‘Caesar Rock’ is the thirteenth track on Egypt Station, Paul McCartney’s 17th solo studio album.
There’s some times when I get in my studio with my engineer Steve, and we just start making up stuff. We will just have no idea what we’re gonna do, but we’ll play with things we’re interested in. So I might just start off with a drum machine, do something, then put a little piano on it, or put a bass on it, then maybe sing some ideas on it.I went in one day and we started making this song. And then I was playing with a little autotune thing that I’d been familiarised with by working with Kanye. So I thought, I fancy having a go at this. And in a way it’s a bit sacrilegious. But then I started thinking, ‘Are you kidding me? You know, you listen to some of the Beatles records, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, and we were never that, you know, nothing was that sacred.
So it was ‘She’s a rock’. But then we started referring to it as ‘Caesar Rock’, ’cause we were just having fun. And so we just built it up.
So I like that. I like this song because it’s slightly oddball, you know. It’s a song where anything goes, and I like it because of that.
And then we got then a group of people in the studio, some of the engineers, some of the guys who were hanging around. I said, OK, come on, we’re all going to go in and just be this big chorus thing.
And the thing I love about it is, right at the end of the track, I still don’t know how this happened, but it must have been me that shouted ‘She’s got matching teeth!’ And everyone was just, ‘She’s got matching teeth?’ I like the idea of matching teeth. I mean, I was playing with that as an album title. Matching Teeth. Yes! So, I mean, that was one we had a lot of fun with. ‘Caesar Rock’!
I always think of things like these as being happy accidents. Like when someone played the tape machine backwards in Abbey Road and the four of us would stop in our tracks and go, ‘Oh! What’s that?’ So then we’d use that effect in a song, like on the backwards guitar solo for ‘I’m Only Sleeping’. It happened more recently too, on the song ‘Caesar Rock’ from Egypt Station. Somehow this drum part got dragged accidentally to the start of the song on the computer, and we played it back and it’s just there in those first few seconds and it doesn’t fit. But at the same time it does.
The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present