October 16, 2018 • 41 mins
This time around, we head north to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Why, you ask? Why, to sit down with some scrappy newcomer named Paul McCartney. Sir Paul lays out the process of making his new album – “Egypt Station” (Capitol Records), his first #1 chart debut in 36 years – and he also divulges some new stories from the Beatles days, everything from on-stage volume wars to the band’s mindset as they crafted their final masterpieces. Follow Inside the Studio on iHeartRadio, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
I Heart Radio Presents Inside the Studio, I'm your host,
Joe Leading. For this episode, we went on the road
to Winnipeg, where the temperatures are frigid even in September,
and it's apparently illegal to serve a burger anything other
than well done. We went in search of historic Paul
(00:25):
Paul McCartney, and he told us about how the fiftieth
anniversary of Sergeant Pepper's helped inspire work on his new album,
Egypt Station, why he likes to walk the streets of
New York by himself, and why the recording of the
white album itself now getting a box set fiftieth anniversary release,
may not have been quite as bad as Beatles legend
(00:47):
has it. Eagypt Station is McCartney's first studio album in
five years. It's gotten rave reviews, though it won't exactly
change the truism that McCartney's post Beatles music is most
undeniable when the cream is skinned for best of collections
(01:07):
your playlists, but the comparison to his peers is instructed.
Bob Dylan hit a late career stride producing himself, starting
in two thousand and one with Love and Theft for
his last three albums, Dylan is stuck to covers of
(01:27):
tin pan Alley standards. The Rolling Stones have relied on
the same producer, Don Was for the last twenty four years,
and their last album, Blue and Lonesome, was a collection
of old school blues songs. McCartney, who describes himself as
still very competitive in a recent GQ cover story, beat
(01:48):
them both to the covers thing. He did fifties rock
and roll with Run Devil Run, which you should definitely hear,
and he did Standards in two thousand and twelve with
Kisses on the Bottom Him, which you should definitely skip.
The producers for new in Egypt Station include Paul Epworth,
Mark Ronson, Greg Kirsten and Ryan Tedder, guys who have
(02:12):
made some of the biggest hits of recent years with
Adele Bruno, Mars Beyonce, that kind of thing. If Egypt
Station is McCartney's first ever solo album to enter the
charts at number one, that's partly because the charts have
changed in the streaming era, and partly because the dude
is seriously trying. Egypt Station has a fair number of
(02:37):
what Paul once called little love songs, except some of
them like for You are sex songs, and though he's
not usually thought of as making protests or political songs,
the album has a share of those two three If
you count the anti bullying song who Cares. You might
(03:00):
enjoy the swampy groove of people Want Peace but think
it's wishful thinking, although you might also think what's wrong
with that? But the song, despite repeated warning, sticks a
little harder. It uses nautical themes what should we do
with the drunken sailor red sky in the morning sailor's
warning to paint Donald Trump's presidency is an out of
(03:22):
control ship of state, and it was inspired in part
by Trump's climate change denial. Yes, it doesn't seem like
people have connected this with another song you did motivated
(03:42):
by climbing change, big boys bickering. Yeah, that was quite
a few years ago. But at the same thing, you've
been doing your homework an America I have. It's what
they paid before. It's an American president again refusing to
assign a climate accord. But in this case, George H. W.
Bush in you do so this is an important issue? Well,
you know the thing is, I think everyone like me
(04:06):
who believes in climate change and that's a lot of people.
We're looking at these climates accords and these these meetings.
There was one in Japan, there was one in Copenhagen,
and you know, as these came up, we'd all be
looking at and going, this will be the one. We're
(04:26):
going to do something about it. Everyone's going to get together,
all the nations are going to agree that, you know,
we've got to figure it out. And then it would fail. Oh,
I don't believe it. America and China didn't sign it,
and it was so disappointing, you know that. Finally when
Paris arrived, it's like, yeah, you can't believe it, you know,
(04:48):
and then Trump pulls out of it. It's like, oh,
you know, that was like really disappointing. But you know,
the thing is, as far as I'm concerning, is a reality.
I don't think there's any doubt about that. You know,
we're getting this freak weather. And you could say, as
(05:09):
some people who deny climate change say, well, you know,
there's always been freak weather. It's always been you know,
maybe it's just more of the same. But I don't know.
I believe scientists, you know, I don't think they're study
a bit harder than I do. And they do have
science on their side. They're clever man, you know, but
the science does indicate that if you warm up the planet,
(05:33):
you're going to get these effects. So yeah, I was
in Japan actually, and I saw in the newspaper. I
saw this phrase, despite repeated warnings. I can't remember what
it was about now it's just about something else. But
I thought, yeah, that's a good phrase, despite repeated warnings,
and I made the song up about that. And in
the chorus, when you say how can we stop them?
(05:53):
Grab the keys, lock them up? Are you thinking of
those lacquer up chants directed at Hillary Clinton at the
Trump I wasn't, actually, you know, but like it kind
of plays into it, don't you know. You're writing a song,
so it's not always that logical. You're just writing a song,
so whatever it's, you know, you you start off maybe
(06:14):
very logical, and then you give yourself the freedom to roam,
you know. So I wasn't actually thinking that. I was
thinking what did we do with the drunken sailor, I
must admit, And I was hoping no one would spot
that rebated my head. Well, the captain wasn't this do
(06:47):
what was now. Shortly after we were done talking, Paul
went on stage and played in nearly three hour set
thirty nine songs, twenty three of them Beatles songs, three
from Egypt Station and the rest drawn from the other
twenty four studio albums he's recorded solo or with Wings,
(07:08):
except for the one song he recorded with Kanye West
and another one he recorded in Night with the Quarryman,
his band with John Lennon and George Harrison before the Beatles.
(07:30):
Three hours songs, even for a guy who's not seventy
six years old, that is a solid night's work. It's
roughly twice the number of songs played lately by the
Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, both still out on the
road and long may they run. And it's not even
counting the one hour sound check McCartney played earlier in
the night for those who bought v I P tickets.
(07:52):
So that's a grand total of about four hours of
playing guitar, bass, piano and during his verse and of
George Harrison's Something Yuka Lately for those keeping score at home,
four hours. That's about half of the marathon eight hours
sets the Beatles put in in Hamburg. In n when
McCartney was just twenty years old. That's pretty remarkable. The
(08:17):
rock stars of the sixties used to represent an ideal
of freedom for their audience, the freedom to live however
you wanted, outside of society's rules, and in their septagenarian years,
these guys represent a different kind of freedom, the freedom
to keep on keeping on, to be able to do
in your seventies what you used to do in your twenties.
(08:46):
And no one may be a better or more joyous
representation of that than Paul McCartney. Score one for vegetarianism.
McCartney's work ethic may come from his dad, Jim, who
put in ten hour days as a cotton broker in
Liverpool and also played trumpet and piano, leading a group
called Jim Max Jazz Band. It goes without saying that
(09:07):
Paul does not have to do any of this. It's
not just that he changed the world with the Beatles,
creating the context that pretty much all of pop music
unfolds in today. And and by the way, I mean
that in the most literal sense. The pension for micro
hooks that defines current modern pop is prefigured by McCartney's
prodigious gift for melody. Take Band on the Run from
(09:42):
There must be four songs worth of hooks packed into
the first eighties seconds guitar, synthesizer, bass, vocal, And that's
just the intro. Well, really, it's just the first intro,
because then there's another intra section with another set of guitars,
sand based and vocal hooks, only this time you could
count the drum part two, and then there's a horn
(10:16):
fanfare and then the song actually starts, so in a
different way than his peers, McCartney has an eternal relevance.
