Lyrics Paul Mccartney

Teaming with Greg Kurstin – a producer best-known for helming Adele's Grammy-winning 25, but also a musician in his own right, collaborating with Inara George in the savvy retro duo the Bird and the Bee – is a signal from Paul McCartney that he intends Egypt Station, his 18th solo album, to be a thoroughly modern affair. It is, but not in the way that the glitzy 2013 album New, with its fair share of Mark Ronson productions, was. Kurstin doesn't specialize in gaudiness, he coaxes his collaborators to act like a bright, colorful version of their best selves, which is what he achieves with McCartney here. Apart from "Fuh You" – a vulgar throwaway novelty recorded with Ryan Tedder – Egypt Station is a handsome and clever collection where McCartney hits many familiar marks but the difference is, he gets there in a different fashion than before.

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. These may not be epochal songs, the way many wished them to be, but McCartney and Costello turn out to be successful collaborators, spurring each other toward interesting work.

The Wild Life box set is three CDs and includes a remarkably generous selection of audio - 25 bonus tracks including rough mixes of the album, original single edits, B-sides, home recordings and other previously unreleased material. The packaging looks consistent with the last few, so what you have is a slipcase into which slot a few books. The "main" book is a 128-page tome written by David Fricke which tells the story of the album etc., but there is also a 48-page scrapbook of tour diaries (from the 1972 tour), lyrics, setlists, unpublished polaroids and the like.
The irony of the first Wings album is that it seems more domesticated than Ram, feeling more like a Paul McCartney 'n' Linda effort than that record. Perhaps it's because this album is filled with music that's defiantly lightweight - not just the cloying cover of "Love Is Strange" but two versions apiece of songs called "Mumbo" and "Bip Bop"…