Paul Mccartney Song Quotes

Close your eyes and I'll kiss you, Tomorrow I'll miss you.

When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be. Whisper words of wisdom, let it be. And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be. For though they may be parted there is still a chance that they will see, there will be an answer. let it be. Let it be, let it be, ..... And when the night is cloudy, there is still a light, that shines on me, shine until tomorrow, let it be. I wake up to the sound of music, mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. Let it be, let it be, .....

What I have to say is all in the music. If I want to say anything, I write a song.

From a floor below someone was singing with a karaoke machine, Paul McCartney's 'Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time,' completely out of tune. 'Beyond doubt the worst Christmas song ever written,' New York said to me, quietly. 'Like a request to God to end the universe.

Radio One played “Ebony and Ivory,” a new song by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. The breakfast DJ Mike Read played it two times in a row which was pretty hardcore of him as it was clearly the worst song of the decade so far, perhaps of the entire century.

And there was the time Paul McCartney serenaded my wife with “Michelle.” She laughed, a little embarrassed, as the rest of the audience applauded, and I wondered what Michelle’s parents would have said back in 1965, the year the song came out, if someone had knocked on the door of their South Side home and told them that someday the Beatle who wrote it would be singing it to their daughter from a White House stage.

At least I knew that if someone broke in the alarm was so annoying that he would immediately leave. It's like how I feel when I walk into a store in December and that awful Paul McCartney song 'Wonderful Christmastime' is playing. Not worth it. I'm out of here even though I could have finished all my holiday shopping in one place.

MICHELLE, MA BELLE Paul McCartney had been awarded the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in a ceremony in the East Room. For most of the evening, other artists performed his songs. But for the conclusion, McCartney went onstage to sing some classics. Then he sang “Michelle” to Michelle Obama. I didn’t realize how special the moment was until the next day, when I was talking to the President. What were the odds, he said to me, that an African-American girl from the South Side of Chicago would one day be sitting in the front row of the White House, as the First Lady of the United States, while a member of the Beatles sang her name? Wow, just wow, I thought. June 2, 2010

I hate this Christmas song,” Lyle said at last, turning off the radio. “You don’t like John Lennon?” Peg asked, trying to stifle a small laugh. “It’s just that, only John Lennon could write a Christmas song that made you feel like a fool for ever liking Christmas at all. Paul McCartney would never do that. Or George or Ringo, for that matter.

Originally, Abe explained, the record companies had put the “hit” on the A-side and the lesser track on the B-side. At some point, the record companies started calling 45s double A-sides so that there’d be less conflict in bands. According to Abe, John Lennon and Paul McCartney had been at each other’s throats over which of their songs would be called the A-side. McCartney’s “Hello Goodbye” (A) versus Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus” (B), for example.

One story sums up their magical quality. On June 30th 1968, at the height of Apple optimism, Paul McCartney and Derek Taylor were driving back to London from Saltaire, Yorkshire, where they had been recording the Black Dyke Mills Band on a song of Paul’s called ‘Thingummybob’. They were in Bedfordshire. Let’s pick a village on the map and pay it a visit, said Beatle Paul. He found a village called Harrold, which they found quite hilarious, and turned off the A5. Harrold turned out to be a picture-perfect village, with a picture-perfect pub at its heart. The pub was closed, but when the villagers saw there was a Beatle at the door they opened it up. Soon the whole village was in the pub, listening to Paul McCartney on the pub piano playing the as-yet-unreleased ‘Hey Jude’. Every Harrold resident danced and sang along, and the revelry went on until 3 a.m. It was beautiful, perfect, spontaneous and full of love. Harrold. You couldn’t make it up.

If you tell people you’re writing a book about the Beatles, at first they smile and ask, “Another one? What’s left to say?” So I mention “Baby’s in Black,” or “It’s All Too Much,” or Lil Wayne’s version of “Help” or the Kendrick Lamar battle rhyme where he says “blessings to Paul McCartney,” or Hollywood Bowl, or Rock ’n’ Roll Music, or the Beastie Boys’ “I’m Down”—but I rarely get that far, because they’re already jumping in with their favorite overlooked Beatle song, the artifact nobody else prizes properly, the nuances nobody else notices. Within thirty seconds they’re assigning me a new chapter I must write. And telling me a story to go with it. Every few days, I get into a Beatles argument I’ve never had before, while continuing other arguments that have been raging since my childhood. And though I’ve spent my whole life devouring every scrap of information about them, I’m constantly learning. I guarantee the day this book comes out, I will find out something new. Things like that used to pain me. But that’s what it means to love the Beatles—you never run out of surprises.