But the other thing that makes how hard he works
so striking is that McCartney has long been touted as
one of the most wealthy figures in the music industry,
(10:39):
with a net worth estimated at one point two billion
according to Forbes. He added another fifty four million dollars
to that pile last year when he was finishing up
the seventies seven dates of his One on One tour,
making him the thirteenth highest earning artist in the music business,
on a list topped by Diddy, Beyonce and Drake. There's
(11:01):
that eternal relevance again, As you're about to find out,
Paul McCartney has a pretty optimistic view of the world,
and you can hear it just in the way he
pronounces the word Winnipeg. At one point he told us
that the Beatles never argued about music. If they had
an argument, it was about other stuff. And then later
he told us about an argument that they had about music.
(11:25):
Does he contradict himself? Maybe he was also there. I
think he knows better than you and I so let
me get out of the way, because I've always wanted
to say this, ladies and gentlemen, Paul McCartney, Paul McCartney,
(11:46):
welcome to inside the studio like Joe or a very
special edition of Backstage at the Paul McCartney Show. Okay,
and here we are in the Winnipeg. In Winnipeg a
few months ago, I'm walking up Park Avenue and I
pass a guy coming down the street who looks remarkably
like Paul McCartney Park Avenue in eighty nine street. I think,
(12:09):
can't be Paul McCartney. No one with him, no one
around did a double take. It was Paul McCartney. It
couldn't have been him, but it was. You were just
walking down the street by yourself and I walked down streets.
Therefore walking down I've heard that, you know, I like
to get out and about and people say, oh no,
you're gonna have acreuse of security behind you and stuff.
(12:30):
But I'd like to just get out, you know, just
so as you feel like yourself instead of like a
rock star. Are there times you do like to feel
like a rock star? You know, when I do the show,
that's good, but then you know you need to balance it,
so you get off the stage and maybe you know,
like you said, you're walking somewhere. So I like to
(12:52):
just get out like I always did when I was
a kid. So you know, it's just keeps me sane,
and it's it's the same feeling as when I was
okay just walking around, only differences. I get recognized. Everyone
reaches in their pocket immediately, you know, but no, I got,
(13:14):
you know, quite a lot of freedom much and I
I value it. And then you know, if I'm out
at a restaurant and stuff with my wife, so I'm like,
come over to grab a father, I say not not
just now. You know, it's a private moment and most
people are very cool, understand it. So I like to
keep that, you know, a private bit of my life,
(13:35):
and then I like the other bit even more because
it's like, wow, this is cool, the other bit being
in public, being on stage. Yeah, you have to like it.
You are playing these three hour shows. We just saw
a one hour sound check, and that's something that people
don't actually know that many concerts are preceded by this
(13:55):
one hour sound check. I think you have no set
list for that. Many of those songs aren't in the set, right. Yeah. No,
we always do that, I mean because it's good because
we need to check the instruments we're going to use,
just to make sure they're all plugged in, they all work,
and I mean there was a little moment there. Normally
doesn't screw up too much, but our keyboard players moog
(14:16):
didn't work. So that's good. That's what the sound checks for,
instead of just doing all the numbers from the show,
which kind of spoils the show for us because when
we get a bit bored doing the numbers again, we
just use the same instruments we're going to use, but
we switched the numbers. About we do any ill thing,
you know, so we'll do kind of like skillful things,
(14:37):
folk things, early rock and roll things, like a little
solely Things Midnight Special tonight, which was kind of amazing,
and we always do Midnight Specially, Yeah, what we often do.
You know, You've got certain songs that go way back
before I started even playing, you know. I think that's
like a big Bill Brunsi song. So he's an old
(14:59):
blues sing and they're just songs you learn along the
way and you like them. So if you get an
opportunity or something like this where there's a sound check,
all you really need to do is just make sure
everything's working. Then you can indulge yourself and play something
like that, you know, and it's nice. Keeps it all fresh,
(15:19):
you know. Talking about the songs, you do know, there's
something I wanted to ask you about in the set
list now, is in spite of all the danger, the
first song recorded by the Quarryman in nineteen Oh my god,
so it's now sixty years old and that can't be true.
That's before my time. I will say, for those just
(15:43):
listening at home, he could pull that off, because it
does look like he's not old enough to have written really,
but thank you. But that said, the amazing thing that
I realized is that, you know, you're performing songs from
your your newest record, Egypt Station, and the very first
thing you ever recorded, So the audience tonight will hear
sixty years parmacurns. It's right, Yeah, yeah, it is crazy,
(16:07):
you know. It's um. I've been enjoying playing for that
long and when I do that song in spite of
all the danger, which was just the first little demo
we ever did with the Beatles, before we got a
record contract or anything. So I always imagine us all
going to this little studio in Liverpool, all paying a
(16:30):
pound each for five pound demo and doing this little song,
you know, and it's it's so ancient that it's great
for me because it's like what it is, it's like
reaching back into your childhood. So it'd be like somebody
maybe listening to this thinking of when they were on
the beach when they were one, and it's what a
(16:51):
great memory, you know, So it makes it special for
me just thinking that, Wow, you know, it goes back
really before we ever went down to Ivy Road, before
we got a record country, before you've been too Hamburg, right,
I mean we've been to Hamburg. Yeah, So it's a
great memory for me and I like doing it because
we get the audience involved on that one, you know,
(17:12):
and so we have fun with it. So it is
nice to be able to say this is the very
first thing we ever did, first record I was ever
involved with, and then we come right up to date
and were saying, now this is like the most recent
somehow it seems to fit together, you know. You know.
So that's twice now that you've mentioned drawing on those
(17:34):
childhood feelings. First when we were talking about walking around
by yourself, and now when we're talking about playing that
song in spite of all the danger. Is that a
wild spring for you going back to that time or
holding onto that energy. Yeah, you know. It's funny. In
the Beatles, even when we were like maybe twenty four
years old or something in the height of the Beatles,
(17:55):
we often would we were trying to work out something
on a song or what we're going to do with
the recording, we'd often say, what would we have done
when we were seventeen, And we check back to our
seventeen year old selves, who we thought like, we're like
the coolest opinion in the world. Well, we would have said, yeah,
do it, yeah, do it man, or no way that
(18:18):
that's no good, you know, so you always refer to
that period. You know, it's your formative period, so when
you get a lot of your ideas, and in my case,
if you're writing songs, those memories are very rich wells
of inspiration. So you know, I can just think I
remember walking along the road with our guitars on our backs,
(18:42):
me and John just before we were famous, you know,
and me writing let us to people, dear sir, we
are a rock combo, and you know we would love
to play at your place, you know, So all that
sort of stuff. It's kind of like magic for me,
I think also because of how far I've come. So
you've got that very early innocent period. And then we
(19:06):
get famous with the Beatles. What before that? We go
to Hamburg, as you say, and then we get famous
with the Beatles, and then we get the American fame,
and then we make records and we we go through
our various phases. So it's a long, long, long journey.
And then right now, you know, here I am, you know,
making a new album in Egypt station and long behold
(19:30):
it goes to number one in America. You know, you
can imagine, you know where partying that night was a party,
We'll see. I wanted to ask you about that. Egypt
Station enters the charts at number one, so I guess
that if you're keeping score at home, that's your first
record to debut at number one since the Beatles, since
the Beatles, and the first number one and I believe
(19:50):
thirty six years. So what was the party? What was
the well, you know, the great thing was after the show.
Sometimes if the guys don't have to load out, if
they're all in a place and we're going to play
the place tomorrow, which was that occasion, I'll say, okay,
let's all get together, have a little drink, I have
something to eat, and we get the crowd in so
(20:11):
we'll get to hang with each other, because it's a
bit like a family, your tour family, you know. So
we all get together and then our DJ who comes
with us on the tour, he'll DJ some nice dance
music and stuff. So we were going to have that
little party anyway. And then suddenly that afternoon, right after
sound check, on my phone, I get the message Bank
(20:32):
congratulations request count in the morning and I'm just about
to go to the dressingroomhich I stopped. Oh wait a minute,
hey guys, I announced to everyone every number one. You know,
So that party that evening, that was special because we
had a real great reason to celebrate. We were going
to celebrate anyway, just having a party, but it became
(20:54):
really special. We danced the night away. Baby. I was
talking to someone at you label in Los Angeles Capital
and the people, well, they said back at you. They said,
we're amazed at how hard this guy works, seventy six
years old, three hour concerts. But also he's out there
(21:16):
doing things, taking advantage of opportunities we bring him. If
we bring them to a twenty three year old artists,
they might complain. I was like, yeah, let's do it
what I always do. Promoting a record used to be
quite boring because they would trot out the same old things.
