For Paul McCartney to name an album “New” in 2013 is almost as oblivious—or as brash—as the band Asia naming an album “XXX,” which they did last year. Try searching for information about either of those: in the latter case, you’ll suddenly find yourself looking at a tremendous amount of Japanese pornography; in the former, you’ll get articles about every McCartney project from the past fifteen years. But “New” is something more specific: it’s McCartney’s first collection of original material since “Memory Almost Full,” from 2007.
In the half decade since then, he hasn’t exactly been idle: there’s been a ballet score (“Ocean’s Kingdom”), a collection of standards (“Kisses on the Bottom”), soundtrack-only songs (“(I Want to) Come Home,” from “Everybody’s Fine”), collaborations (“Cut Me Some Slack,” with the two surviving members of Nirvana), and a series of lavish rereleases (most recently, a multi-disk set of the mid-seventies concert “Wings Over America”). The McCartney industry is enjoying such a boom that there is a legitimate question as to the necessity of new material. When there’s so much traffic in what’s old, who needs “New”? The lead single and title track attempt an answer, with instantly loveable Beatle harmonies, a touch of harpsichord, and bright backing vocals. But saying that Paul McCartney wrote a bouncy, prepossessing song on the high side of passable is like saying that a bird laid an egg.
McCartney has been famous at an unimaginable level longer for than nearly anyone else alive. But as he has headed into old age, he has addressed the matter with a kind of relentless professionalism that borders on impersonality. He isn’t Paul Simon, using rueful humor to get a foothold on mortality. He isn’t Bob Dylan, grizzling his way to the grave. He isn’t Neil Young, hurtling from primal enthusiasm to primal enthusiasm, or Leonard Cohen, wisely dissipating into a mist of erotic Buddhism. He’s Paul McCartney, and he’s Paul McCartney now the way that he was Paul McCartney ten years ago, or thirty, generically exhorting listeners to action or reminding them of glory of love or sketching the outlines of a less pleasant emotion (fear, sadness, unregulated anger) without any real specifics. On album after album, McCartney has been content to be a rock star seen from the outside rather than an artist seen from the inside. Fronting Nirvana was only ever going to be a style exercise that yielded a muscular song, quickly forgotten. When he performed at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Astoria, Queens, last week, his closing remarks to the students were laughably generic, in the Paul McCartney way: “You rock on. You be great. You be lovely in your careers.”
In that sense, “New” is a perfect Paul McCartney album. It’s filled with songs that are without meaning but not meaningless. Whether in the wonderfully eerie “Appreciate,” the lovely, Indian-inflected “Hosanna,” or the happily crack-brained nursery rhyme “Queenie Eye,” McCartney makes songs that work extremely well on their own terms while remaining largely sealed off from anything approaching real or raw emotion. “Alligator” is a sharp, bluesy song whose lyrics, about love’s liberating power, are defiantly characterless: “Could you be that person for me? / Would you feel right setting me free? / Could you dare to find my key?” And “Everybody Out There,” which deploys a full arsenal of McCartneyisms—a descending melody line, spiralling guitar, squiggles of keyboard, and background chanting that will remind people of Mumford & Sons but should remind them of “Mrs. Vanderbilt”—exerts a tremendous amount of energy to put across a platitude: “Do some good before you say goodbye.” The title track might be a love song for his third wife, Nancy Shevell, unless it’s a broad statement regarding universal optimism. “Save Us” (packed with guitar and at least one brilliant rhyme, “battle” and “that’ll”) might be a political manifesto, unless it’s a broad statement about hope. The songs aren’t especially irritating until you think too much about them, at which point you may start to feel foolish—not as a result of their limits but as a result of your own. If you come to a Paul McCartney album looking for ragged candor, you will be left wanting, and that’s not a koan so much as it is a warning label.
Much has been made of the fact that, on “New,” McCartney worked with a series of young producers: Mark Ronson (best known for his work with Amy Winehouse), Paul Epworth (best known for his work with Adele), Ethan Johns (whose father, Glyn, took a crack at early versions of the Beatles’ “Let It Be,” before it was turned over to Phil Spector), and Giles Martin (whose father, George, also had some passing acquaintance with McCartney’s former band). The four of them are responsible for the sound of McCartney’s record, but only in the sense that, when they made it, they made it in his image. “I Can Bet,” produced by Martin, is lightly funky and heavily orchestrated, the kind of thing that Wings was doing around “Back to the Egg.” The dark piano chords of “Road” have nothing on “1985.” And even those rare songs that don’t sound like by-the-numbers extensions of his earlier hits sound like extensions of his earlier experiments—remember, McCartney has been toying with circular composition, atonality, and ambient soundscapes for longer than his producers have been alive. The title of the album is almost comically inaccurate.
That’s especially clear in the record’s most interesting and least characteristic song, “Early Days,” an overt memoir of his Beatle past. Here, the rose-colored glasses come off entirely, as McCartney confesses that he’s wounded that others feel entitled to retell his history. “They can’t take it from me if they try,” he sings. “I lived through those early days / So many times I had to change the pain to laughter / Just to keep from getting crazed.” The details are spare and specific, anchored in time and place: “Dressed from head to toe / Two guitars across our back / We would walk the city road / Seeking someone who would listen to the music / That we were writing down at home.” Wounded, melancholy, and even a little defensive—the melodic callbacks to “Blackbird” are especially confusing (are life rights civil rights?)—“Early Days” is also the rare McCartney song that feels as though it was created honestly, by a real human, rather than strategically, by a corporate director interested primarily in promoting (or at least preserving) his brand. What’s most notable about “Early Days” is how it presents McCartney’s vocals. Johns has stripped away all the artificial sweeteners and busy arrangements and exposed McCartney’s voice for what it really is these days: frail and aged, able to convey sadness not as an effect but as a fact.
Photograph: Christopher Polk/Getty for Clear Channel
