Paul McCartney‘s career endured into the music video era, but in the early years of the Beatles and his solo career, visual elements weren’t commonplace. Because of this, many McCartney songs are video-less. Below, find three McCartney songs, from the Beatles’ tenure or otherwise, that would’ve made killer music videos. McCartney should go back and give these songs their moment on screen.

Starting with a Beatles cut, “Yesterday” would be a strong contender for a music video. Though simple, this Beatles hit is narrative enough to lend itself well to visual storytelling. Moreover, the song’s emotionality has the perfect amount of melodrama for McCartney to flex his acting chops, if he had wanted to.

Because this song was released well before the ’80s music video craze, it never got its time to shine in this way. If we could move McCartney to make any visual retroactively, it would be this one.
“Jet”

“Jet” is one of McCartney’s most anthemic songs to date. The punchy, bright musicality of this song begs for a visual just as striking. There are aviation angles, ’70s glam angles, classic rock angles, and many more lenses through which to view this song. It’s a wonder McCartney hasn’t gone back and given this song its visual moment. Even a high-quality performance video would’ve sufficed.

McCartney’s music videos have always been fun-loving, engaging, and impossible to forget. This song seems like the perfect playing ground for all three of those goals.

Source: Alex Hopper/americansongwriter.com

Read More<<<

When Rubber Soul arrived in the UK on 3 December 1965, The Beatles stepped into a new phase of their creative lives, a phase that would soon define the sound and ambition of popular music. The sixth studio album from John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr landed during a frantic period in their global rise, yet the work itself came from a rare four-week window where the group were free of touring, filming and radio commitments, a gift they had never been offered before.

Recorded in London across October and November 1965, the album represented a shift away from Beatlemania’s high-volume demands, with the band focusing on the studio as a place of exploration. For the first time they had the space to work as recording artists rather than performers, a change that altered the direction of their career and the wider rock landscape.

Often described as a folk rock record, Rubber Soul grew from a mix of influences that the group absorbed during their August 1965 North American tour. They had played to more than 55,000 people at Shea Stadium, met Bob Dylan in New York and visited Elvis Presley in Los Angeles, events that broadened their sense of possibility. American radio during that trip introduced them to Motown and Stax artists whose vocal styles and rhythmic detail shaped their writing on return to London.

Source: Paul Cashmere/noise11.com

Read More<<<

While it’s undeniable that the team of Lennon/McCartney produced some of the world’s most cherished hits, at least one of these gents was not a total fan. And he made no bones about going public with his opinions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the naysaying Beatle in question was John Lennon.

While John and Paul teamed up brilliantly, John carried an albatross of perfectionism placed on himself. It made his artistic calling disproportionately difficult. This is, after all, the man with one of the most distinctive rock voices who hated hearing his self-described “thin, nasal” tones because they so differed from what he heard in his head.

As a general observation, it’s safe to say that Paul McCartney gravitated towards a more mainstream pop vibe than Lennon, who leaned into an experimental and often surreal approach. Paul had a fondness for old-timey music and rippling keyboards; John preferred more dissonance.

In the post-Beatles years, John came clean with some of his true feelings. His opinions are as enlightening as they are confounding. Here’s a partial list of Beatles standards that weren’t up to John’s exacting standards.
“Run for Your Life” – Rubber Soul, 1965

Lennon objected to “Run for Your Life” for a few reasons. He considered it a cheesy knockoff of Elvis’ “Baby, Let’s Play House.” And as his own sensibilities shifted over the years, he grew appalled by the inherent misogyny of the lyrics: “Well, I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man,” for starters. The cringe-y machismo mortified him. All in all? This is Lennon’s least favorite Beatles song.

“Hello, Goodbye” – non-album single, 1967

Lennon objected to what he considered the lightweight commercial pop qualities of the track, especially in contrast to “I Am the Walrus,” which meant infinitely more to him in its wild experimental scope.

To his chagrin, “Hello, Goodbye” got the “A” side of the single while “Walrus” was relegated to the “B” side. He resented this and described “Hello, Goodbye” as “three minutes of contradictions and meaningless juxtapositions.”

“Lovely Rita” – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967

Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles’ 1967 conceptual masterpiece, was filled with wit, psychedelia, and new approaches to music. “Lovely Rita” is a whimsical number that plays like a roguish love song. He differed from Paul’s wider approach to songwriting, where he delved into the lives of people.

Source: Ellen Fagan/culturesonar.com

Read More<<<

There are almost certainly worse holiday songs than Paul McCartney's 1979 "Wonderful Christmastime." But in a genre famous for cheesiness, it stands out as among the most polarizing. And it's notable for being written by the same Beatle who penned "Let It Be" on the band's final album.

The song? You know the one where McCartney sings "Simply having a wonderful Christmastime" a dozen times while a chorus of children chime in with "Ding dong, ding dong …" In the 46 years since it was released, it has become a seasonal staple — in inescapable rotation on radio, department store elevator music and streaming services.

For some, it's charming and joyful. For many others, it's hackneyed and repetitive. The vitriol against "Wonderful Christmastime" routinely lands it on perennial lists of the worst Christmas songs.

NPR Music's Stephen Thompson learned to abhor the song while working as a stocker at a grocery store in Iola, Wis., in the late 1980s.

"I hate that song," he says. It seemed to play nonstop for the whole of December, he recalls. "It's this insistent, tinny little synth-pop earworm that once it gets that hook under your skin, you can't shake it. And not in a good way."