You gotta go there, you gotta do thirty six interviews.
(21:37):
We're gonna take you to some place central in Europe
where all the European territories can come in and it
how it was that was Cologne. They always say you're
going to Cologne and said why Cologne? So well, it's
in the middle of Europe, and we'll bring the Italians,
the French and Swiss and everybody in and so I
kind of did it, thinking well, I've got to promote
(21:57):
the record, but it was a deadly ball. It was
really like, oh no, not that again. So I kind
of rebelled one day and the meeting, I said, look,
you know, let's make it something that we're excited about.
Because if we're excited, we actually have a good time.
So let's cook up some ideas that are like fun
(22:18):
and they're different, and it's not going to Cologne and
with endless interviews. So we had some great little things.
We had playbacks at the studio in l A. We
were working at Henson and we had these little playbacks
for my heart. These are great little sessions. We just
cranked it up, played the album for them. So that
was easy. That wasn't like the cancer to Debbey Road
(22:41):
that you did. And we did a CAVN. We went
back to my old school and the little concert there,
so you know, it made it fun, it made it interesting,
and each little thing was different, and so it was Yeah,
capital were happy, but I was happy with the ideas
we were cooking up together. You know, as long as
(23:02):
I have a good idea, is that we're exciting everyone.
We had a blest. You worked with Greg Kirstin and
Ryan Tedter on this record, and Ryan, you did the
single for you or some might hear it the way
I do, MM, which would be a nought of your word,
and we can say it for you. There we go.
(23:22):
So give you. If you give someone a present, you
don't say this is for you, You go, this is
for you, for you, okay, if you h okay. So
this is my story and I'm sticking to it, okay.
And yet I was immediately reminded of something I grew
up reading a Grill Marcus essay in the Old Rolling
Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll about the Beatles,
(23:43):
where he recalls hearing I saw her standing there on
the radio immediately in the days after the first appearance
on The Ed Sullivan Show. He writes, Paul's one two
three fuck opening. How in the world did they expect
to get away with that? And the thing is is,
after I read that, I never heard it another way.
I always heard it, but I'll never hear another way. Now.
(24:05):
It wasn't that, But I like it. O. Man. You know,
you know, it's a kind of nice thing when people
kind of misinterpret what you've done, or they put extra
meaning on it. I mean, I did the song Hi
Hi Hi, which we'll do tonight, and there's a line
in it which I was just kind of writing, just
like surrealist lyrics. I was like, so I wrote, I
(24:27):
wrote lie on the bed and get ready for my polygone.
It doesn't mean anything was a polygon, you know, but
people thought it was getting ready for my body gun.
I thought, you know what, that is better if you
ever sung it that way. Okay, So you know, sometimes
(24:47):
the misinterpretation is actually better than the real lyric. You know.
Tell me you've said that the songs you you worked
on with Greg you brought into the studio, but when
you worked with Ryan Tedder, he wanted to make it
up in the studio. Yeah, tell me a little bit
about putting that song for you together. As you say.
When I was working with Greg, which was most of
(25:09):
the time, I had a lot of songs I wanted
to record, so I came in and we worked on
them together. But they were ready written. And then there
was a period there where Great couldn't work. But I
had a couple of weeks off, so I took one
of the weeks as a holiday. Uh. And then the
other week my manager said, you want to keep the
(25:30):
momentum going. You know, you're on a bit of a
role here and if you want to keep it going,
you know, I can suggest other people you might work with,
you know. So he sent me a few suggestions and
I liked what I was hearing that Ryan was doing.
I didn't know much about him. I phoned him up
and we had a great conversation. So I said, well,
come to my studio in England and we'll just figure
(25:53):
it out. We'll just think of something, you know. So
I said, I've got a couple of songs we could
do these. He said, no, no, let's just make it
up because we didn't have long We just had the
seven days. It might have even been five days, and
so we just made them up and we ended up
making up three tracks. When you say make them up,
were you writing side by side? Were you trying just
(26:16):
had ideas, you know, just throwing ideas out. He'd sort
of say, what about yeah do John Dodd? I go yeah.
So I go out on the mic and go yeah do.
And they think, oh God, put us stick some words in.
Hey you want uanu and I eventually put some words
to it, and then we put a beat to it,
and I put some guitar on or bass on or whatever,
(26:39):
and him and his co producers zac, you know, they
just got grooving with the sounds, and I'd get sort
of thinking of what I was going to do on
the vocal. They throw ideas out and he said, what
about that? He said, well, let me try it, you know.
So some of the things didn't work. We can those.
It was funny because because of this method of work,
(27:00):
the trouble was often that yeah dad u dado becomes yeah,
I love you baby, and it's like, this is a
bit boring. So I said to Ryan in the middle
of the week, I said, hey, you know, man, I said,
I'm known for doing songs like eleanor Rigby or you know,
Living Let Die, which you've got a little bit of
(27:20):
meaning to them, you know. So I said, I'm not
sure I can do this. Hey, I love your baby.
Said well, I'll tell you what. So we decided what
we would do because we'd carry on like that and
then I'd revisit it and come up with what I
thought were better lyrics. So that was how how we
did it. And made a lot of it up as
we went along and thought that was good. But the
(27:41):
bits I thought were a bit corny. I just rewrote
and then went in and fix the vocal with these
new words. You know. A week or sore ago, I
was in Los Angeles. I saw a band, Lake Street Dive,
terrifically talented band and the will turn and they do
in their set let me roll it, and it's it's great.
And afterwards I was talking to them, that's terrific, and
(28:04):
they looked at me and they shrugged, Yeah, it's a
Paul McCartney song. But then they started talking about for You,
and he's got a song out now, and the thing
is it's so on trend, like it's got these the
drum track and these little drops in it. So they
were like amazed at that classic McCartney melotticism up against
(28:29):
the sort of modern touches that Bryan Tyder brought to it. YEA,
well that's that's what it was. Yeah, Ryan brought that
to it, and say Zach is co producers, a young
guy called Zack, and the two of them took care
of that side of things. What's about this you know list?
So they would take a little bit of my vocal
and speed it up and drop it back in and
(28:50):
do these little crazy things. And you know the idea
was if I didn't like it, I go, oh, no,
way man. But most of the time I go, oh,
that's cool. I like that. There were three tracks. Only
one has been released from that week, but the others
are pretty good too. And then when you were working
with Greg that's over a longer period, and you've said
(29:10):
that one thing that charged those sessions was seeing this
documentary Howard Goodall did about the rerelease the fiftieth anniversary
set of Sergeant Pepper's that you actually had this experience
of learning wait, wait, that's how we did it. Yeah, yeah,
you know. I mean I wasn't really gonna watch this
(29:31):
because you know, it's like I thought, well, I kind
of know everything he didn't tell me. I know about this.
But then he started in on Penny Lane. He hooked
me in because he started to say, oh, now Paul
wants to go higher, but he actually modulates down a key.
I'm going, did I, oh, wow, that's good. I'm getting
(29:51):
impressed by this young twenty four year olds work. You know.
Now I'm intrigued. And he got to this pit where
he sort of said, and the penny lane piano. I thought, yeah, okay,
I know I played it. I know how that went.
