Scared

‘Scared’ is a hidden track on Paul McCartney’s 16th solo studio album New.

Out of the blue, I met this girl [Nancy] and we started talking and she happened to say, ‘I knew Linda.’ So that was emotional. I wouldn’t meet, typically, many people who knew Linda, and who knew her during her cancer treatment – and Nancy did. She’s a cancer survivor herself. So it got very deep, very quickly, and it was like, ‘What the hell was that?’ And then I ran into her a couple of more times on the holiday, and we got to know each other and started dating. So the song is about that, about this depth of emotion, of but totally being scared to say or do feeling anything about it. Like a tongue-tied teenager.

‘Scared’ was produced by Giles Martin, who also worked on ‘On My Way To Work’, ‘Appreciate’, ‘Everybody Out There’, and ‘Looking At Her’.

We tried various things, various arrangements. But to me this had to be just him on his own. Funnily enough, I was talking to Ethan [Johns] about a thing his dad [Glyn Johns] had said to him, which was ‘When the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, you should just step back’. It’s a great end to the album.