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 chooses 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.
