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1.35am
6 May 2018
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Happy New Year!
I don’t recall seeing this remarkable interview before. This clip was included as an extra on the DVD release of ‘Wingspan’ and shows Paul revealing the writing process behind three songs from the Band On The Run album:
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5.22am
7 November 2022
Offline That was fun to watch, but he doesn’t really explain how he wrote them. There are so many songs he’s done over the years — Beatles and solo career — but precious little discussion anywhere I can find of the actual mechanics of how he’s writing and how he came up with this riff and that riff and this line and that line. For example, I accidentally happened upon a YouTube of the harp player who was asked to play harp on She’s Coming Home. I guess a couple of years ago British TV caught up with her and sat her down, and at one point Ringo joined in. She talked about how she was asked to come in late at night to the studio and every time she did her harp line Paul McCartney would speak down from the control booth and say that she didn’t get it right, and he would come down and explain what he wanted but she couldn’t really understand what he wanted. Finally she left, and she didn’t know whether they took any of her sessions. It turns out Paul chose the first one she did, but what he did was somehow add a doubling echo effect on each harp note. Why hasn’t Paul ever talked about that? There are like a thousand different things like that in all of his songs that he could talk about and get into the fascinating technical minutiae about, but he never does and about 50% of his chit chat is just repetition of motifs and themes and tropes he’s already repeated 100 times before.
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4.32am
6 May 2018
Offline Sea Belt said
That was fun to watch, but he doesn’t really explain how he wrote them.
Paul has been asked about his songwriting many times and, as in this interview, he says that the musical ideas basically come into his mind spontaneously. He may be playing a few chords on guitar or piano when a progression comes up that he likes, or sometimes the music or lyrics just pop into his mind even when he isn’t playing: a prime example of this type is Yesterday – the music came to him in a dream, and when he awoke he added his temporary “Scrambled Eggs” lyrics.
I’ve written a few songs myself on guitar, and they often come about when I’m just playing through some chords pretty much at random.
Some songwriters have a more formal method that they work through but, as far as I recall, Paul likes to keep the process as spontaneous as possible.
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5.13am
7 November 2022
Offline Richard said
Sea Belt said
That was fun to watch, but he doesn’t really explain how he wrote them.
Paul has been asked about his songwriting many times and, as in this interview, he says that the musical ideas basically come into his mind spontaneously. He may be playing a few chords on guitar or piano when a progression comes up that he likes, or sometimes the music or lyrics just pop into his mind even when he isn’t playing: a prime example of this type is Yesterday – the music came to him in a dream, and when he awoke he added his temporary “Scrambled Eggs” lyrics.
I’ve written a few songs myself on guitar, and they often come about when I’m just playing through some chords pretty much at random.
Some songwriters have a more formal method that they work through but, as far as I recall, Paul likes to keep the process as spontaneous as possible.
Sure, the initial impetus comes in a flash of inspiration to him, but knowing his perfectionistic attitude about crafting songs, which over the years through other people’s reports has become notorious, I’m more interested in the mechanics of how he built his songs after the initial inspiration. That building must have many moving parts which to me would be fascinating. Just to pick one out of a thousand, there are many sections and components of Uncle Albert , and I doubt he came up with all of them in the initial flash of inspiration. They probably came up with one and then started building upon that. I would just like to know why he went from the a minor to d part and chose g minor to c to alternate. And also, how he came up with that “live a little” section. And all the interesting transition riffs that go on within the song. They can’t all just be coming out of nameless flashes of inspiration, he must be actually tinkering and trying one thing out and another and getting upon the right thing, etc.
Uncle Albert brings up yet another example of how it had to be someone other than Paul to reveal an interesting glimpse into his song crafting: the guy who plays I think it’s a flugelhorn in Uncle Albert , talked about his experience. He said Paul sat down on the floor in front of him and explained to him what he wanted and also scat sang the line. At first the guy was playing a trumpet, and Paul knew it wasn’t right but he didn’t know why, and so the guy said why don’t I try doing it with a flugelhorn? And when he did Paul said that’s the ticket. But also, how did Paul come up with that line that the flugelhorn is doing? If it came later while he was adding component parts to his structure, he knew he wanted a little interlude but how did he know that particular melody had to be the right one? I write songs myself, and I can — and would — answer all these questions if someone asked me. In fact, from long frustrating experience of songwriters NOT talking about exactly what I want to hear (James Taylor does that too like Paul, but it’s also the fault of the interviewers for steering them to blandly general topics), if I ever got famous I would be sure to go into detail in interviews about the song crafting process — even if they DIDN’T ask me! One musician who is really good about that and explains all the minutiae is the electronic music guy Steve Reich.
