Five years on, McCartney III has settled into the catalog. It's worth asking how it sits there.
Paul has made three solo albums titled simply for himself: McCartney in 1970, McCartney II in 1980, and McCartney III in 2020. Each was made largely alone, each appeared during a moment of creative or personal transition, and each was treated, on release, as something of a curiosity rather than a major statement.
McCartney (1970) was famously the album that broke the Beatles, recorded in his home studio in the months following Linda's first pregnancy and the band's collapse. McCartney II (1980), made in the wake of the Wings tour cancellation and Paul's brief Japanese imprisonment, leaned heavily into early-eighties synth experimentation in a way that puzzled critics at the time but has since been reassessed as quietly prescient.
McCartney III completes the loop, fifty years on from the first. The pattern is the same: a Beatle alone with his instruments, working without committee. The result, this time, is more reflective than experimental.
By Paul's own account in the album's accompanying interviews, McCartney III began without an album in mind. He had been working on a film score that fell through when production halted in March 2020. Rather than abandon the recordings, he kept going. Songs accumulated. Eventually he had a record.
The album was tracked at Hog Hill Mill, his Sussex studio. With the exception of brass on one track and some additional vocals, Paul played every instrument himself.
McCartney III is, by Paul's standards, a quiet record. There are flashes of his familiar pop instincts (Find My Way opens the album with a propulsive guitar line that wouldn't sound out of place on Flaming Pie), but the dominant mode is reflective. Pretty Boys, Women and Wives, and Deep Deep Feeling are all built around vocal performances that lean into Paul's age rather than away from it.
The most striking track, Long Tailed Winter Bird, opens the album with seven minutes of acoustic guitar and percussive vocalization, instrumental except for some wordless vocal tracking late in the song. It's the kind of opening that announces a record is going to take its time.
The album was generally well-received on release, with critics noting its intimacy and Paul's evident comfort with solo recording. Rolling Stone gave it a four-star review. MOJO placed it in its top albums of 2020. Pitchfork gave it a 7.1, which for Paul represents a very respectable score from a publication that has historically been cool to Beatles solo work.
Five years on, the consensus seems to be that McCartney III is the best of the three trilogy entries. It lacks the historical weight of the 1970 album (which arrived with the Beatles' breakup as its subtext) and the bracing weirdness of the 1980 record, but it has something the other two don't: an artist comfortable in his own skin, making music for its own sake.
Where does McCartney III sit in the broader McCartney solo discography? It's not at the top: Band on the Run, Ram, Tug of War, and Flaming Pie still occupy that ground. But it's better than its quiet release would suggest, and it's holding up as well as any record Paul has made since Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005).
For an artist who has been releasing music continuously for sixty-three years, the achievement of McCartney III is not that it's a comeback (Paul never went anywhere) or a reinvention (he doesn't reinvent). The achievement is that, at seventy-eight, alone in a studio, with no commercial expectation hanging over the project, he made a record that is recognizably and unmistakably his own.
That's harder than it sounds.
]]>Half a century later, Ram is one of the most influential records of its decade. It has been covered in its entirety by multiple artists. Its songs turn up in younger musicians' record collections with the regularity of a foundational text. Pitchfork, reviewing the 2012 reissue, gave it a perfect score. Indie pop, as a sound, sometimes seems to be reverse-engineered from this single album.
How a record gets from "nadir" to "foundational text" is a story worth telling.
After his 1970 debut McCartney, an album recorded almost entirely alone at home in the months following the Beatles' collapse, Paul wanted something more polished. He and Linda flew to New York in October 1970 to begin work on the follow-up, holding auditions for musicians in a 45th Street attic and a Bronx basement. Some auditioning players were brought in under the guise of recording a commercial jingle, the McCartneys keeping the real project quiet. Guitarist David Spinozza was recruited first, with drummer Denny Seiwell, soon to be a founding member of Wings, brought in shortly after.
Basic tracks were taped at Columbia's Studio B between October and November 1970, with additional sessions at Studio D, A&R Recording Studios, and finally Sunset Sound Recorders in Los Angeles, where Norwegian engineer Eirik Wangberg took over mixing duties from producer Jim Guercio and finished the album over six weeks. Paul gave Wangberg unusually free rein. Among Wangberg's decisions: stitching two unfinished songs together to create Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, and adding the artificial-stereo thunder effects that open its second half.
