songs through their time together, that makes it so poignant, especially now. It came during the sad dissolution of the dream, the breakup, and yet shines with that perfect Lennon and McCartney harmony. Despite all the dissonance between them, John and Paul sang this beautifully, free of any rancor, allowing the music to unite them again.
New
The title track from the 2013 album. Have a listen, and then you tell me whether the boy still has it. Many likened the rhythm and arrangement to Penny Lane, similarities to which can undoubtedly be heard in the horns and descending bass line under the verses, but this is also Paul, ever the chameleon, channeling the spirit of Brian Wilson (a peer whom McCartney has always greatly admired), especially in the a cappella conclusion. The first time I heard this I felt little waves of joy and recognition wash over me – just as Lennon once shouted from the back seat of a car, I was all fuck a pig, that’s Paul, it has to be, it’s fantastic – and this and the other tracks on New were very well received both by critics and the public, who pushed it into the top 5 in ten countries, including the U.S., Japan, U.K. and Canada. My favourite review comes from the comments section underneath the YouTube posting (usually a dragon-infested hellscape that one does well to avoid):
Can’t Buy Me Love
Distilled Beatlemania in a bottle, and the biggest hit from the wonderful Hard Day’s Night, the movie and album versions of which utterly beguiled the previously skeptical pundits of the snooty American mass media. The United Artists soundtrack released over here was entirely different from the U.K. offering, with about half of the songs missing, their spots filled by instrumental muzak – I don’t know, maybe that had something to do with publishing rights. Sadly, this gave the rapacious, predatory capitalists over at Capitol Records an opening to pad whole new fabricated albums with the residue, as they merrily butchered the real albums in the quest for more product (a miserable practice they didn’t cease until Sgt. Pepper – what they did to Revolver was particularly heinous). Many of the U.S. releases weren’t even in stereo, or proper mono either (which would have been O.K., the lads put a lot of effort into the mono mixes back in those days), but something misleadingly labelled “re-channeled stereo”, a hideous process that allots the same basic mono track to both channels, but tweaks one to emphasize treble while the other is altered to stress bass frequencies, creating a weak illusion of stereo separation while slaughtering the fidelity on both sides. It’s godawful. I remember being pleasantly surprised around 1980 when I picked up a superb Japanese pressing of the U.K. version of Hard Day’s Night, and first heard the songs – all the songs from the actual U.K. album – reproduced in true glorious stereo.
Summer’s Day Song
A small, overlooked, and entirely lovely little synthesizer piece (with flutes provided by mellotron) from the home-made McCartney II, released in 1980. Summer’s Day Song is built around baroque, hymn-like harmonics right out of Bach, and features dreamy, wordless, beautifully textured interludes that I’ve always found soothing and utterly, ethereally gorgeous. I can imagine it as film music, and wonder what it would sound like echoing under the vaults of a Gothic cathedral.
Jenny Wren
Another standout track from Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, likened by many to a cross between Blackbird and Eleanor Rigby (with the muted, booming drums also reminiscent of Mother Nature’s Son), in which Paul paints a portrait of a lonely and heartbroken girl plucked from the pages of Dickens. The day will come, he assures us, when she’ll sing again. That Paul’s aging vocal cords can only just manage to hit the high notes that used to come so readily only adds to the poignancy. The clarinet-like solo is provided by a duduk, an ancient Armenian double reed woodwind instrument that Paul somehow encountered in his travels, making its first appearance on a popular record.
