Salesman Saint

Written by: McCartney
Producers: Paul McCartney, Andrew Watt

Released: 29 May 2026

Available on:
The Boys Of Dungeon Lane

Personnel

Paul McCartney: vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass guitar, Mellotron, spinet, drums, tambourine, handclaps
Mike Davis: trumpet

‘Salesman Saint’ is the 13th and penultimate song on Paul McCartney’s 19th solo album The Boys Of Dungeon Lane.

I was born in 1942, in the war. I was too young to appreciate that, but my parents weren’t. My dad was a fireman, putting out fires from the bombs. My mum was a nurse and midwife. But they carried on, because they had to. Like people in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere now.

The brass arrangement was by Ben Foster and Giles Martin, and conducted by Foster.

It just so happened that the songs I was writing – like obviously ‘Days We Left Behind’ – were very much childhood memories or thoughts from that period of mine in Liverpool. That was always going to be nostalgic.

And then there’s another song I call ‘Salesman Saint’ where I’m talking about my parents, so, again, that was going to be nostalgic. I don’t know what it is, really, but I was in a certain kind of mood.

One day, on that song ‘Salesman Saint’, I just happened to think, Wow, people these days, raising children – young families, young friends, people I know – it’s hard. It’s a great experience, but you’ve got to work at it. And then I thought, Well, I wonder what it was like for my parents? It wasn’t like I was trying to be nostalgic. It was just a thought: What must it have been like for them? And then, of course, you realise, that was in World War II. That was completely different from anything we know at the moment. These wars are going on, but in other countries. In their case, it was in their country where the bombs were falling. That just struck me as an amazing fact that my actual parents had gone through that stuff, and yet they’d come through. They’d survived. My dad was a fireman during the war. He was directly involved in the wartime effort. My mother was a nurse, a midwife. She was involved in that kind of stuff, too. It just seemed like a really good tale to tell. It’s not that I was trying to be nostalgic but, in telling that tale, it had to be nostalgia, to be referring to the past. Things people write often do refer to the past, but it’s hard to just refer to tomorrow. We don’t know what’s gonna happen then. So you can make it up and stuff, as we often do. But the past is full of stuff. It’s a rich place to mine for ideas.