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8.01am
24 March 2014
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David Lynch interviews Paul about Maharishi and trascendental meditation:
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9.07pm
7 November 2022
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10.27pm
7 November 2022
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1.33am
6 May 2018
Offline I think Paul was understandably in a state of shock at that time.
Paul has been asked about this several times, and here is his response:
Here are Paul’s comments in an NME interview:
I was very terrified right after John’s death because it’s such a horror for such a thing to happen. I was talking to Yoko about this — I had a few conversations with her quite recently and she told me people don’t like me because of certain things I’ve said. For instance, when John was killed I was asked for a quote. I said, “It’s a drag.” To me, looking back on it, I was just stunned. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I could have tried for a sentence and put it all into words. I couldn’t. It was just like “blob, blob, blob.” All I said was, “Ah! It’s a drag.” (Pauses) That, put in cold print, sounds terrible: “Paul’s reaction today was, ‘It’s a drag, thank you very much,’ and then he got into his car and zoomed off.” That’s the terrible thing about all that stuff. That’s the PR thing again. I hate all that because I don’t ever mean it like it comes out in print.
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2.15am
7 November 2022
Offline Wow
@Richard
Just as I clicked on your response I had seconds earlier clicked on the same clip from someone who provided it on Twitter! It’s not the “drag” part that evoked my reaction; it’s his general demeanor. I can’t honestly completely erase my sense of something peculiar even though logically it seems groundless.
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3.53am
7 November 2022
Offline Now today I find, you have changed your mind
7.17am
Reviewers
17 December 2012
Offline But that’s a completely different situation, @Sea Belt. John was gunned down in the street by a “fan”, the first such event to have happened. Paul was responding to questions about the murder of his friend, someone so close that their names will always be remembered together.
The “It’s a drag” statement is what always quoted as his response to John’s murder, but what’s rarely quoted is his official statement that day, which in part runs:
John was a great guy and he’s going to be missed by the whole world.
Sammy Davis Jr. had been diagnosed with throat cancer nearly a year before his death. He and his friends had had the chance to say goodbye. It wasn’t unexpected, or the result of violence, a shocking crime that still echoes through the decades.
The logical comparison between Frank’s response on Sammy’s death, a death from natural causes that was expected, a when not an if, would be Paul’s response to George’s death:
The difference, time to ready yourself for the blow of the loss.
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8.17am
7 November 2022
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4.50pm
24 March 2014
Offline Sea Belt said
I saw that interview a few years ago. When I first heard that David Lynch was deep into TM, I began to wonder how he squares that with the often dark and violent themes he regularly explores in his movies. What is it about darkness and violence and chaos and ugliness and evil that he finds so attractive that they become dominant themes in his main career of movie making? And what’s the relation of that to the peace and serenity of TM? Is that darkness part of the light? Is rape and murder and hatred part of the bliss that one is seeking in TM? Or does TM promise to vanquish the darkness? I don’t get any sense in Lynch’s movies that he proffers any hope or even desire to vanquish the darkness. Anyway, I wonder if any journalist or interviewer has ever bothered to ask him these questions.
I don’t really think there is any relation at all between what he expresses in his movies and TM. It’s not that if you practice TM you are surrounded by a happy shinny multicolor world…you are still living in this world, surrounded by the very same misery, violence, and darkness as everybody else. TM just help you cope with anxiety, stress, depression and also brings a lot of other positive things…which doesn’t mean you are going to be talking about rainbows for ever.
I remember watching an interview where he quoted Maharishi saying “an artist doesn’t need to be sad to express sadness”
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6.23pm
7 November 2022
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Now today I find, you have changed your mind
2.31am
6 May 2018
Offline Sea Belt said
Wow@Richard
Just as I clicked on your response I had seconds earlier clicked on the same clip from someone who provided it on Twitter! It’s not the “drag” part that evoked my reaction; it’s his general demeanor. I can’t honestly completely erase my sense of something peculiar even though logically it seems groundless.
As Ron remarked, John was gunned down in the street by a “fan”, the first such event to have happened. John and Paul had been close friends since mid-1957, including a holiday together in Paris. Suddenly, John is murdered as he entered his home.
