What is this? Just a few months after releasing his 17th solo album — the well-reviewed, chart-topping Egypt Station — 76-year old music legend Paul McCartney returns with a standalone single called “Get Enough.”
Seriously, WTF is this? What could have been a rather lovely, melancholy ballad (“There was a time when we walked by the docks / And I told you, ‘I need you all of my life’ / And watching the tugs rolling by together / Do you remember?”) is an AutoTune-d mess.
Who’s to blame? Let’s go with Ryan Tedder, who co-wrote and co-produced the track (along with Zach Skelton) and makes it sound like a glitchy outtake from his band OneRepublic. Note: Tedder, Skelton and McCartney also wrote the rather awful “Fuh You” on Egypt Station, which McCartney admits was solely done to get a hit.
Is there a saving grace? Right at 1:57, the drums kick in and a wall of oohs and ahhs (with some mumbling spoken word) breathes some life and later-day Beatles memories into the mix. In fact, we’d love to hear the demo of this song; it seems like something we’d put on during a rainy day afternoon.
Are you saying Paul McCartney shouldn’t experiment? We’d never tell a former Beatle and the man behind “Hey Jude” not to take chances, but maybe now’s the time he should play to his strengths.
Let’s use his post-Beatles experimental history as a guide.
While hits, his recent Kanye collabs (like “FourFiveSeconds”) were not really true McCartney songs. As he noted: “[With Kanye] you basically don’t write songs. You basically just talk and noodle a bit and you record it all on your phone. And then he goes away.”
Otherwise, you have The Fireman — an on-and-off again with producer/Killing Joke bassist Youth — that started out as ambient music and, at least by 2008, turned into pretty decent lo-fi, dreamy pop-rock. Nothing groundbreaking, but harmless.
And then you have misfires like the final Wings album (1979’s Back to the Egg), where McCartney tried to embrace punk, new wave and disco; Rolling Stone called it “the sorriest grab bag of dreck in recent memory.”
What if I like this and want to hear more? If you really want to dig into McCartney’s less characteristic work, Ian Peel devoted a whole book to the musician’s avant-garde side.
Photo: Jimmy Baikovicius/Flickr Creative Commons
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