And he said, it's not just one piano. And I'm
sitting there going, yeah it is. What do you mean
it's not just one? And he saw he starts going
(30:12):
back to the multi tracks and he goes, well, there's
this one piano. I said, yeah, that's it, and he
goes and then they got this little spiky piano and
then he plays and there's this very trebling, little ding
ding ding piano playing along with it, and he goes on.
Then there's this harmonium, and it turned out I'd forgotten,
(30:33):
but we'd put all these layers into this piano that
eventually sounds like one very groovy piano, so much so
that I believed it myself. So I went in the
next day with Greg and I said, why wait a minute.
You know, so this is a really great idea. So
we started messing with like harpsichords and piano and mixing
(30:55):
them and getting them very exact so you couldn't tell
it was two pianos, but it was like a hybrid.
That's a kind of interesting way to work, and you've
been working for almost a year at that point, So
were you going back and adding a retexturing tracks the
truth we've been doing a bit of that anyway, because
(31:15):
the rerelease of Sergeant Pepper. I was inspired by how
experimental we were and the inspiration that we'd had for
Sergeant Pepper, and I thought, yeah, you know, that's a
kind of good way to go, is to just not
make the same old record, just try and think outside
the box and think, you know, what can we do
(31:36):
now that that's crazy? And at the same time it
comes out just like a song. You know, it's still
in the end, isn't isn't some crazy mess. It's actually
Penny Lane, you know, your day in the Life. It's
it's a proper song. But the approach was very experimental,
So we've been doing a bit of that with Greg.
(31:57):
But once I saw that program about it, then started
to pick apart some of the stuff we've done, made
pianos consisting of a few things instead of just the piano.
Were there any particular tracks that you remember that you
began to to rewire this way. I think the track
that's the opening track, the opening song. I don't know yeah.
(32:20):
I think we cooked the piano a bit there, and
also we kind of de tuned it because what was
anice was I played it in a certain key and
song along with it, but I was finding the vocals
a little bit too high and I was just going
to struggle with it. But Greg, a good producer, says,
(32:40):
why don't we just take it down a bit? You know,
it would be easier to sing. And what was cool
about it was the piano I had already played now
got a little bit darker, and it actually is a
bit one of his sounds. I think I heard it
on the Adele Hello. I listened to that, and I thought,
(33:01):
this is one of Greg's tricks, you know. But it
happened anyway to us, and I liked the sound of
the piano we were experimenting as well. And the thing is,
you know, it keeps it really interesting to you go
in each day and instead of thinking, oh I gotta
do this song, I'll but do it good. There'd be
a bit of that, but mainly it'll be whatever, don't
do it good. We'll mess around, you know, we'll get
(33:24):
something that excites us. We'll put a crazy sound on it.
And I got yeah, I can see to that, and
it's often that when we did a lot of that
in the Beatles. I mean, John was particularly fond of
putting an echo when he was doing the vocal so
he would do what we called the bog echo in Liverpool.
Bog means the toilet. You know, I'm going to bog
(33:46):
and the toilet traditionally has got a good acoustic so
we would call this little delay on the vocal sound
the bog echo. It just gives you a little bit
different feeling than when you're just hearing your own voice,
plane and straightforward. It's like your eldest days, somebody with
(34:21):
a crazy sound on his voice. Jean Vincent, Yeah, you
know whatever. The sounds like your old rock idols. So
it inspires you a little bit. You know. It's interesting
you you mentioned the darker sound that Greg brought to
that to the piano, and then you talk about John's experimentation,
because John was sometimes the one bringing in the darker energy,
(34:43):
the slight darkness of you know, like it's getting better
all the time. It couldn't couldn't get much worse like that.
That's the famous example of a little addition that that
just adds a different shadow. Yeah, that's true. I mean
we all brought that. You know, this is the thing
well has. You know, over time things become legendary, so
(35:05):
you'll get John was the dark one, Paul was a
cute one, and that's not true because we each had
a bit of that or the other. So George could
be very much the one who would bring that in.
But you know what I'm talking about it. I always
use that example of the song getting better. I go,
it's getting better all the time, and John goes couldn't
(35:25):
get much worse. So you know, that's a good example
of how he would do that. But often it could
be George who do it just as much as John would.
And I think you know I would sometimes take John's
songs and darken them. I mean, Come Together was a
very jolly little song when John brought it in and
(35:48):
it was like, no, we're not going to do that.
Seventeen year old you seventeen year old, Yeah, we would
have swamped it out, man. So that's the point in
case where John's thing was, and then I would We
(36:12):
had those kind of influences on each other. But the
story sticks that John was the dark one. I was
the light one. George was the mystic one, you know,
and to some degree that's true, but we each had
aspects of all those kind of forces. And Ringo too,
you know, he would come in sort of put some
(36:34):
drumming on it. That would be like whoa, I mean,
I had the song get Back and I'm just going
to get back, get Back and he comes up with
and that drum makes that record, you know, so say, yeah,
we're all four corners of a square. The Beatles. It
(36:55):
was a very democratic group, so we all brought ideas in.
Maybe John and I wrote most of the songs, but
George wrote some of the best songs, you know, like
something you know, some of those songs he wrote. So
sticking with this idea of it comes the legends that
(37:18):
stick and what we might be missing. Will soon hear
the fiftieth anniversary box set of the White album. Yeah,
what surprises are in store for us. So the legend,
of course is that this is where things get difficult.
There's a lot of tension during these sessions that have
spread over I think five months or so, and sometimes
the group is recording as individuals rather than as a group.
(37:41):
Is the legend they're true? Or do you remember those
sessions differently. You know. The thing is, because it was
towards the end of the Beatles all the forces that
were later going to break the Beatles up, which is
mainly business, to tell you the truth, there was a
lot of arguing about business and we didn't like that.
We'd always traditionally just left that to someone else. But
(38:03):
it got a bit dangerous to do that, and that
someone else, it was a different someone else actually was
about to nicke it all. So that got This is
a period after Brian Epstein's death and the start of
Applecord referring to called Alan Klein. You know, it got dangerous.
It was an idea that he was maybe going to
(38:25):
take over and take over all the money and all
the stuff that we'd ever done, and that made it
a difficult period. But you know, the great thing was
when we got in the studio it all changed because
we were just these four guys again and it wasn't
to do with business. It was now to do with music,
and so sometimes we did record separately. I would do Blackbird,
(38:50):
but only because it's a solo song I did yesterday,
and I said to him me, okay, guys, what are
you gonna do on this, and they also, well, we can't.
It's the solo song. You know. It wasn't because we
were arguing some of the great songs like She's So Heavy,
John's I mean, we all got right in there. There's
(39:11):
no we were at peace. When we were playing music
in the studio. It was always a thrill from the
word go when the Beatles were formed to the word stop.
You know, we always got in the studio and even
if we were arguing, that kind of got superseded by
the music. And you know, we argued like families argue.
(39:34):
I mean, in the early days, it was always John
and George arguing about who would have his amp loudest.
They degree, okay, look, you know we gotta yeah, let's
put it at seven. Okay, and they put it at seven,
And then you will be playing and you just see
George kind of back towards his up and go nine.
(39:56):
And then Johnathan noticed, so he quietly sneak towards his ten,
you know, and then that would go, hey, well what
are you doing? You know, that might cause a bit
of an argument, but other than that, you know that
when we played music, it came good, but we're not
(40:24):
going to keep you any longer. It is almost time
to I'm in a mispronounsis, but they're going mak chow
Mick show. Yeah all, that's what they used to say
in Germany. I remember the guy's name, Billy. He was
the chefts for like the manager of the little club.
We first played him and he used to come, okay, chat.
(40:48):
We tried to. We weren't very good at MAC and show.
Make show in German. Come on, make a show in German.
