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At 83, Paul McCartney remains one of rock’s most dependable arena-fillers, still packing out multiple nights in the biggest venues of whichever country he choses to visit. But his recent solo albums have proved a decidedly mixed bag. There are always lovely songs that only Paul McCartney could have written: Seize the Day, Hosanna and I Don’t Know all offered compelling evidence that the extraordinary melodic instincts of the Most Successful Songwriter in the History of Popular Music were entirely intact as he stared down his ninth decade.
But they coexisted alongside ungainly lurches for contemporaneity that you rather wish he had left out: thumpy post-Mumford folk on 2013’s Everybody Out There; what appeared to be a Queens of the Stone Age pastiche in the shape of 2020’s Slidin’; a dreadful collaboration with pop songwriter for hire Ryan Tedder called Fuh You that even its co-author seemed to have misgivings about. “This doesn’t amount to anything – y’know, I wrote Eleanor Rigby,” he protested, which was a fair point but raised the question of how it still made the tracklisting of 2018’s Egypt Station.
It wasn’t merely that these songs weren’t much cop, it was the sense of pointlessness that attended them. McCartney’s back catalogue isn’t so much influential as a fundamental part of pop’s DNA, with all the timelessness that suggests. Echoes of the music he made at his creative zenith are still everywhere, which means he doesn’t need to lunge for contemporaneity in order to sound contemporary: he just needs to be himself.
On the basis of one song, it’s obviously impossible to judge whether his 18th solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, was made in that knowledge, but lead single Days We Left Behind augurs well. Andrew Watt (whose credit on the album further bolsters his reputation as producer-by-appointment to the rock aristocracy: Elton, Ozzy, Iggy Pop, the Stones, now Macca) appears to have encouraged McCartney to be as McCartney-esque as possible. You would struggle to describe its lovely descending piano melody and harmony vocals as anything else. Its reflective, autumnal tone recalls that of 2005’s Chaos and Creation in the Backyard – by common consent, the last genuinely fantastic album he made – which itself threw back to the twilit mood that consumed much of the Beatles’ White Album.
Days We Left Behind also suggests a wholehearted embrace of a notion that McCartney’s recent albums have hinted at without fully committing to: what you might call a convincing mature style, similar to that first minted by Bob Dylan on 1997’s Time Out of Mind and profitably deployed by him thereafter. You could hear the suggestion of it scattered across McCartney’s recent albums, on Early Days, Confidante and Pretty Boys: reflective, rueful, haunted, making capital from his audibly aged voice. But there are sepia-tinted lyrics: “Nothing ever stays, nothing comes to mind, no one can embrace the days we left behind.” McCartney has been harking back to his Liverpool childhood on and off since 1967’s lysergic Penny Lane, but not with the degree of wistfulness or the sense of temporal distance found here. And there’s the album’s title: Dungeon Lane was the route to the shoreline in Speke, the area of Liverpool where McCartney spent his early childhood.
The combination strongly implies that McCartney may have written an album that fully reflects his time of life, when the natural tendency to look back, fondly or otherwise, is amplified by the fact that your past vastly outweighs your future. It’s an intriguing prospect – certainly more intriguing than the prospect of more where Fuh You and Everybody’s Out There came from – which may, of course, prove to be wide of the mark when The Boys of Dungeon Lane appears. Still, you can but hope.
