Paul Mccartney 1979 Back To The Egg (sunny Side Up)(japan, Pctc 257 [yex 987]) Paper Sleeve

Quiet though it may be, Paul McCartney experienced something of a late-career renaissance with the release of his 1997 album Flaming Pie. With that record, he shook off years of coyness and half-baked ideas and delivered an album that, for whatever its slight flaws, was both ambitious and cohesive, and it started a streak that continued through the driving rock & roll album Run Devil Run and its 2001 follow-up, Driving Rain. For Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, the follow-up to that record, McCartney tried a different tactic, returning to the one-man band aesthetic of his debut album, McCartney, its latter-day sequel, McCartney II, and, to a lesser extent, the home-spun second album, Ram…

Paul Is Live is a live album by Paul McCartney, released in 1993 during his New World Tour in support of the album Off the Ground. The album cover is based on that of Beatles' 1969 album Abbey Road and contains multiple references to the "Paul is dead" conspiracy theory…

Entitled McCartney II because its one-man band approach mirrors that of his first solo album, Paul McCartney's first record since the breakup of Wings was greeted upon its release as a return to form, especially since its synth-heavy arrangements seemed to represent his acceptance of new wave…

Paul McCartney's fourth live album in four years (including Tripping the Live Fantastic: The Highlights) is full of Beatles classics and recent McCartney numbers, including a live version of "Biker Like an Icon"? Paul Is Live uses the exact same band and tone as Tripping the Live Fantastic.

Paul McCartney's second classical work, following six years after his first, the Liverpool Oratorio, is a 75-minute "symphonic poem" which, along with an actual poem printed in the CD booklet, tries "to describe the way Celtic man might have wondered about the origins of life and the mystery of existence," as an explanatory note puts it…

Flowers in the Dirt did earn good reviews but perhaps more important was its accompanying tour, McCartney's first full-fledged world tour in years. Given the tour's enthusiastic reception, McCartney could wait until 1993 to deliver the album's proper sequel, Off the Ground…

Paul McCartney must not only have been conscious of his slipping commercial fortunes, he must have realized that his records hadn't been treated seriously for years, so he decided to make a full-fledged comeback effort with Flowers in the Dirt. His most significant move was to write a series of songs with Elvis Costello, some of which appeared on Costello's own Spike and many of which surfaced here…

After tackling two lengthy works in the Liverpool Oratorio and Standing Stone, Paul McCartney works in much smaller form on the pieces in his third album of classical music, Working Classical. The album consists of three compositions performed by the London Symphony Orchestra that run 10-12 minutes each, plus 11 short selections performed by the Loma Mar Quartet, some of which are versions of his pop songs…

At its quietest moments, 2007's Memory Almost Full played like a coda to Paul McCartney's illustrious career; he seemed comfortable residing in the final act of his legend, happy to reflect and riff upon his achievements. Such measured meditation is largely absent from 2013's New, the first collection of original material he's released since 2007. New lives up to its title, finding McCartney eager, even anxious, to engage with modern music while simultaneously laying claim to the candied, intricate psychedelia of latter-day Beatles. Five decades into his career, reinvention isn't expected from McCartney, so the shock arrives in the avenues Paul chooses to follow and, here, he's enthusiastically embracing modernism and pop art.