But sometimes there's people in the audience hold that signal,
so it's still you know, there we are, and that
is it. I do have to go. Thank you so much,
have to go on MAC show. Thanks very much for
chatting nice one. Inside the Studio is an I Heart
(41:16):
Radio original podcast. This episode was written and hosted by
me Joe Levy. We'd like to give a big thank
you to Paul McCartney and Capitol Records. You can follow
Inside the Studio on I Heart Radio, or you can
subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
I Heart Radio Presents Inside the Studio, I'm your host,
Joe Leading. For this episode, we went on the road
to Winnipeg, where the temperatures are frigid even in September,
and it's apparently illegal to serve a burger anything other
than well done. We went in search of historic Paul
(00:25):
Paul McCartney, and he told us about how the fiftieth
anniversary of Sergeant Pepper's helped inspire work on his new album,
Egypt Station, why he likes to walk the streets of
New York by himself, and why the recording of the
white album itself now getting a box set fiftieth anniversary release,
may not have been quite as bad as Beatles legend
(00:47):
has it. Eagypt Station is McCartney's first studio album in
five years. It's gotten rave reviews, though it won't exactly
change the truism that McCartney's post Beatles music is most
undeniable when the cream is skinned for best of collections
(01:07):
your playlists, but the comparison to his peers is instructed.
Bob Dylan hit a late career stride producing himself, starting
in two thousand and one with Love and Theft for
his last three albums, Dylan is stuck to covers of
(01:27):
tin pan Alley standards. The Rolling Stones have relied on
the same producer, Don Was for the last twenty four years,
and their last album, Blue and Lonesome, was a collection
of old school blues songs. McCartney, who describes himself as
still very competitive in a recent GQ cover story, beat
(01:48):
them both to the covers thing. He did fifties rock
and roll with Run Devil Run, which you should definitely hear,
and he did Standards in two thousand and twelve with
Kisses on the Bottom Him, which you should definitely skip.
The producers for new in Egypt Station include Paul Epworth,
Mark Ronson, Greg Kirsten and Ryan Tedder, guys who have
(02:12):
made some of the biggest hits of recent years with
Adele Bruno, Mars Beyonce, that kind of thing. If Egypt
Station is McCartney's first ever solo album to enter the
charts at number one, that's partly because the charts have
changed in the streaming era, and partly because the dude
is seriously trying. Egypt Station has a fair number of
(02:37):
what Paul once called little love songs, except some of
them like for You are sex songs, and though he's
not usually thought of as making protests or political songs,
the album has a share of those two three If
you count the anti bullying song who Cares. You might
(03:00):
enjoy the swampy groove of people Want Peace but think
it's wishful thinking, although you might also think what's wrong
with that? But the song, despite repeated warning, sticks a
little harder. It uses nautical themes what should we do
with the drunken sailor red sky in the morning sailor's
warning to paint Donald Trump's presidency is an out of
(03:22):
control ship of state, and it was inspired in part
by Trump's climate change denial. Yes, it doesn't seem like
people have connected this with another song you did motivated
(03:42):
by climbing change, big boys bickering. Yeah, that was quite
a few years ago. But at the same thing, you've
been doing your homework an America I have. It's what
they paid before. It's an American president again refusing to
assign a climate accord. But in this case, George H. W.
Bush in you do so this is an important issue? Well,
you know the thing is, I think everyone like me
(04:06):
who believes in climate change and that's a lot of people.
We're looking at these climates accords and these these meetings.
There was one in Japan, there was one in Copenhagen,
and you know, as these came up, we'd all be
looking at and going, this will be the one. We're
(04:26):
going to do something about it. Everyone's going to get together,
all the nations are going to agree that, you know,
we've got to figure it out. And then it would fail. Oh,
I don't believe it. America and China didn't sign it,
and it was so disappointing, you know that. Finally when
Paris arrived, it's like, yeah, you can't believe it, you know,
(04:48):
and then Trump pulls out of it. It's like, oh,
you know, that was like really disappointing. But you know,
the thing is, as far as I'm concerning, is a reality.
I don't think there's any doubt about that. You know,
we're getting this freak weather. And you could say, as
(05:09):
some people who deny climate change say, well, you know,
there's always been freak weather. It's always been you know,
maybe it's just more of the same. But I don't know.
I believe scientists, you know, I don't think they're study
a bit harder than I do. And they do have
science on their side. They're clever man, you know, but
the science does indicate that if you warm up the planet,
(05:33):
you're going to get these effects. So yeah, I was
in Japan actually, and I saw in the newspaper. I
saw this phrase, despite repeated warnings. I can't remember what
it was about now it's just about something else. But
I thought, yeah, that's a good phrase, despite repeated warnings,
and I made the song up about that. And in
the chorus, when you say how can we stop them?
(05:53):
Grab the keys, lock them up? Are you thinking of
those lacquer up chants directed at Hillary Clinton at the
Trump I wasn't, actually, you know, but like it kind
of plays into it, don't you know. You're writing a song,
so it's not always that logical. You're just writing a song,
so whatever it's, you know, you you start off maybe
(06:14):
very logical, and then you give yourself the freedom to roam,
you know. So I wasn't actually thinking that. I was
thinking what did we do with the drunken sailor, I
must admit, And I was hoping no one would spot
that rebated my head. Well, the captain wasn't this do
(06:47):
what was now. Shortly after we were done talking, Paul
went on stage and played in nearly three hour set
thirty nine songs, twenty three of them Beatles songs, three
from Egypt Station and the rest drawn from the other
twenty four studio albums he's recorded solo or with Wings,
(07:08):
except for the one song he recorded with Kanye West
and another one he recorded in Night with the Quarryman,
his band with John Lennon and George Harrison before the Beatles.
(07:30):
Three hours songs, even for a guy who's not seventy
six years old, that is a solid night's work. It's
roughly twice the number of songs played lately by the
Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, both still out on the
road and long may they run. And it's not even
counting the one hour sound check McCartney played earlier in
the night for those who bought v I P tickets.
(07:52):
So that's a grand total of about four hours of
playing guitar, bass, piano and during his verse and of
George Harrison's Something Yuka Lately for those keeping score at home,
four hours. That's about half of the marathon eight hours
sets the Beatles put in in Hamburg. In n when
McCartney was just twenty years old. That's pretty remarkable. The
(08:17):
rock stars of the sixties used to represent an ideal
of freedom for their audience, the freedom to live however
you wanted, outside of society's rules, and in their septagenarian years,
these guys represent a different kind of freedom, the freedom
to keep on keeping on, to be able to do
in your seventies what you used to do in your twenties.
(08:46):
And no one may be a better or more joyous
representation of that than Paul McCartney. Score one for vegetarianism.
McCartney's work ethic may come from his dad, Jim, who
put in ten hour days as a cotton broker in
Liverpool and also played trumpet and piano, leading a group
called Jim Max Jazz Band. It goes without saying that
(09:07):
Paul does not have to do any of this. It's
not just that he changed the world with the Beatles,
creating the context that pretty much all of pop music
unfolds in today. And and by the way, I mean
that in the most literal sense. The pension for micro
hooks that defines current modern pop is prefigured by McCartney's
prodigious gift for melody. Take Band on the Run from
(09:42):
There must be four songs worth of hooks packed into
the first eighties seconds guitar, synthesizer, bass, vocal, And that's
just the intro. Well, really, it's just the first intro,
because then there's another intra section with another set of guitars,
sand based and vocal hooks, only this time you could
count the drum part two, and then there's a horn
(10:16):
fanfare and then the song actually starts, so in a
different way than his peers, McCartney has an eternal relevance.
But the other thing that makes how hard he works
so striking is that McCartney has long been touted as
one of the most wealthy figures in the music industry,
(10:39):
with a net worth estimated at one point two billion
according to Forbes. He added another fifty four million dollars
to that pile last year when he was finishing up
the seventies seven dates of his One on One tour,
making him the thirteenth highest earning artist in the music business,
on a list topped by Diddy, Beyonce and Drake. There's
(11:01):
that eternal relevance again, As you're about to find out,
Paul McCartney has a pretty optimistic view of the world,
and you can hear it just in the way he
pronounces the word Winnipeg. At one point he told us
that the Beatles never argued about music. If they had
an argument, it was about other stuff. And then later
he told us about an argument that they had about music.