Nor did I know back then that McCartney had written the song as an ode to Black women ("bird" being British slang for a pretty girl) at the pivotal moment of the civil rights struggle. That would only deepen my appreciation for "Blackbird

Denny’s ‘No Words,’ a song about a romance going through a rough patch, moves like a George Harrison tune. Its melody, like many of Harrison’s, begins cheerily but quickly takes an unexpected turn toward the lachrymose, with phrases that sound as if they are in minor keys, even when the accompanying chords are major. The opening line, for example, is a gently rising melody over an A major chord; but a sudden drop from C-sharp to G, transforming the accompanying chord into an A7, gives the melody a dark, thoroughly Harrisonian lilt. The bridge, by contrast—Paul’s principal contribution—is bright and outgoing and reaches up into the falsetto range.

No Words,’ for example, was two songs that became one song.54 I wrote the first few verses and couldn’t get any further. I took them to Paul, and he added his little bit of magic.

And Denny Laine, just weeks after the LP was released, had developed a sour view of the project, and Wings generally. “I look on Band on the Run as definitely their [Paul and Linda’s] album,” he complained to Disc’s Caroline Boucher, while promoting Ahh . . . Laine!, finally released on December 7. “We’re not a group anymore. I’m one of the three, or I’m an individual. If it was Wings I’d feel more a part of it. But it’s not my songs and I’d like to feel more involved and contribute as much as they do.

38 Paul was still thinking of singles and albums as he did during the Beatles’ days, and as many British groups (and record labels) did in the 1960s—as separate releases, with no crossover. With few exceptions, when the Beatles released a song as a single, it was removed from consideration as an album track. They explained this as a value-for-money issue: fans who already bought a single should not have to buy those tracks again on the next LP. It was different in the United States. Singles were considered teasers for albums. Record executives like Coury considered albums more marketable when they had hits on them, and American consumers considered it a convenience to have the songs they knew as singles on albums as well. In the Beatles’ case, because Capitol LPs typically included 12 songs, compared with

Though illustrating a Wings LP, Arrowsmith’s cover shot also symbolized Paul’s feeling of contractual imprisonment with Apple. The seed of an idea sown by George at their July business meeting had now been captured in both song and photograph, and a veiled illustration of Paul’s desire to finally shed his legal ties with John, George, and Ringo would soon be in the hands of music fans.

The song Paul chose for this second session, ‘Get on the Right Thing,’ is built around McCartney’s interesting use of a common-tone harmonic trick: the chords accompanying the song’s verses all contain an E natural, but the melody McCartney sings against them steadily rises, creating a subtle tension harmonically, and between stasis and movement.

Perhaps because McCartney was principally a guitarist and bassist, and a drummer only when necessary, he was less hands-on with Seiwell. “He never told me what to play, except for one song. I think that’s why he hired me—he didn’t have to tell me. I used to channel Ringo. I’d think, ‘What would Ringo do here?’ And I listened to the way Paul played on the McCartney album. I knew what he liked as a drummer. I would always craft some sort of a part that was going to be down that vein at least. I knew he was going to like it.”22

In response, he repurposed an unfinished song that had been kicking around since 1969, originally titled ‘Since You Came to Me,’ and fashioned a response. Composing new lyrics that put Paul directly, and identifiably, in the crosshairs, he transformed his old tune into ‘How Do You Sleep?

I had considered orchestrating ‘The Long and Winding Road’ but I decided against it. I therefore want it altered to these specifications: Strings, horns, voices and all added noises to be reduced in volume. Vocal and Beatle instrumentation to be brought up in volume. Harp to be removed completely at the end of the song and original piano notes to be substituted. Don’t ever do it again. Signed, PAUL McCARTNEY c.c. Phil Spector, John Eastman

But if he and Linda composed together, they stood to earn a higher share, since unlike Paul, Linda was not under contract to Northern Songs and could route her part in the collaboration through another publisher—specifically, McCartney Music, Inc., the publishing arm of the newly formed McCartney Productions Ltd.

This was a song with a clear beginning and a viable verse structure, but without a bridge. The keys of the two fragments were close—‘Another Day’ was in G major, but quickly moves toward a wistful, E minor feeling, and ‘So Sad’ was in E minor. Where ‘So Sad’ was in 3|4 time, ‘Another Day’ was in 4|4—but that hardly mattered: rather than alter ‘So Sad,’ Paul would just shift at the point where the two sections meet, and then shift back when the verse returned.

