Tones Behind The Tracks
Artist: Paul McCartney
Album: McCartney III
What did you do during the extended periods of downtime in 2020? As gigs ground to a halt and collaborating in person became a no-go, musicians everywhere looked for ways to keep their creative pulse ticking. This applied to Paul McCartney, too, who, after finishing some soundtrack work pre-Covid, turned his attention to getting some song ideas down.
“He’s always writing, Paul. He’s forever recording or scribbling down little bits of ideas and he’s collected them for years,” Paul’s technical manager, Keith Smith, tells us. “Sometimes he has a big purge and we document them all. He just started to come in with some of these ideas and said, ‘Let’s work on it.’ It was literally demos for a bit of fun.”
The three quickly formed a bubble, recording in the already remote setting of McCartney’s Hogg Hill Mill studio and these ideas – with McCartney playing every instrument – became a lockdown distraction for the former Beatle: making music in anger.