(11:25):
Does he contradict himself? Maybe he was also there. I
think he knows better than you and I so let
me get out of the way, because I've always wanted
to say this, ladies and gentlemen, Paul McCartney, Paul McCartney,
(11:46):
welcome to inside the studio like Joe or a very
special edition of Backstage at the Paul McCartney Show. Okay,
and here we are in the Winnipeg. In Winnipeg a
few months ago, I'm walking up Park Avenue and I
pass a guy coming down the street who looks remarkably
like Paul McCartney Park Avenue in eighty nine street. I think,
(12:09):
can't be Paul McCartney. No one with him, no one
around did a double take. It was Paul McCartney. It
couldn't have been him, but it was. You were just
walking down the street by yourself and I walked down streets.
Therefore walking down I've heard that, you know, I like
to get out and about and people say, oh no,
you're gonna have acreuse of security behind you and stuff.
(12:30):
But I'd like to just get out, you know, just
so as you feel like yourself instead of like a
rock star. Are there times you do like to feel
like a rock star? You know, when I do the show,
that's good, but then you know you need to balance it,
so you get off the stage and maybe you know,
like you said, you're walking somewhere. So I like to
(12:52):
just get out like I always did when I was
a kid. So you know, it's just keeps me sane,
and it's it's the same feeling as when I was
okay just walking around, only differences. I get recognized. Everyone
reaches in their pocket immediately, you know, but no, I got,
(13:14):
you know, quite a lot of freedom much and I
I value it. And then you know, if I'm out
at a restaurant and stuff with my wife, so I'm like,
come over to grab a father, I say not not
just now. You know, it's a private moment and most
people are very cool, understand it. So I like to
keep that, you know, a private bit of my life,
(13:35):
and then I like the other bit even more because
it's like, wow, this is cool, the other bit being
in public, being on stage. Yeah, you have to like it.
You are playing these three hour shows. We just saw
a one hour sound check, and that's something that people
don't actually know that many concerts are preceded by this
(13:55):
one hour sound check. I think you have no set
list for that. Many of those songs aren't in the set, right. Yeah. No,
we always do that, I mean because it's good because
we need to check the instruments we're going to use,
just to make sure they're all plugged in, they all work,
and I mean there was a little moment there. Normally
doesn't screw up too much, but our keyboard players moog
(14:16):
didn't work. So that's good. That's what the sound checks for,
instead of just doing all the numbers from the show,
which kind of spoils the show for us because when
we get a bit bored doing the numbers again, we
just use the same instruments we're going to use, but
we switched the numbers. About we do any ill thing,
you know, so we'll do kind of like skillful things,
(14:37):
folk things, early rock and roll things, like a little
solely Things Midnight Special tonight, which was kind of amazing,
and we always do Midnight Specially, Yeah, what we often do.
You know, You've got certain songs that go way back
before I started even playing, you know. I think that's
like a big Bill Brunsi song. So he's an old
(14:59):
blues sing and they're just songs you learn along the
way and you like them. So if you get an
opportunity or something like this where there's a sound check,
all you really need to do is just make sure
everything's working. Then you can indulge yourself and play something
like that, you know, and it's nice. Keeps it all fresh,
(15:19):
you know. Talking about the songs, you do know, there's
something I wanted to ask you about in the set
list now, is in spite of all the danger, the
first song recorded by the Quarryman in nineteen Oh my god,
so it's now sixty years old and that can't be true.
That's before my time. I will say, for those just
(15:43):
listening at home, he could pull that off, because it
does look like he's not old enough to have written really,
but thank you. But that said, the amazing thing that
I realized is that, you know, you're performing songs from
your your newest record, Egypt Station, and the very first
thing you ever recorded, So the audience tonight will hear
sixty years parmacurns. It's right, Yeah, yeah, it is crazy,
(16:07):
you know. It's um. I've been enjoying playing for that
long and when I do that song in spite of
all the danger, which was just the first little demo
we ever did with the Beatles, before we got a
record contract or anything. So I always imagine us all
going to this little studio in Liverpool, all paying a
(16:30):
pound each for five pound demo and doing this little song,
you know, and it's it's so ancient that it's great
for me because it's like what it is, it's like
reaching back into your childhood. So it'd be like somebody
maybe listening to this thinking of when they were on
the beach when they were one, and it's what a
(16:51):
great memory, you know, So it makes it special for
me just thinking that, Wow, you know, it goes back
really before we ever went down to Ivy Road, before
we got a record country, before you've been too Hamburg, right,
I mean we've been to Hamburg. Yeah, So it's a
great memory for me and I like doing it because
we get the audience involved on that one, you know,
(17:12):
and so we have fun with it. So it is
nice to be able to say this is the very
first thing we ever did, first record I was ever
involved with, and then we come right up to date
and were saying, now this is like the most recent
somehow it seems to fit together, you know. You know.
So that's twice now that you've mentioned drawing on those
(17:34):
childhood feelings. First when we were talking about walking around
by yourself, and now when we're talking about playing that
song in spite of all the danger. Is that a
wild spring for you going back to that time or
holding onto that energy. Yeah, you know. It's funny. In
the Beatles, even when we were like maybe twenty four
years old or something in the height of the Beatles,
(17:55):
we often would we were trying to work out something
on a song or what we're going to do with
the recording, we'd often say, what would we have done
when we were seventeen, And we check back to our
seventeen year old selves, who we thought like, we're like
the coolest opinion in the world. Well, we would have said, yeah,
do it, yeah, do it man, or no way that
(18:18):
that's no good, you know, so you always refer to
that period. You know, it's your formative period, so when
you get a lot of your ideas, and in my case,
if you're writing songs, those memories are very rich wells
of inspiration. So you know, I can just think I
remember walking along the road with our guitars on our backs,
(18:42):
me and John just before we were famous, you know,
and me writing let us to people, dear sir, we
are a rock combo, and you know we would love
to play at your place, you know, So all that
sort of stuff. It's kind of like magic for me,
I think also because of how far I've come. So
you've got that very early innocent period. And then we
(19:06):
get famous with the Beatles. What before that? We go
to Hamburg, as you say, and then we get famous
with the Beatles, and then we get the American fame,
and then we make records and we we go through
our various phases. So it's a long, long, long journey.
And then right now, you know, here I am, you know,
making a new album in Egypt station and long behold
(19:30):
it goes to number one in America. You know, you
can imagine, you know where partying that night was a party,
We'll see. I wanted to ask you about that. Egypt
Station enters the charts at number one, so I guess
that if you're keeping score at home, that's your first
record to debut at number one since the Beatles, since
the Beatles, and the first number one and I believe
(19:50):
thirty six years. So what was the party? What was
the well, you know, the great thing was after the show.
Sometimes if the guys don't have to load out, if
they're all in a place and we're going to play
the place tomorrow, which was that occasion, I'll say, okay,
let's all get together, have a little drink, I have
something to eat, and we get the crowd in so
(20:11):
we'll get to hang with each other, because it's a
bit like a family, your tour family, you know. So
we all get together and then our DJ who comes
with us on the tour, he'll DJ some nice dance
music and stuff. So we were going to have that
little party anyway. And then suddenly that afternoon, right after
sound check, on my phone, I get the message Bank
(20:32):
congratulations request count in the morning and I'm just about
to go to the dressingroomhich I stopped. Oh wait a minute,
hey guys, I announced to everyone every number one. You know,
So that party that evening, that was special because we
had a real great reason to celebrate. We were going
to celebrate anyway, just having a party, but it became
(20:54):
really special. We danced the night away. Baby. I was
talking to someone at you label in Los Angeles Capital
and the people, well, they said back at you. They said,
we're amazed at how hard this guy works, seventy six
years old, three hour concerts. But also he's out there
(21:16):
doing things, taking advantage of opportunities we bring him. If
we bring them to a twenty three year old artists,
they might complain. I was like, yeah, let's do it
what I always do. Promoting a record used to be
quite boring because they would trot out the same old things.