I happened to be talking to George at a meeting—we were sorting out some of the Apple business,” Paul later recalled. “Someone said something, and George just said, ‘Well, we’re all prisoners, kind of inside ourselves,’ or, you know, ‘inside every fat man, there’s a thin man trying to get out.’ I just took up that theme of, we’re all prisoners in a way, so I kind of wrote a prison song. And as I say, you can take it symbolically or straight, it works on both levels.”35 Getting from George’s comments to a prison song took some doing, however, and as Paul turned over the remark in his mind, his first thoughts reflected his own sense of still being trapped in the Beatles partnership agreement—and at an Apple legal meeting. The first verse he wrote,36 “If we ever get out of here / Thought of giving it all away / To a registered charity” is the kind of internal bargaining one does when stuck in circumstances—a business meeting, say—and hoping for liberation. Another verse moves closer to the prison metaphor—“Stuck inside these four walls / Sent inside forever / Never seeing no-one nice again.

Ça ne fait rien”4 (or “It does not matter,” more loosely translated as “Don’t worry, we’ll sort it”). Paul and Linda heard Richards’s comment as “San Ferry Anne,” a phrase they adopted to mean “don’t worry,” and true to form, McCartney began toying with the phrase as the title for a new song.

By the time I got to know Paul, he and John had formed a close partnership. They had agreed that any songs they wrote, together or separately, would be by Lennon and McCartney. It was as though, even then, they had a strong sense that their success depended on the connection between them.

The divorce prompted Paul McCartney to pen the Beatles' classic "Hey Jude" to help Julian cope with his parents' separation. He changed the name Julian to Jude in the song.

So that basically sums it up to me, love songs are eternal. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a time when there’s no one in love. I certainly hope not.

What Paul did not know was that Laine was broke, and homeless, and sleeping in the back room of Secunda’s office, and that he was trying to keep body and soul together with a Tin Pan Alley job, writing songs and recording demos at Essex Music in the hope that other artists would record them and earn him some royalties. He was writing a song when Paul telephoned.

For many of the people in my immediate vicinity, it was clear that the Beatles (to say nothing of McCartney’s solo career) ceased to be a going concern once the Summer of Love commenced. Anything in the set list that was even mildly psychedelic—“The Fool on the Hill,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”—went over like Timothy Leary at the 1968 Republican National Convention. Apparently, there are still people for whom Sgt. Pepper is a radical—perhaps too radical—musical experiment. This wasn’t a classic-rock-radio crowd, it was an oldies-radio crowd. I, too, was hoping to hear my favorite Beatles hits. But I also secretly wished that McCartney would play “Temporary Secretary,” one of the battiest tracks from one of his battiest solo albums, 1980’s McCartney II. I believe that “Temporary Secretary” is a legitimately great song, even if it is totally bonkers. “Temporary Secretary” sounds like a businessman discussing his staffing practices while also imitating a car alarm. It’s genius! But the main reason I wanted to hear “Temporary Secretary” is because I knew that it would confound all of the boomers in the house who stopped following Paul McCartney’s career after he wrote “Michelle.

Apparently, Paul McCartney and I were on the same wavelength that night, because five songs into the set, he played a number that only a small, demented fraction of the audience wanted to hear. And yet there he was, jamming on “Temporary Secretary,” seemingly oblivious to the mass confusion created by the song’s mind-bending mess of synth bleeps and slashing acoustic guitar and McCartney’s robo-ranting about needing a woman who can be a belly dancer but not a true romancer. I loved it, and I loved how the people around me didn’t love it.

bought a pristine copy of Man on the Run, a biography of Paul McCartney that began not with the Beatles, but with what McCartney did after they broke up. Parker had always preferred McCartney’s work to John Lennon’s, whatever effect it might have had on his standing with the cool kids. Lennon could only ever really write about himself, and Parker felt that he lacked empathy. McCartney, by contrast, was capable of thinking, or feeling, himself into the lives of others. It was the difference between “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane”: although Parker loved both songs, “Penny Lane” was filled with characters, while “Strawberry Fields Forever” really had only one, and his name was John Lennon. Parker might even have taken the view that Lennon needed to get out of his apartment more, but when he did, an idiot shot him. He’d probably been right to spend the best part of a decade locked inside. Ross appeared just as McCartney

I think it’s easier for me to do melodies and ballads,” Paul later reflected. “I think they come easier to me. I think they’re actually easier songs to write than rockers. . . . Rock ’n’ roll is deceptively hard to write. A lot of people will just think, ‘Oh, it’s three chords and all you’ve gotta have is a lot of soft lyrics and you’ve got a rock song.’ And sometimes that does work.28 Every time I attempt a heavy rock thing, I know it must be perfect. Otherwise I have people saying, ‘That’s a nice soft rock thing you’ve just done, Paul.’ That’s no compliment, believe me.

