Good things, our parents so often assure us, will come to those who wait.
The wait between the release of Paul McCartney’s first solo album and his third, McCartney III, which dropped overnight, was 50 years.
And the span between McCartney II and the third in the trilogy, no less than 40 years.
Good things, they say.
So, when McCartney and his team announced some months ago that the LP would was delayed by a week due to “unforeseeable production delays,” well, no biggie.
McCartney zoomed in to The Tonight Show on Thursday night (Dec. 17) for a chat with Jimmy Fallon about life during lockdown, making music and much more.
The new album was self-produced in isolation, a process that was as organic as the neighboring farms in east Sussex.
“I just was in lockdown, I had some time on my hands and so I started finishing up bits of songs and stuff, thinking this is just for my own fun,” he recounted. “Suddenly I had about 11 of them. It was ‘oh, this should probably be an album.’”
Despite having no formal training, McCartney played every instrument on the LP, which he demoed along the way to family members.
“I wasn’t trained in anything. Nothing. I really wasn’t,” he admitted. His lack of music theory didn’t prove to be a barrier for his career in music. “There’s still time, I might get lessons,” he said. Just not from Fallon.
The two-time inductee into the Hall of Fame also walked us through some of the album tracks, the origins of the dice artwork, and his own listening habits. He tunes into Spotify and radio, apparently, and an associate sends him new release music “to keep me up with modern tastes,” he quipped.
McCartney also shared his experiences about the process of collaboration. “Sometimes I left it happen, I let it come to me,” he explained.
That’s how it all panned out when Kanye West and McCartney worked on “FourFiveSeconds,” a track which formed in a conversation during which the Beatles great strummed out a tune on the guitar.
Kanye was, unbeknownst to him, recording the moment. Two months later, voila, a full-fledged recording arrived with Rihanna’s vocal input. “Again, I didn’t even know was making a song,” McCartney said.
There was talk one time of a collaboration with Bob Dylan, McCartney explained, but that “fizzled out.”
Watch the interview below.