The album was credited to Paul and Linda McCartney, the only studio album to bear that joint billing. Linda's vocal contributions were primarily harmonies, but her presence on the credits was, at the time, controversial. Paul has since acknowledged that the joint credit had practical implications around publishing royalties; it was also, plainly, a statement.
The hostility Ram received in 1971 makes more sense in context than it does in retrospect. The Beatles had broken up the previous year, and the rock press of 1971 was actively choosing sides. John Lennon was making confrontational, politically engaged solo records. George Harrison had delivered a triple-album spiritual epic. Paul, by contrast, made a record about his wife, his farm, and his sheep.
Lennon himself heard slights in it. Too Many People opens with the line "too many people preaching practices," which Lennon took as a direct attack and answered the following year with How Do You Sleep? on Imagine. The opening words of Ram, when reversed, are reportedly a half-audible "piss off." For listeners hoping to find the next Beatles record in this sleeve, what they got instead was domestic, eccentric, and almost willfully unfashionable.
Christgau called it "the most stupid mainstream rock record of the past few years." Landau's Rolling Stone review went further, accusing Paul of having needed Lennon's editorial discipline to produce anything of value. The consensus formed quickly: Ram was the sound of a major artist losing the plot.
Several things were happening in Ram that took the rock press a generation to catch up to.
The first is its compositional restlessness. Songs like Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey and The Back Seat of My Car are essentially mini-suites, structurally closer to the Abbey Road medley than to anything on Lennon's Plastic Ono Band. Monkberry Moon Delight, which Paul's adopted daughter Heather sings backing vocals on, is a piece of vocal-led baroque pop that has been covered by everyone from Screamin' Jay Hawkins to Phish.
The second is its texture. The combination of Spinozza and Hugh McCracken's interlocking acoustic guitars, Seiwell's loose, jazz-inflected drumming, and Linda's high harmonies created a sound that was simultaneously homemade and elaborately produced. This combination of "sounds like it was made on a farm" with "actually has George Martin string arrangements on three tracks" is exactly the formula that two generations of indie-pop artists have spent years trying to reverse-engineer.
The third is its emotional ambiguity. Ram refuses to commit to either the rural-domestic warmth its cover promises or the embattled-defensive posture its opening lines establish. The result is a record that feels strange and unresolved in ways that more straightforwardly autobiographical singer-songwriter albums of the era do not.
The first signs of critical reappraisal came in the late 1990s, when artists like Jon Brion and the High Llamas began citing Ram as a touchstone. The Brion connection mattered: he produced records for Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, and Kanye West, and the Ram-derived production tricks (close-miked acoustic guitars, tightly stacked vocal harmonies, deliberately rustic textures) showed up in his work and spread from there.
By the time Pitchfork's Mark Richardson reviewed the 2012 Archive Collection reissue, the consensus had completely flipped. Richardson awarded Ram a 9.1, calling it a record whose "supposed flaws now sound like its great achievements." The review explicitly framed Ram as the unacknowledged template for indie pop, naming a lineage from Brian Wilson through Ram to artists like Of Montreal and Animal Collective.
Rolling Stone, which had buried the album in 1971, ranked it number 450 on its 2023 list of the greatest albums of all time. The mid-list placement is itself a kind of admission: Ram was always there; the publication just didn't know how to hear it.
There's a direct line from Ram to McCartney III, the 2020 lockdown album that closed Paul's solo trilogy. Both records were made under deliberately constrained circumstances. Both feature Paul playing most instruments himself, with family members contributing where appropriate. Both arrived without the weight of expectation that attended the records around them, and both used that absence of expectation to do something stranger than they would have been allowed to otherwise.
The trilogy that McCartney III completes is sometimes described as the trilogy of Paul's solo records, but that framing misses the point. Ram is just as essential to the lineage. Together, McCartney, Ram, McCartney II, and McCartney III form the backbone of a four-decade investigation into what one Beatle does when no one is watching.
The answer, on this evidence, is something pretty close to indie pop, decades before anyone had a name for it.
]]>It is, in the technical sense, an outtakes compilation. Across roughly thirteen years and four serious attempts at completion, Paul tried to assemble an album from the leftovers of his post-Beatles work. The material spanned sessions from Ram in 1970 through Back to the Egg in 1978, with overdubs added at various points by three different lineups of Wings. Each version got further than the last. None was ever officially released.
What follows is the story of how an album gets made, partially unmade, remade, leaked, and then, decades later, partially released as bonus tracks across an entirely different reissue program.