drives those songs. “My dad never had [a record player], but he used to play on the piano, so that’s how I heard them all,” Paul said of the pop songs of the 1920s through 1940s. “I was a big fan of Fred Astaire. Still am. I just like that style: the wit in the old black and white movies, the little underdog who’s really very sophisticated. The sophisticated underdog is a character I’ve always been very drawn to. I think in some ways it’s because I’ve grown up in a working-class environment where there were some very clever people, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at them. So this whole idea of the hidden talent in people I’ve always found very attractive.

From the start, he envisioned a complicated piece with several strands of vocal counterpoint, as if to make the point that whether or not one considers love songs silly, they can have more than their fair share of musical complexity. On his manuscript from Hawaii, the lines sung contrapuntally are listed as “first line” (the rising “I love you”), “second line” (the rising, then falling “Ah, I can’t explain, the feeling’s plain to me / say can’t you see?”) and “third line” (the descending “How can I tell you about my loved one?”), indicating their order of appearance in the thickening texture he had in mind.

An album of Paul’s music was selected as the first rock album to be released officially by Melodiya. Technically, the album chosen for release was Band on the Run, but because the title track was replaced with ‘Silly Love Songs,’ the album was renamed ПОЛ МАККАРТНИ+Ансамбль (Wings)—Paul McCartney + Ensemble (Wings). The release, EMI cautioned Paul, would not make him appreciably more wealthy: as classical musicians who toured in Russia already knew, fees and royalties were paid in rubles, which were not freely exchangeable for Western currency. Classical players found that they were best off spending their fees in Russia and returning to the West with fur coats, vodka or other Russian goods.

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

But one concert stood head and shoulders above the rest, sonically: Led Zeppelin at Earl’s Court on May 25, the finale of a five-concert run, during which Zeppelin played a three-hour, 20-song set, including a three-song acoustic segment. Comparing Wings (a group unashamed to put out a nursery rhyme as a single) to Led Zeppelin was like comparing a comfy pullover with a studded leather suit, but just as the Bowie concert in Nashville had turned Paul on to the appeal of a live horn section, watching one of Britain’s premier rock groups up close was eye-opening. “The basis for our [1975–76] show was a Led Zeppelin concert we saw in London,”54 Paul happily acknowledged.

Paul was unusually subdued, his songwriting engine powered down as he digested a book of press clippings and pondered his plans for Wings’ world tour. Venus and Mars was selling well, but criticism always affected Paul’s equilibrium. It was up to Linda to drag him out of a morass of self-doubt. “He likes positive thinking,” Linda explained. “He blossoms when he’s around positive people. Negative people get a bit on his back. It’s so easy, isn’t it, with somebody who’s written as many songs as him, to actually say, ‘Oh, he’s no good.’ I mean, I just don’t see how you can say it. But it’s easy. It’s easy to put down anybody. He’s very self-critical. He is not like a person who thinks, ‘I am great. No matter what they say, I am great. Look what I’ve done. I have it in me.’ No, he doesn’t have that much confidence in that way.”51

We were at Soho Square and I told them that I’d made the decision to go back home and leave the band,”10 said Joe. “McCartney once wrote this song [with the line] ‘happiness is a homeland’* and I reminded him of that. I told him, ‘The US is my homeland. I miss the US. I miss my family. I’d had enough of the hype and big glamour.’ I mean, you can sit there and fool yourself all you want. But when you work with McCartney, the people are there for one reason. And it wasn’t to hear me. I told Paul that. I said, ‘They’re here for you and I’ve got to get on my own feet before I stay too many years.’ He saw this wild and crazy look in my eyes and told me to go home, mellow out for a month and think about it. But I never went back.

Lyrically, the directness and poetic imagery in ‘Warm and Beautiful’ make it a close second to ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ among Paul’s songs inspired by Linda. And it was almost enough to make him reconsider his insecurity about writing lyrics. “I’ve never thought I had a relationship with words that’s very strong. I feel as though it’s more music. But that’s my particular hang up. I think what I’m saying is, there are some people who string words together that I admire to the degree that I don’t think I’m that good. I mean, that’s my natural response—‘No, I’m not very good with words.’ But when I think about it I know I have some moments when suddenly a little flash has come to me and I’ve thought, ‘Okay, that’s good, those are good words.’”48 In Paul’s own estimation, ‘Warm and Beautiful’ was one of those sudden flashes. “That one really does get to me,” he later admitted. “It captures some of my innermost feelings for her.

