Feet In The Clouds

‘Feet In The Clouds’ is the tenth song on Paul McCartney’s 14th solo album Memory Almost Full.

Because of the retrospective mood of this medley, it then goes back to school and teachers. I had a real motley bunch of teachers at the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys. Some of them were complete maniacs. Whereas I wrote about golden summers in ‘You Tell Me’, school was very dark and gloomy. The building itself wasn’t the lightest of places – it was built in 1825. This seemed to affect the attitude of the teachers. They were a dark bunch of people. So the song is like a therapy session for me.

Although it was recorded with the members of McCartney’s band, all but their vocals and Rusty Anderson’s electric guitar was replaced in 2007 by McCartney, whose own vocals were treated with Celemony’s Melodyne Studio signal processing software.

I had about 36 tracks of vocals. I chose different lines to flatten out to get rid of the vibrato. Then in the mix, I kind of pitched them a little bit, which took a fairly long time. Melodyne does what Auto-Tune does, but better.