The idea began during Wings' Nashville sessions in July 1974. Paul wanted to clear his shelf. He had been recording prolifically since 1970, and a substantial number of finished tracks had never made any of the studio albums. The concept was a budget release, originally titled Hot Hitz and Kold Kutz, that would pair greatest hits on one disc with B-sides, outtakes, and previously unreleased material on the other. The "kold kutz" half would be the more interesting one for fans, the part of the project Paul actually cared about.
The album was scheduled for March 1975 release, ahead of Wings' Venus and Mars later that year. It never happened. Capitol Records didn't see the commercial value of an outtakes compilation, and the label declined to schedule it.
Paul revisited the project in October 1978, presenting it to EMI/Capitol again as a hits-and-rarities double album. The label was again unconvinced, and the project was repackaged into the more conventional Wings Greatest, released in November of that year. The B-sides and outtakes disc, Kold Kutz, was once more shelved.
This is the version that surfaced in 1988 as the bootleg LP Cold Cuts (Another Early Version), pressed in a limited run of 100 green-marbled copies on the Wilbur label.
In late 1979, Paul retitled the project simply Cold Cuts and began compiling new tracklists. In January 1981, the third and final Wings lineup, with guitarist Laurence Juber and drummer Steve Holley, recorded fresh overdubs on tracks including A Love for You, Waterspout, My Carnival, and Same Time Next Year. The plan was a mid-1981 release.
This version of Cold Cuts is the one most heavily documented in the bootleg lineage. It removed several of Linda McCartney's vocal features and Denny Laine's instrumentals from earlier compilations in favor of more commercial material. It was, by most accounts, the closest the project ever came to feeling like a real album.
Two things killed it. The first was John Lennon's murder in December 1980, which made the timing of any McCartney outtakes album feel inappropriate. The second was Wings' own dissolution in early 1981. By the time the dust settled, Paul had moved on to Tug of War, his Beatle-aware reckoning album with George Martin, and Cold Cuts was once again on the shelf.
The final attempt came in August 1987. Paul mixed and edited a new version of the album with producer Chris Thomas and engineer Bill Price, with additional work on Mama's Little Girl and Same Time Next Year. According to Paul himself, this version was to feature album art by the celebrated New Yorker illustrator Saul Steinberg, whom Paul had asked years earlier for a cover.
It didn't ship. Paul's then-manager Richard Ogden recommended that, given where Paul was in his career, a best-of compilation would serve him better. The result was All the Best!, released in November 1987. The previously unreleased Waterspout had been planned for that compilation but was pulled at the last minute. Cold Cuts, in any form, was finally and permanently abandoned.
The blow to the project was bootlegging itself. As Paul told Mark Lewisohn in Club Sandwich in 1994: "It became a bootleg, which put me off the idea." Multiple unofficial pressings had appeared between 1987 and the early 1990s, each compiling a slightly different mixture of takes. The album existed in the world before it could be officially released.
There was no single canonical Cold Cuts tracklist. Each version included different songs. But across the four attempts, the recurring tracks were:
The strange epilogue to Cold Cuts is that nearly all of its tracks have, eventually, been officially released. Just not as a Cold Cuts album.
Beginning with the 2010 launch of the Paul McCartney Archive Collection, the deluxe reissue program that has progressively unboxed his back catalog, Cold Cuts material has been released as bonus tracks on the appropriate parent albums:
The result is a ghost album. Almost every song that would have been on Cold Cuts now exists, in officially-released form, scattered across the deluxe boxes of the records they were originally outtakes from. Listened to in sequence, they make a coherent mid-period McCartney album that is genuinely different from anything he released between 1971 and 1987.
What they don't make is Cold Cuts. The album as Paul conceived it, with its Saul Steinberg cover and its specific track sequencing decisions, will probably never exist. The closest a fan can come is the 1981 bootleg, which is itself preserved across multiple pressings, none authoritative.
In a 1994 interview, Paul mentioned the unused Steinberg cover art as "probably the most compelling reason to issue the album, actually: just to use his cover." Steinberg died in 1999. The cover, if it still exists in MPL Communications' files, has yet to be published.
For now, Cold Cuts remains what it has been since 1975: an album that almost was, multiple times, in slightly different forms each time. The most thoroughly attempted Paul McCartney album that no Paul McCartney listener has ever officially heard.
