Wings

Band on the Run was a commercial success, but even if it was billed as a Wings effort, it was primarily recorded by Paul, Linda, and Denny Laine. So, it was time to once again turn Wings into a genuine band, adding Joe English and Jimmy McCulloch to the lineup and even letting the latter contribute a song…

Essential: a masterpiece of pop rock music
Band on the Run is generally considered to be Paul McCartney’s strongest solo effort.

Wild Life, the debut album from Wings was originally released December 1971 and is the eleventh release in the Paul McCartney Archive Collection, personally supervised by Paul McCartney. Written by Paul and Linda McCartney (with the exception of a cover of Mickey & Sylvia's Love Is Strange ), Wild Life is beloved by fans for its raw and direct vibe - having been recorded in just over a week with the majority of tracks laid down in a single take. The 2CD digipack features the original album remastered at Abbey Road Studios on CD1 and bonus audio of singles B-sides, and previously unreleased tracks on CD2.

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".

Released in 1978 after London Town gave McCartney another huge hit, Wings Greatest rounds up McCartney's greatest hits from 1971 to 1978 – which means it skips "Maybe I'm Amazed" but touches on Ram. The main strength of this collection is that it contains many hits that never appeared on any album, and these are among McCartney's very best non-Beatle singles: the eccentric domesticity of "Another Day," the choogling rocker "Junior's Farm," the Bond anthem "Live and Let Die," the piledriving "Hi Hi Hi," and "Mull of Kintyre," a Scottish-styled folk ballad that was his biggest hit in England. And yes, it's fair to peg these as McCartney successes, since some of them were billed as McCartney, not Wings, and as such, this record is a great overview of McCartney's first decade of solo recording, containing many of his very best solo tunes.

All right, he's made a record with his wife and a record with his pickup band where democracy is allegedly the conceit even if it never sounds that way, so he returns to a solo effort, making the most disjointed album he ever cut. There's a certain fascination to its fragmented nature, not just because it's decidedly on the softer side of things, but because his desire for homegrown eccentricity has been fused with his inclination for bombastic art rock à la Abbey Road…