Get Back
Just about everybody’s favourite scene from Peter Jackson’s documentary of the same name shows Paul, immediately upon arriving in the morning to begin another day’s studio sessions, conjuring this irrepressible rock & roll number quite literally out of thin air. Playing his Hoffner bass as if it’s a rhythm guitar, he begins with just a few chords, tries out some interesting melodic accompaniment, and arrives at something almost fully formed (and pretty much affixed with a label reading Note: Future Billboard #1) in just about two minutes, while George and Ringo sit there looking only half awake, yawning at him. Ho-hum. They’ve seen it a thousand times. On the final studio cut, Billy Preston’s keyboard accompaniment was deemed so important that they didn’t just give him a credit, making him one of only a handful of Beatles session players to get the nod, they paid him the singular honour of billing themselves as “The Beatles with Billy Preston”:
At first, it was going to be a pointedly ironic political protest song, featuring the usual cast of English bigots instructing third world immigrants to get back to wherever it is they all came from, but the mood wasn’t right, and the Beatles generally shied away from overt political statements. A set of humorous, nonsense-rhyme “placeholder” lyrics were used instead, one suspects with significant improvisational input from Lennon, who was always apt to compose verse about characters like “Sweet Loretta Modern”. Somehow, it works just fine.
1985
A rousing piano number from Band on the Run, released back when 1985 was still twelve years in the future, this is another one that sounds a lot like film music (Paul, perhaps, still channeling the energy he brought to Live and Let Die). It’s hugely effective when performed live. Once again, Linda adds completely serviceable vocal assistance.
A World Without Love
Not the best thing he ever wrote, but still, it’s kind of nice isn’t it? Back in those halcyon days when Paul was engaged to the exquisite Jane Asher, and living in a spare room in the Asher household, he naturally became chummy with Jane’s brother Peter, who was himself an aspiring pop singer trying to catch a break in a duo with Gordon Waller. McCartney, perhaps figuring it might stand him in good stead with the whole Asher family, decided to throw Peter a bone and contrived the somewhat slight but typically lilting A World Without Love, not so much a rock & roll number as a show tune influenced, perhaps, by Broadway standards like ‘Til There Was You, a hit from The Music Man that Paul used to like to perform in concert. Naturally, as a song credited to Lennon/McCartney, it went all the way to #1 in both the U.K. and America, and Peter and Gordon went on to have a couple of more hits before Peter moved on to become Apple’s head A&R man, and then a producer working on recordings for luminaries like James Taylor (whose demo first caught Peter’s attention at Apple), and Linda Ronstadt. The brief demo attached above was lost for decades, until Peter dug it out of some forgotten box.
I’m Looking Through You
Speaking of Jane Asher, conventional wisdom has it that this delightfully bitchy litany of gripes against an anonymous and apparently vexatious love interest arose out of a rough patch in the relationship, to which I say, Lord, that woman was so good for that kid – even when she was pissing him off, she was inspiring (and anyway, it was undoubtedly all his fault). I’m Looking Through You, off 1965’s Rubber Soul, gives voice to a sort of wounded disillusionment that we’d come to expect mainly from John, though it’s positively tame (and musically far superior) when compared to John’s really quite vicious Run For Your Life, also on Rubber Soul, in which Lennon threatens to outright murder his own girlfriend if she steps out of line, a bullying, misogynist sentiment that makes it unlistenable nowadays.
Friends to Go
Delightful. Even on first impression it’s immediately obvious that Paul is adopting the musical style of none other than George Harrison, paying gentle tribute to his old friend, who’d fallen just a few years earlier to cancer. In Friends to Go McCartney imagines his former bandmate as a reclusive ghost, happy to hang around and haunt his buddy’s place for a while, but waiting for the party to wind down, and all the strangers to leave, before he makes an appearance. It’s such a warm, affectionate, and whimsical piece, though George, who always laboured on his songs, often struggling mightily to get them just so, would probably have been exasperated at how easily Paul was able to sound just like him, only better (particularly in once again bringing the music to a tidy and satisfying conclusion, something George often seemed unable to do, see Blue Jay Way, It’s All Too Much, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Isn’t it a Pity, and so on, which leave one wondering how he managed the feat so well on his twin Abbey Road masterworks, Something and Here Comes the Sun). For much of the post-breakup period, George became known for having nothing but nasty things to say about Paul, resentful at having been, as he saw it, repeatedly thwarted by the guy who always treated him like a kid and junior partner, but the two were eventually reconciled, and it’s nice to know that Paul was at his bedside, the two of them reminiscing and joking as they used to do, just a few days before the end.
the needlefish 