You gotta go there, you gotta do thirty six interviews.
(21:37):
We're gonna take you to some place central in Europe
where all the European territories can come in and it
how it was that was Cologne. They always say you're
going to Cologne and said why Cologne? So well, it's
in the middle of Europe, and we'll bring the Italians,
the French and Swiss and everybody in and so I
kind of did it, thinking well, I've got to promote
(21:57):
the record, but it was a deadly ball. It was
really like, oh no, not that again. So I kind
of rebelled one day and the meeting, I said, look,
you know, let's make it something that we're excited about.
Because if we're excited, we actually have a good time.
So let's cook up some ideas that are like fun
(22:18):
and they're different, and it's not going to Cologne and
with endless interviews. So we had some great little things.
We had playbacks at the studio in l A. We
were working at Henson and we had these little playbacks
for my heart. These are great little sessions. We just
cranked it up, played the album for them. So that
was easy. That wasn't like the cancer to Debbey Road
(22:41):
that you did. And we did a CAVN. We went
back to my old school and the little concert there,
so you know, it made it fun, it made it interesting,
and each little thing was different, and so it was Yeah,
capital were happy, but I was happy with the ideas
we were cooking up together. You know, as long as
(23:02):
I have a good idea, is that we're exciting everyone.
We had a blest. You worked with Greg Kirstin and
Ryan Tedter on this record, and Ryan, you did the
single for you or some might hear it the way
I do, MM, which would be a nought of your word,
and we can say it for you. There we go.
(23:22):
So give you. If you give someone a present, you
don't say this is for you, You go, this is
for you, for you, okay, if you h okay. So
this is my story and I'm sticking to it, okay.
And yet I was immediately reminded of something I grew
up reading a Grill Marcus essay in the Old Rolling
Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll about the Beatles,
(23:43):
where he recalls hearing I saw her standing there on
the radio immediately in the days after the first appearance
on The Ed Sullivan Show. He writes, Paul's one two
three fuck opening. How in the world did they expect
to get away with that? And the thing is is,
after I read that, I never heard it another way.
I always heard it, but I'll never hear another way. Now.
(24:05):
It wasn't that, But I like it. O. Man. You know,
you know, it's a kind of nice thing when people
kind of misinterpret what you've done, or they put extra
meaning on it. I mean, I did the song Hi
Hi Hi, which we'll do tonight, and there's a line
in it which I was just kind of writing, just
like surrealist lyrics. I was like, so I wrote, I
(24:27):
wrote lie on the bed and get ready for my polygone.
It doesn't mean anything was a polygon, you know, but
people thought it was getting ready for my body gun.
I thought, you know what, that is better if you
ever sung it that way. Okay, So you know, sometimes
(24:47):
the misinterpretation is actually better than the real lyric. You know.
Tell me you've said that the songs you you worked
on with Greg you brought into the studio, but when
you worked with Ryan Tedder, he wanted to make it
up in the studio. Yeah, tell me a little bit
about putting that song for you together. As you say.
When I was working with Greg, which was most of
(25:09):
the time, I had a lot of songs I wanted
to record, so I came in and we worked on
them together. But they were ready written. And then there
was a period there where Great couldn't work. But I
had a couple of weeks off, so I took one
of the weeks as a holiday. Uh. And then the
other week my manager said, you want to keep the
(25:30):
momentum going. You know, you're on a bit of a
role here and if you want to keep it going,
you know, I can suggest other people you might work with,
you know. So he sent me a few suggestions and
I liked what I was hearing that Ryan was doing.
I didn't know much about him. I phoned him up
and we had a great conversation. So I said, well,
come to my studio in England and we'll just figure
(25:53):
it out. We'll just think of something, you know. So
I said, I've got a couple of songs we could
do these. He said, no, no, let's just make it
up because we didn't have long We just had the
seven days. It might have even been five days, and
so we just made them up and we ended up
making up three tracks. When you say make them up,
were you writing side by side? Were you trying just
(26:16):
had ideas, you know, just throwing ideas out. He'd sort
of say, what about yeah do John Dodd? I go yeah.
So I go out on the mic and go yeah do.
And they think, oh God, put us stick some words in.
Hey you want uanu and I eventually put some words
to it, and then we put a beat to it,
and I put some guitar on or bass on or whatever,
(26:39):
and him and his co producers zac, you know, they
just got grooving with the sounds, and I'd get sort
of thinking of what I was going to do on
the vocal. They throw ideas out and he said, what
about that? He said, well, let me try it, you know.
So some of the things didn't work. We can those.
It was funny because because of this method of work,
(27:00):
the trouble was often that yeah dad u dado becomes yeah,
I love you baby, and it's like, this is a
bit boring. So I said to Ryan in the middle
of the week, I said, hey, you know, man, I said,
I'm known for doing songs like eleanor Rigby or you know,
Living Let Die, which you've got a little bit of
(27:20):
meaning to them, you know. So I said, I'm not
sure I can do this. Hey, I love your baby.
Said well, I'll tell you what. So we decided what
we would do because we'd carry on like that and
then I'd revisit it and come up with what I
thought were better lyrics. So that was how how we
did it. And made a lot of it up as
we went along and thought that was good. But the
(27:41):
bits I thought were a bit corny. I just rewrote
and then went in and fix the vocal with these
new words. You know. A week or sore ago, I
was in Los Angeles. I saw a band, Lake Street Dive,
terrifically talented band and the will turn and they do
in their set let me roll it, and it's it's great.
And afterwards I was talking to them, that's terrific, and
(28:04):
they looked at me and they shrugged, Yeah, it's a
Paul McCartney song. But then they started talking about for You,
and he's got a song out now, and the thing
is it's so on trend, like it's got these the
drum track and these little drops in it. So they
were like amazed at that classic McCartney melotticism up against
(28:29):
the sort of modern touches that Bryan Tyder brought to it. YEA,
well that's that's what it was. Yeah, Ryan brought that
to it, and say Zach is co producers, a young
guy called Zack, and the two of them took care
of that side of things. What's about this you know list?
So they would take a little bit of my vocal
and speed it up and drop it back in and
(28:50):
do these little crazy things. And you know the idea
was if I didn't like it, I go, oh, no,
way man. But most of the time I go, oh,
that's cool. I like that. There were three tracks. Only
one has been released from that week, but the others
are pretty good too. And then when you were working
with Greg that's over a longer period, and you've said
(29:10):
that one thing that charged those sessions was seeing this
documentary Howard Goodall did about the rerelease the fiftieth anniversary
set of Sergeant Pepper's that you actually had this experience
of learning wait, wait, that's how we did it. Yeah, yeah,
you know. I mean I wasn't really gonna watch this
(29:31):
because you know, it's like I thought, well, I kind
of know everything he didn't tell me. I know about this.
But then he started in on Penny Lane. He hooked
me in because he started to say, oh, now Paul
wants to go higher, but he actually modulates down a key.
I'm going, did I, oh, wow, that's good. I'm getting
(29:51):
impressed by this young twenty four year olds work. You know.
Now I'm intrigued. And he got to this pit where
he sort of said, and the penny lane piano. I thought, yeah, okay,
I know I played it. I know how that went.
And he said, it's not just one piano. And I'm
sitting there going, yeah it is. What do you mean
it's not just one? And he saw he starts going
(30:12):
back to the multi tracks and he goes, well, there's
this one piano. I said, yeah, that's it, and he
goes and then they got this little spiky piano and
then he plays and there's this very trebling, little ding
ding ding piano playing along with it, and he goes on.
