According to Paul McCartney, working on the Beatles Anthology project inspired him to record an album that was stripped-back, immediate, and fun, one less studied and produced than most of his recent work. In many ways, Flaming Pie fulfills those goals. A largely acoustic collection of simple songs, Flaming Pie is direct and unassuming, and at its best, it recalls the homely charm of McCartney and Ram. McCartney still has a tendency to wallow in trite sentiment, and his more ambitious numbers, like the string-drenched epic "Beautiful Night" or the silly Beatlesque psychedelia of "Flaming Pie," fall a little flat.
Band on the Run is the third studio album by Paul McCartney and Wings, released in December 1973. It marked the fifth album by Paul McCartney since his departure from the Beatles in April 1970. Although sales were modest initially, its commercial performance was aided by two hit singles - "Jet" and "Band on the Run" - such that it became the top-selling studio album of 1974 in the United Kingdom and Australia, in addition to revitalising McCartney's critical standing. It remains McCartney's most successful album and the most celebrated of his post-Beatles works. In 2000, Q magazine placed it at number 75 in its list of the "100 Greatest British Albums Ever". In 2012, Band on the Run was voted 418th on Rolling Stone's revised list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".
Off the Ground is the ninth solo studio album by Paul McCartney under his own name, released in 1993. As his first studio album of the 1990s, it is also the follow-up to the well-received Flowers in the Dirt (1989). In the United Kingdom, the album debuted at number 5 and quickly fell off the chart, spending only 6 weeks inside the top 100. In the United States, it peaked at the number 17 on the Billboard 200 with the first-week sales of only 53,000 copies, managing to receive Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America. Although it met with mixed reviews from critics and suffered from lackluster sales in the UK and North America, the album fared better in other key markets such as Spain.
Touted as a personally curated compilation by Paul McCartney, Pure McCartney is the first McCartney compilation since 2001's Wingspan: Hits and History. A full 15 years separated this and Wingspan, longer than the span between that double-disc set and 1987's All the Best, but the 2001 set also stopped cold in 1984, leaving over 30 years of solo McCartney recordings uncompiled on hits collections. In both its standard two-CD and deluxe four-disc incarnations, Pure McCartney attempts to rectify this, going so far as to include "Hope for the Future," his song for the 2014 video game Destiny.
Wings Greatest is a compilation album by Wings and is their eighth album as well as Paul McCartney's 10th since leaving the Beatles. It is notable as being the first official retrospective release from McCartney's post-Beatles career. Excepting interest in its vinyl LP mix, this collection has become largely irrelevant since the releases of All the Best! and Wingspan: Hits and History.