Paul McCartney’s tenth solo album, 1997’s Flaming Pie, will become the 13th instalment in his Grammy-winning Archive Collection on 31 July. The acclaimed set, which featured such favourites as ‘Young Boy,’ ‘Calico Skies’ and ‘Beautiful Night,’ will be released in multiple formats with a treasure trove of unheard home recordings, demos and other rarities.
Basically, there are two things that rock bands do: they make an album and they go on tour. Since Paul McCartney fervently wanted to believe Wings was a real rock band, he had the group record an album or two and then took them on the road. In March of 1976 he released Wings at the Speed of Sound and launched a tour of America, following which he released Wings Over America, a triple-album set that re-created an entire concert from various venues…
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.
Allusion to the digital world though it may be, there's a sweet, elegiac undercurrent to the title of Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full, an acknowledgement that it was written and recorded when McCartney was 64, the age he mythologized on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released almost exactly 40 years before Memory…
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…
Allusion to the digital world though it may be, there's a sweet, elegiac undercurrent to the title of Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full, an acknowledgement that it was written and recorded when McCartney was 64, the age he mythologized on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released almost exactly 40 years before Memory…
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…