I think Paul was in a deep state of shock. I have experienced the death of family and friends, sometimes through expected natural causes, and sometimes unexpected. However, I have never experienced a family member or close friend being the subject of an unprovoked violent murder. I hope you haven’t either. I don’t know how I would react if a microphone was thrust at me and then I was asked sometimes inane questions shortly afterwards, but it wouldn’t be surprising if my general demeanour was different to usual. I give Paul due credit for keeping his composure in these difficult circumstances.
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9.21am
23 January 2022
Offline Sea Belt said
@Ron NastyYes, that is a better comparison. And in fact, his response about George almost amounts to a textbook example of the best way of handling a situation like that. It could be the best response by any celebrity to the death of a friend or colleague in the annals of paparazzi. Which indirectly reinforces my sense of the oddity of the 1980 response, even though the circumstances were different as you describe. Even with those differences, the lack of any emotion at all still seems odd to me. He could have said something very brief like “I’m in shock, I really can’t talk now, I’ll try to make a statement later, please respect that thank you” as he walks quickly to the exit or a limo. It’s not like he’s a wallflower and hadn’t had a spectacularly sociable life for the past 20 years before that, with massive experience fielding questions from various kinds of reporters over those years. So anyway, when I put all that together, I’m still left with, “it was kind of odd…”
How can you call his reaction ‘odd’ when you have absolutely nothing to compare it to?
Let’s list some of the things that went into Paul’s reaction:
- His relationship with John was deep, long, and complex, and extremely publicly scrutinised
- John was murdered
- The Beatles had received death threats for years, so Paul must have been concerned for his own life, and trying to process how to deal with that
- A couple of months before this Paul held a dying nanny for an hour after a fatal car accident
And perhaps most importantly:
- He has a highly developed press persona that relies on easy-going nonchalance and optimism — it was spectacularly ill-suited to this situation and he had nothing to fall back on
It really gets my goat when people call Paul’s reactions in this interview “odd”. There is no “normal” reaction to death but when you take everything into account I would consider anything from decking the guy to blubbering on the street normal. And that includes shutting down emotionally and looking blank, unemotional, and confused.
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6.04pm
7 November 2022
Offline @meaigs
These two points are probably the best counter-arguments I’ve seen so far:
How can you call his reaction ‘odd’ when you have absolutely nothing to compare it to?
- He has a highly developed press persona that relies on easy-going nonchalance and optimism — it was spectacularly ill-suited to this situation and he had nothing to fall back on
As to the first one, each person has within themselves a sense of anything and everything, even things they don’t have any experience of (consciously that is). It’s how artists can expand beyond their own immediate experience to imagine. Different people have different abilities in this perhaps, & possibly the people who seem devoid of this ability just haven’t tapped into it yet. This imagination or sixth sense or intuition or whatever you want to call it can tap into the human nature we all share and all its complexity and subtleties. It’s not omniscience, it’s not going to deliver absolute knowledge that’s always irrefutable. In fact it’s probably most of the time flawed, but that doesn’t mean that it’s always wrong. So even if I don’t have anything comparable to measure this by, something still nags at me.
(Although by now after some nearly a century of filming famous and non-famous people by the thousands if not the millions by now, one would think that among those there must be at least dozens of filmed reactions both celebrities and non celebrities to sudden deaths of friends and family. So it’s not like we have nothing to compare this with.)
What all of you don’t seem to be understanding is that I’m fully aware of all your points, and find myself, or great part of myself, agreeing with you guys. That’s the thing about paradoxical feelings, you feel both at the same time, you don’t try to force one to squash the other, or at least I don’t. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if a lingering nagging feeling persists in me, I can still intellectually say, well there just must have been a good reason why Paul reacted that way, and my misgivings are just some strange feeling I can’t get rid of. And that’s that. But I’m not going to then conclude that I don’t have this persisting nagging feeling. To me that would be also odd.
Now today I find, you have changed your mind
12.53pm
7 November 2010
Offline Correct me if this has already been posted / if this is the wrong thread.
I recently saw this quote from an interview with Paul Simon, when asked about the best songwriter of all time:
I’d put Gershwin, Berlin and Hank Williams. I’d probably put Paul McCartney in there too. Then I’d have Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Then, in the second tier, Lennon is there, Dylan is there, Bob Marley and Stephen Sondheim are there, and maybe I’m there, too. It’s about whose songs last.
I found it interesting that he put Macca in a higher tier than Lennon and Dylan based on “whose songs last”, and I’m struggling to disagree.
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8.07pm
7 November 2022
Offline I’d agree with Paul about Paul; however, I’m not sure that “it” is about whose songs “last”. The worth of a song isn’t primarily in its lasting.
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