As Paul McCartney prepares for the upcoming release of McCartney II, the 78-year old rock ‘n roll legend has been asked if this will be his last album.
In a recent interview with Loud and Quiet, McCartney says, "Everything I do is always supposed to be my last. When I was 50 – 'That’s his last tour.' And it was like, ‘Oh, is it? I don’t think so.’ It’s the rumor mill, but that’s ok. When we did Abbey Road I was dead, so everything else is a bonus."
Paul has been spending a lot of time in the studio, but says he actually had no intentions of making an album.
Paul says, "I’d just been stockpiling tracks, and I thought, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with all of this – I guess I’ll hang onto it,’ and then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is a McCartney record,’ because I’d played everything and done it in the same manner as McCartney I and II. That was a little light bulb going off, and I thought, ‘Well, at least that makes a point of explaining what I’ve been doing, unbeknownst to me.’"
Paul says the common denominator in making these three self-titled albums has actually been having free time on his hands.
Paul adds, "After The Beatles broke up, I suddenly had a lot of time and no particular plan in mind. And then when Wings broke up it was a similar thing. And with me, when I’ve got a lot of time, my go-to situation is, ‘Well, write and record, then – that’s something to do when you’ve got some spare time.’ So this was similar, but it was the pandemic that stopped things. We were due to go on a European tour this year, but very early on Italy got the virus, and gradually all of the other gigs, including Glastonbury, which was going to be the culmination of it, got knocked out. So then it was, ‘Ok, well what am I going to do?’ And that’s my fall-back situation – to write and record."
He also says, "I still enjoy what I do very much, and it all comes out as clichés – ‘I feel very lucky’ – but it’s true. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was plug a guitar into an amp and turn it up for that thrill, and it’s still there. So it’s not so much that I’m looking for something new, more that I’m looking for something to do to keep me off the streets."
McCartney III will released on December 11th.
[courtesy of Classic Hits Today]