]]>It was, in technical terms, a recording. Whether it was a Beatles recording is a question that depends on how the listener feels about the technology used to make it.
John Lennon recorded Now and Then at his apartment in the Dakota in New York, around 1977 or 1978. The original is a piano-and-vocal home demo, captured on a domestic cassette recorder. Lennon's voice and the piano are on the same track, which is the technical detail that would define the song's afterlife.
After Lennon's murder in December 1980, the demo sat in Yoko Ono's archive. In 1994, she gave it to the surviving Beatles, along with the demos that became Free as a Bird and Real Love on the Anthology project. Of the three demos, Free as a Bird and Real Love were completed and released as new Beatles singles in 1995 and 1996. Now and Then was attempted, briefly, in March 1995, then shelved.
The reason was technical. In 1995, audio source separation, the ability to isolate one instrument or voice from a mixed recording, was not a viable technology. The Lennon demo had vocals and piano on the same cassette track, with a hum from a refrigerator or some similar appliance audible in the background. Producer Jeff Lynne, who oversaw Free as a Bird and Real Love, could not separate Lennon's vocal from the piano cleanly enough to build a Beatles arrangement around it. The other surviving members had reservations of their own. George Harrison, in particular, was reportedly unconvinced that the song was strong enough to justify the technical effort. Paul McCartney told Q magazine in 1997 that "George didn't like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn't do it."
The song was abandoned for nearly three decades.
The technology that made Now and Then possible came from an unexpected source: Peter Jackson's 2021 documentary series The Beatles: Get Back. Working with the original 1969 Let It Be sessions footage, Jackson's team developed a machine-learning audio separation tool that could isolate individual voices and instruments from mixed recordings. The technology was originally built to clean up dialogue from the Get Back footage.
Paul McCartney saw the potential immediately. In a June 2023 interview with BBC Radio 4's Today program, he disclosed that "the last Beatles record" had been completed using AI. The phrasing prompted alarm. Some listeners assumed AI had been used to synthesize Lennon's voice or generate new performance. McCartney clarified within days: "Nothing has been artificially or synthetically created. It's all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings, a process which has gone on for years."
The distinction matters. AI was used as a separation tool, not a generation tool. Lennon's actual 1977 vocal performance, captured on the original cassette, was extracted from the piano track and the room noise. Nothing was added that was not already on the tape. What McCartney and Ringo Starr then did was build a new Beatles arrangement around the cleaned vocal, including overdubs and a string arrangement co-arranged by McCartney, Giles Martin, and Ben Foster.
Crucially, the recording also contains George Harrison. During the 1995 sessions, before the project was abandoned, Harrison had recorded acoustic and electric guitar parts. These were preserved in the Anthology archive and incorporated into the final 2023 mix. All four Beatles are on the track. It is the only Beatles recording to include all four members made after Lennon's death.
The release rollout was unusually careful for a major-label single. A twelve-minute documentary directed by Oliver Murray was published on the Beatles' YouTube channel on November 1, 2023, the day before the song dropped. The film included session footage from both 1995 and the early 2020s, archival material, and interviews with McCartney, Starr, Sean Ono Lennon, and Peter Jackson.
The single itself appeared on streaming services on November 2 and as physical product the following day, paired with a new "true stereo" remix of the band's 1962 debut single Love Me Do. The two songs served as bookends to the band's recording history, the first single and the last, on a single double-A-side release. Vinyl pressings included white marble, light blue, clear, black 7-inch, red and black 12-inch editions, plus a cassette.
Ed Ruscha, the American artist who had designed the 2020 McCartney III cover, designed the Now and Then single sleeve. The back cover incorporated a photograph of a handmade folk-art clock that George Harrison had purchased in Providence, Rhode Island in 1997, with a Beatles photograph added to its face.
In the UK, the single went to number one on November 10, 2023, the same day as the release of the expanded 1967-1970 compilation that included it.
Critical response was largely positive but complicated. Variety's Jem Aswad gave the song a qualified endorsement: "Now and Then is not a lost Beatles classic. But to paraphrase McCartney's famous quote regarding criticism of The White Album, 'It's a bloody new Beatles song, shut up!'"
The more substantive criticism came from listeners who felt that the song's nature as a posthumous collaboration changed its status. Russell Root, writing in Salon, argued that Now and Then was "not a Beatles song, but rather a Beatles tribute song," and that the Anthology-era Free as a Bird and Real Love had stayed truer to both the original demos and the Beatles' sound. Mastering engineer Ian Shepherd noted that the stereo mix was heavily limited in dynamics, though the Dolby Atmos version did not suffer the same compression. Mastering engineer Miles Showell confirmed that the mix he received was indeed heavily compressed.