"Paul McCartney did not try very hard to come up with a unique sentiment," he adds. "It's just this kind of cheerful trifle." Ted Montgomery is the author of The Paul McCartney Catalog and The Beatles Through Headphones. "The bar is so high with McCartney because he's such a great songwriter," he says. "We don't need to list all the classic songs he's written."

But just for fun, let's: As a member of the Fab Four, McCartney composed enduring classics such as "Eleanor Rigby" and "The Long and Winding Road." In his post-Beatles days, he produced songs such as "Maybe I'm Amazed" and "With a Little Luck." It would be difficult to find a bigger McCartney fan than Montgomery, even for him though, "Wonderful Christmastime" is a bridge too far.

"The greatest thing about this song is they only play it between Thanksgiving and Christmas," he says. In Catalog, his take is even harsher: the instrumentation is "amateurish and banal" and the lyrics "embarrassing," he writes. One of Montgomery's biggest gripes is "it's all synth."

In 1979, the versatile Yamaha CS-80 had just come out. Although the synthesizer — an electronic instrument that combines sound waves to create music — wasn't new in the pop world, the Yamaha quickly caught on, and McCartney was an early adopter. The 1970s and 1980s were the golden age of the synthesizer and artists ranging from Michael Jackson to Toto and Bruce Springsteen employed the CS-80 around the same time. Montgomery acknowledges that synthesizers were all the rage at the time, "but I don't like that," he says. "I'm a purist when it comes to music. I like real instruments."

Composer and musicologist Nate Sloan takes a more nuanced view. While he rates the song "pretty far at the bottom" of all the pop songs of the late '70s, "in terms of the Christmas canon, I think that's a different story. I think this is a fantastic Christmas song."

Source: Scott Neuman/NPR

Read More<<<

In February of 1964, The Beatles scored their first-ever No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 with their single, “I Want To Hold Your Hand”. Following that No. 1 hit, The Beatles went on an incredibly dominant run and scored a string of No. 1 hit singles. Needless to say, The Beatles were are the height of their powers, and even if creating a No. 1 single wasn’t their objective, they still did it. Even though this is the ultimate goal of many bands and musicians, Ringo Starr and the rest of the band had a slight problem with it, because once you’ve gone No. 1 several times, where else is there to go?

Do No. 1 hits make a lot of money and produce deals for the opportunity to make more money? Yes, but if you’re a creative person, then you know money isn’t everything, and that the real currency is outperforming your former art. Well, that is seemingly what The Beatles wanted to do, but when they kept garnering No. 1 hit after No. 1 hit, they were worried that they had reached their creative peak. That being said, when they finally didn’t create a No. 1 hit, they were, weirdly enough, a bit relieved.
Why a Non-No. 1 Hit for The Beatles was a Breath of Fresh Air

Recalling their string of No. 1 hits, Starr said in The Beatles Anthology, “After Number One, where else is there to go? Number One was it.” “After that, of course, every bloody thing we did was Number One, and it got strange because in a weird way we were waiting for the one that wasn’t Number One,” added Starr.

However, in 1967, that string of No. 1 hits came to a close, as The Beatles released the incredibly experimental singles, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane”. Now, both those singles were incredibly successful, as “Strawberry Fields Forever” peaked at No. 8 on the Hot 100 and “Penny Lane” ended up at No. 1 after debuting at No. 85 on the chart. Although they weren’t the typical songs, The Beatles previously saw themselves seamlessly climb to the top of the charts.

Source: Peter Burditt/americansongwriter.com

Read More<<<

A remastered edition of the classic documentary series about the legendary rock band — with an additional episode included.

“It’s almost impossible to get the definitive story of the Beatles,” says Paul McCartney in The Beatles Anthology. That hasn’t stopped people trying. The craze for filmed fodder about the Fab Four has barely relented since the band split up in 1970; in the last five years alone, we’ve had films ranging from excellent (Peter Jackson’s Get Back) to perfectly fine (Martin Scorsese-produced Beatles ‘64) to niche (the Cirque du Soleil/Beatles collab All Together Now). Not to mention the four major biopics on each member, from Sam Mendes, arriving in 2027.

Now we have the return of the account that arguably comes closest to “definitive”. The Beatles Anthology was a landmark project when it was released in the early ‘90s, consisting of an 8-part television series (broadcast on ITV in the UK and ABC in the US), a collection of albums, and a book. Made with full participation of the band’s surviving members (McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr), it aimed to tell the exhaustive story of the band “more popular than Jesus”.

The Anthology now makes its debut on streaming with a bit of lick and polish from Jackson’s Wingnut Films, who apply the same magic they used on Get Back to turn the grainy footage higher resolution, the music higher fidelity. While it certainly feels sharper, a lot of material here might feel familiar: footage of policemen holding back screaming girls as the mop-topped men grin cheekily has over time become its own cliché.

To see the three of them hanging out and jamming together is a joy.

And yet. The extended running time of this series allows for deeper cuts. It is still remarkable to watch a minutes-long uninterrupted shot of the band giggling in a limo while fans claw at the windows like zombies, or play to Shea Stadium, treated like gods, bodies willingly flung at the stage. Despite their eternal cultural dominance, the facts of the Beatles remain extraordinary. “By the time I was 23, we’d done Sgt Pepper,” notes Harrison casually at one point.

Source: John Nugent/empireonline.com

Read More<<<