Paul Mccartney Funny Quotes

I knew that being funny always came in second to musicians. (In the world of music, there’s a hierarchy, too—it’s my contention that bass players tend to get laid first, because they’re stolid and cool and their fingers move in gentle yet powerful ways [except for Paul Mc-Cartney; he never got laid first]; drummers come next because they’re all power and grit; then guitarists because they get those fancy solos; then, weirdly, the lead singer, because even though he’s out there up front, he never quite looks fully sexy when he has to throw his head back and reveal his molars to hit a high note.) Whatever the correct order, I knew I was way behind Eddie Van Halen—not only was he a musician, which means he was able to get laid more easily than someone who is funny, but he was also already married to the object of my desire.

With ‘You Gave Me the Answer,’ mixed on March 21, the challenge was to evoke the spirit of Funny Face, the Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn film that inspired the song, without surrendering the benefits of modern sound techniques. They started with the piano introduction, using the fact that the keyboard had been recorded using three microphones, spread across three tracks of the master (labeled ‘left piano,’ ‘right piano,’ and ‘middle piano’) to create an echo effect that suggested a pianist playing in a large, empty hall. The echo evaporated as Paul’s piano intro kicked into the faster tempo that leads into the song. From there, it was a matter of finding the right balance between the winds, strings, and basic track—plus making Paul’s voice sound like that of a vaudeville crooner, something O’Duffy accomplished using a Pultec equalizer that thinned out the high and low frequencies. “That was designed [to sound like it was] recorded through a vaudeville microphone,” O’Duffy explained. “You’re making a great singer’s voice sound thinner and squeakier—removing the warmth of the man’s humanity. You’re screwing it up, essentially. But it’s screwed up to give you an effect reminiscent of vaudeville.”28