The AI question generated more debate than the music itself. Some commentators saw the song as a thoughtful and limited application of new technology. Others saw it as a precedent that opened the door to less careful uses of the same tools. The Grammy nomination, when it came in late 2024, intensified the debate. Was a song completed forty-five years after its composer's death, with the help of machine learning, eligible for an award meant to honor the year's best recordings?
The Recording Academy's answer was yes. Now and Then was nominated for Record of the Year, ultimately losing to Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us, but won Best Rock Performance.
For all the technological and ethical conversation around it, Now and Then is, at its core, a McCartney-shaped Lennon song. The melody is unmistakably Lennon, with the falling phrase structure and the deliberate rhyme schemes ("I know it's true / it's all because of you") that defined his late-period writing. The arrangement, with its strings, its tasteful acoustic guitars, and its carefully managed dynamics, is unmistakably McCartney.
The most affecting moment in the song is structural. The arrangement holds back during Lennon's verses, letting the cleaned vocal sit in the foreground with minimal accompaniment. When the strings enter, it feels both like a tribute to the orchestral arrangements George Martin built for Eleanor Rigby and A Day in the Life and like an admission that there are some things only McCartney would do to a Lennon vocal.
Ringo Starr's drums, recorded in the early 2020s, are the third Beatle voice on the song, distinctive for their characteristically loose feel. George Harrison's 1995 guitar parts thread through the second half. The result is, structurally, what it claims to be: all four Beatles, on a single recording, decades after such a thing should have been possible.
In November 2025, the Now and Then mini-documentary was released as part of the song's two-year anniversary celebrations. Paul McCartney performed Now and Then live for the first time during his 2025 Got Back tour. The song's status, as something between a Beatles recording and a McCartney-produced tribute to the band's history, has settled into the catalog.
The technology that made it possible has, predictably, been applied elsewhere. Peter Jackson's separation tool has been used on additional Beatles archive material. The Lennon estate has signaled that other unfinished demos may be candidates for similar treatment, though no further releases have been announced. The conversation about what AI assistance means in legacy artist contexts has, if anything, only intensified.
What Now and Then established, more clearly than the debate around it acknowledges, is that the question is no longer whether such recordings are possible. They are. The question is whether they should exist, what their relationship is to the original creative act, and how they should be received. Now and Then is the recording that forced those questions into the open. The answers are still being worked out.
For Maccafan readers specifically, the song also functioned as a quiet announcement that the Beatles archive is still capable of surprises. The 1995 Harrison guitar parts, sitting in storage for nearly three decades, were not the last unreleased Beatles material in the vault. What else might emerge, on what timeline, with what technology, is no longer a hypothetical. It is a planning question.
]]>This guide is for the listener who wants to understand the solo catalog specifically: the eighteen albums Paul released under his own name. Wings is treated separately, as is the orchestral and Fireman work. The intent is not to rank them but to place each one in its context, so a new listener can find an entry point that fits their interests.
These three albums share a common method: Paul plays nearly every instrument, often alone in a home studio, with minimal outside collaboration.
Recorded mostly at home on a four-track during late 1969 and early 1970, this album was released two weeks before the Let It Be film and effectively confirmed the Beatles' end. Maybe I'm Amazed is its monument. The rest of the record is deliberately ramshackle, full of fragments and instrumentals. Critics dismissed it on release. It is now considered foundational for what would later be called bedroom pop.
Recorded at home in the summer of 1979 in the wake of Wings' Japan tour cancellation and Paul's brief Japanese imprisonment for cannabis possession, McCartney II is the most sonically experimental album in his catalog. Coming Up, Temporary Secretary, and Waterfalls push into early-eighties synth-pop territory before that sound was widely understood. The album was puzzling on release and has been substantially reassessed since.
Recorded at Hog Hill Mill in Sussex during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, McCartney III completes the trilogy. It is the most reflective of the three, with songs like Pretty Boys, Women and Wives, and Long Tailed Winter Bird leaning into Paul's age rather than away from it. Critical response was warm, with Pitchfork awarding it a 7.1.
Entry point: McCartney II if you like adventurous production. McCartney III if you want the most consistent songwriting.
