Paul McCartney Was “Insulted” When EMI Asked Him for This Favor, but the Comeback
No matter how successful and world-renowned a musician becomes, there will still be a “suit,” or record label executive, telling them what to do—Paul McCartney being no exception. When the former Beatle felt pushback from his labels in the mid-1990s, the artist in him was ready to take offense.
But by the mid-1990s, McCartney was no spring chicken in the industry. He knew that there were silver linings to the favor-slash-command EMI and Capitol were expecting. And as is often the case in rock and roll history, this temporary delay ended up working in McCartney’s favor. Paul McCartney Was Asked (Or Told) Not to Make Another Album
In the mid-1990s, Capitol in the United States and EMI in the United Kingdom were gearing up to release three albums as part of their massive Beatles Anthology series. Speaking with Billboard in 1997, Paul McCartney recalled, “One of the bigwigs at the record company said, ‘We don’t want a [solo] record from you for the next two years. We don’t really need a record off you for a while.’ I was almost insulted at first.”
And indeed, it’s easy to see why he would be. Who tells Paul McCartney not to make new albums? However valid, these feelings didn’t last long. “I thought, ‘Well, yeah, it would be silly to go out against yourself in the form of The Beatles,’” McCartney said. “So, I fell in with the idea and thought, ‘Great. I don’t even have to think about an album.’ What a great, lovely, lazy couple of years. Although we worked quite hard on the anthology.” Working on ‘Anthology’ Helped Inform His Next Album, ‘Flaming Pie’.
Putting his solo work to the side to dive into the anthology of his former band, The Beatles, was another blessing in disguise. As Paul McCartney told Billboard, revisiting his old band’s catalog helped recalibrate his artistic vision. He remembered The Beatles’ ethos in their earliest, most optimistic years, when they sought to make music “for the kid in the bedroom somewhere because we had recently been that kid in a bedroom.”
Source: americansongwriter.com/Melanie Davis