Then there's this harmonium, and it turned out I'd forgotten,
(30:33):
but we'd put all these layers into this piano that
eventually sounds like one very groovy piano, so much so
that I believed it myself. So I went in the
next day with Greg and I said, why wait a minute.
You know, so this is a really great idea. So
we started messing with like harpsichords and piano and mixing
(30:55):
them and getting them very exact so you couldn't tell
it was two pianos, but it was like a hybrid.
That's a kind of interesting way to work, and you've
been working for almost a year at that point, So
were you going back and adding a retexturing tracks the
truth we've been doing a bit of that anyway, because
(31:15):
the rerelease of Sergeant Pepper. I was inspired by how
experimental we were and the inspiration that we'd had for
Sergeant Pepper, and I thought, yeah, you know, that's a
kind of good way to go, is to just not
make the same old record, just try and think outside
the box and think, you know, what can we do
(31:36):
now that that's crazy? And at the same time it
comes out just like a song. You know, it's still
in the end, isn't isn't some crazy mess. It's actually
Penny Lane, you know, your day in the Life. It's
it's a proper song. But the approach was very experimental,
So we've been doing a bit of that with Greg.
(31:57):
But once I saw that program about it, then started
to pick apart some of the stuff we've done, made
pianos consisting of a few things instead of just the piano.
Were there any particular tracks that you remember that you
began to to rewire this way. I think the track
that's the opening track, the opening song. I don't know yeah.
(32:20):
I think we cooked the piano a bit there, and
also we kind of de tuned it because what was
anice was I played it in a certain key and
song along with it, but I was finding the vocals
a little bit too high and I was just going
to struggle with it. But Greg, a good producer, says,
(32:40):
why don't we just take it down a bit? You know,
it would be easier to sing. And what was cool
about it was the piano I had already played now
got a little bit darker, and it actually is a
bit one of his sounds. I think I heard it
on the Adele Hello. I listened to that, and I thought,
(33:01):
this is one of Greg's tricks, you know. But it
happened anyway to us, and I liked the sound of
the piano we were experimenting as well. And the thing is,
you know, it keeps it really interesting to you go
in each day and instead of thinking, oh I gotta
do this song, I'll but do it good. There'd be
a bit of that, but mainly it'll be whatever, don't
do it good. We'll mess around, you know, we'll get
(33:24):
something that excites us. We'll put a crazy sound on it.
And I got yeah, I can see to that, and
it's often that when we did a lot of that
in the Beatles. I mean, John was particularly fond of
putting an echo when he was doing the vocal so
he would do what we called the bog echo in Liverpool.
Bog means the toilet. You know, I'm going to bog
(33:46):
and the toilet traditionally has got a good acoustic so
we would call this little delay on the vocal sound
the bog echo. It just gives you a little bit
different feeling than when you're just hearing your own voice,
plane and straightforward. It's like your eldest days, somebody with
(34:21):
a crazy sound on his voice. Jean Vincent, Yeah, you
know whatever. The sounds like your old rock idols. So
it inspires you a little bit. You know. It's interesting
you you mentioned the darker sound that Greg brought to
that to the piano, and then you talk about John's experimentation,
because John was sometimes the one bringing in the darker energy,
(34:43):
the slight darkness of you know, like it's getting better
all the time. It couldn't couldn't get much worse like that.
That's the famous example of a little addition that that
just adds a different shadow. Yeah, that's true. I mean
we all brought that. You know, this is the thing
well has. You know, over time things become legendary, so
(35:05):
you'll get John was the dark one, Paul was a
cute one, and that's not true because we each had
a bit of that or the other. So George could
be very much the one who would bring that in.
But you know what I'm talking about it. I always
use that example of the song getting better. I go,
it's getting better all the time, and John goes couldn't
(35:25):
get much worse. So you know, that's a good example
of how he would do that. But often it could
be George who do it just as much as John would.
And I think you know I would sometimes take John's
songs and darken them. I mean, Come Together was a
very jolly little song when John brought it in and
(35:48):
it was like, no, we're not going to do that.
Seventeen year old you seventeen year old, Yeah, we would
have swamped it out, man. So that's the point in
case where John's thing was, and then I would We
(36:12):
had those kind of influences on each other. But the
story sticks that John was the dark one. I was
the light one. George was the mystic one, you know,
and to some degree that's true, but we each had
aspects of all those kind of forces. And Ringo too,
you know, he would come in sort of put some
(36:34):
drumming on it. That would be like whoa, I mean,
I had the song get Back and I'm just going
to get back, get Back and he comes up with
and that drum makes that record, you know, so say, yeah,
we're all four corners of a square. The Beatles. It
(36:55):
was a very democratic group, so we all brought ideas in.
Maybe John and I wrote most of the songs, but
George wrote some of the best songs, you know, like
something you know, some of those songs he wrote. So
sticking with this idea of it comes the legends that
(37:18):
stick and what we might be missing. Will soon hear
the fiftieth anniversary box set of the White album. Yeah,
what surprises are in store for us. So the legend,
of course is that this is where things get difficult.
There's a lot of tension during these sessions that have
spread over I think five months or so, and sometimes
the group is recording as individuals rather than as a group.
(37:41):
Is the legend they're true? Or do you remember those
sessions differently. You know. The thing is, because it was
towards the end of the Beatles all the forces that
were later going to break the Beatles up, which is
mainly business, to tell you the truth, there was a
lot of arguing about business and we didn't like that.
We'd always traditionally just left that to someone else. But
(38:03):
it got a bit dangerous to do that, and that
someone else, it was a different someone else actually was
about to nicke it all. So that got This is
a period after Brian Epstein's death and the start of
Applecord referring to called Alan Klein. You know, it got dangerous.
It was an idea that he was maybe going to
(38:25):
take over and take over all the money and all
the stuff that we'd ever done, and that made it
a difficult period. But you know, the great thing was
when we got in the studio it all changed because
we were just these four guys again and it wasn't
to do with business. It was now to do with music,
and so sometimes we did record separately. I would do Blackbird,
(38:50):
but only because it's a solo song I did yesterday,
and I said to him me, okay, guys, what are
you gonna do on this, and they also, well, we can't.
It's the solo song. You know. It wasn't because we
were arguing some of the great songs like She's So Heavy,
John's I mean, we all got right in there. There's
(39:11):
no we were at peace. When we were playing music
in the studio. It was always a thrill from the
word go when the Beatles were formed to the word stop.
You know, we always got in the studio and even
if we were arguing, that kind of got superseded by
the music. And you know, we argued like families argue.
(39:34):
I mean, in the early days, it was always John
and George arguing about who would have his amp loudest.
They degree, okay, look, you know we gotta yeah, let's
put it at seven. Okay, and they put it at seven,
And then you will be playing and you just see
George kind of back towards his up and go nine.
(39:56):
And then Johnathan noticed, so he quietly sneak towards his ten,
you know, and then that would go, hey, well what
are you doing? You know, that might cause a bit
of an argument, but other than that, you know that
when we played music, it came good, but we're not
(40:24):
going to keep you any longer. It is almost time
to I'm in a mispronounsis, but they're going mak chow
Mick show. Yeah all, that's what they used to say
in Germany. I remember the guy's name, Billy. He was
the chefts for like the manager of the little club.
We first played him and he used to come, okay, chat.
(40:48):
We tried to. We weren't very good at MAC and show.
Make show in German. Come on, make a show in German.
But sometimes there's people in the audience hold that signal,
so it's still you know, there we are, and that
is it. I do have to go. Thank you so much,
have to go on MAC show. Thanks very much for
chatting nice one. Inside the Studio is an I Heart
(41:16):
Radio original podcast. This episode was written and hosted by
me Joe Levy. We'd like to give a big thank
you to Paul McCartney and Capitol Records. You can follow
Inside the Studio on I Heart Radio, or you can
subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
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