The only album credited jointly to Paul and Linda. Recorded in New York with session musicians including future Wings drummer Denny Seiwell, Ram was savaged on release and has since been rehabilitated as one of the most influential records of its decade. Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, Too Many People, The Back Seat of My Car, and Monkberry Moon Delight are the standouts. The 2012 Archive Collection reissue is the recommended edition. (See our full Ram retrospective for the complete story.)
Entry point: Start here if you like compositional ambition and unusual texture.
Wings dissolved in early 1981. The four albums that followed represent Paul's most commercial period as a solo artist, with mainstream production and major collaborators. The 1980s catalog is the period most contested by critics; some hear it as Paul at his most polished, others as Paul at his most diluted.
Produced by George Martin in his first full McCartney production since the Beatles. Features Ebony and Ivory (with Stevie Wonder) and Here Today, Paul's elegy for John Lennon. Often cited as Paul's strongest 1980s album.
A direct sequel to Tug of War, sharing producer, sessions, and several musicians. Includes Say Say Say with Michael Jackson. Less consistent than its predecessor.
The soundtrack to Paul's box-office-failing film of the same name. Mixes new material with re-recorded Beatles songs. Considered a low point at the time, partially reassessed since.
A deliberate stylistic reset, produced by Hugh Padgham. Features collaborations with Eric Stewart of 10cc. Commercial disappointment on release; modest cult status now.
Entry point: Tug of War if you want the best of the period.
An album of rock and roll covers recorded in two days in 1987, released only in the Soviet Union in 1988 in a deliberate gesture toward Soviet listeners who had been unable to legally purchase Western music. Released worldwide in 1991. Not a major artistic statement but a fascinating historical artifact. Maccafan covers the album in depth in our archive section.
Produced with Mitchell Froom and others, with co-writes by Elvis Costello. The Costello collaborations (My Brave Face, You Want Her Too, Don't Be Careless Love) are the album's high points. A genuine return to form after the 1980s commercial wobble.
Recorded with the touring band Paul had assembled for the New World Tour. Less essential than Flowers in the Dirt but contains the underrated Hope of Deliverance and Off the Ground.
Produced by Jeff Lynne and George Martin during the Anthology period, with Ringo Starr on drums on three tracks. Paul has called it the album he made because Anthology reminded him of the standards he wanted to reach. The Song We Were Singing and Calico Skies are particular highlights. Widely considered his best album of the 1990s.
Entry point: Flaming Pie. If you want one Paul album from the 1990s, this is it.
A rock and roll covers album, recorded in a week with David Gilmour and Mick Green, made in the wake of Linda's death from breast cancer. Cathartic and unexpectedly raw.
The first album of original material after Linda's death. Recorded in California with producer David Kahne. Includes the only Beatle-on-Beatle collaboration with George Harrison after the Anthology sessions, on Vanilla Sky.
Produced by Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck), who pushed Paul to play most instruments himself in a deliberate echo of McCartney and McCartney II. The result is the strongest review-driven album of Paul's solo career, nominated for Album of the Year at the 2006 Grammys.
A lighter follow-up to Chaos, also self-played in significant portions. Includes Dance Tonight and Mr. Bellamy.
Entry point: Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. If you want one Paul album from the 2000s, this is it.
A standards album of pre-rock-era covers, with a Diana Krall band. Often overlooked but quietly excellent for what it is.
Produced by Mark Ronson, Ethan Johns, Paul Epworth, and Giles Martin, with each producer handling a few tracks. The youngest-sounding album Paul has made since the 1980s. Save Us, New, and Queenie Eye are the singles.
Produced by Greg Kurstin (Adele, Kelly Clarkson) and Ryan Tedder (OneRepublic). His first US number-one solo album since 1982's Tug of War. I Don't Know and Confidante are the standouts.
Entry point: Egypt Station. The most consistent late-period Paul album before the McCartney III trilogy capper.
If you have never seriously engaged with Paul's solo catalog, a five-album introduction would be:
These five records, listened to in sequence, will give a new listener a working sense of Paul's solo career: its variety, its evolution, its preoccupations, and its persistent strangeness. From that base, any of the other thirteen studio albums become more navigable.
The Wings catalog, the classical work, and the Fireman albums are separate guides. We will publish each in due course.
For a deeper dive into individual albums, our Albums archive contains track-by-track notes and recording histories for the entire catalog, written by Pierre Rattaire and contributors over the past twenty-five years.
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