The captain was threatening us that he was gonna keep turning the generators off, so I had to take him into a corner and talk to him very discretely, ‘Now, come on, Cap,’”50 was how Paul later remembered the lecture. But at the time he was incensed. “The captain of the boat that we were on was a little, sort of, heavier than the other captains—you know, he sort of took it a little more seriously—and at some stage we had an argument with him, and I sort of said, ‘You know, we don’t need all this aggro and stuff,’ and we wanted to get off onto this other boat that happened to be in the harbor.”51 The other boat was Wanderlust, and Paul cooled off by spending a few hours there with his guitar. Unwinding after his altercation with Captain Carlo, Paul wrote a song, taking the name of the boat as its title and alluding to the argument in the opening verse: “Light out wanderlust / Head us out to sea / Captain says there’ll be a bust / This one’s not for me.” “It became like a symbol of freedom to me, this catamaran, as it was, called Wanderlust. . . . After this hassling that this other fellow had given us, to get on this boat was like freedom, you know? So the song for me is actually just carrying on the idea. You know, just head us out to sea and take us away from all these headaches, and just wanderlust kind of free.” 52

On Friday, January 12, Wings met in MPL’s boardroom to map out their immediate future. It was an unlikely scene, for a rock band. “We all sat around one of those big boardroom tables with notepads and glasses of water,” Laurence recalls, “and we talked about what the next step was going to be.”2 The next step, Paul told them, was to release a single. “What did the Beatles do when they needed a single?” someone asked. “We’d write one over the weekend,” Paul replied. Steve remembered Paul proposing a full-band contest. “I remember him saying, ‘I challenge you all to go home and write your best effort, and we’ll review them all on Monday. And whoever’s written the best song is the one we record.’ I honestly don’t remember what I did, but I know I put something together and Denny put something together, and Laurence, and we all came in and one by one played what we had. And then I remember Paul saying, ‘Well, I wrote this,’ and that was ‘Daytime Nighttime Suffering.’ And we all collectively went, ‘Ahh, okay. Well, let’s record that one then!’”3 Linda offered a closer look at Paul’s side of the competition. “He’s actually incredible,” she enthused to Ray Connolly four months later. “On Friday he decided he needed a new single, on Saturday and Sunday he messed around the house writing it, on Monday he explained to the group how it should go, on Tuesday we recorded it. He just never stops. Ideas seem to come to him all the time.

In America, ‘Getting Closer’ did slightly better. The anonymous reviewer for Billboard found the song to be “an uplifting rocker” and praised McCartney’s vocals, as well as lyrics and instrumental hooks that were “subtle but effective.”44 The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 64 on June 16 and remained ten weeks. It took until July 28 to hit its peak, No. 20, a spot it held for a fortnight. At Lympne Castle, meanwhile, Wings were filling reels of tape with jamming, and Paul was bringing in new material. One of his new tunes was ‘Ebony and Ivory,’ a song he had started after a row with Linda at High Park in the summer of 1978, but that looked at relationships more globally, using the keyboard as a metaphor for racial harmony: “Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony, side by side on my piano, keyboard, oh Lord, why don’t we?

Rough mixes of both ‘Goodnight Tonight’ and ‘Daytime Nighttime Suffering’ were made on January 23, and after listening to them overnight, Paul decided he could sing ‘Goodnight Tonight’ better, so on January 24, he rerecorded the lead vocal. Now Paul began tussling, internally, with whether either of the new songs should be the single. “We sat around for years—well, it seemed like years—discussing it,” he told Paul Gambaccini a few months later. “You know, the normal soul-searching you go through. And we decided, ‘No, it isn’t right, we won’t put it out.’ So we scrapped the whole thing. And about a week later, I played the record again. I thought, ‘That’s crazy, we’ve made it—it’s stupid, why not put it out? Just because people are going to pan it?’ I liked it, and other people had taken it home and played it to people at parties. So we decided to do it.”12

He popped in to say hello to Paul,” Chris Thomas remembered, “and as usual, we played some songs, and we played him ‘Arrow Through Me.’ And Pete went, ‘That is fantastic. Absolutely bloody brilliant!’ He loved it. And he said, ‘It’s a stroke of genius not to have a bass on it.’ And the basic track was great; there wasn’t anything to do to it. Pete went home, and Paul put a bass on it!

They began a new version of ‘Baby’s Request’ the next day. The song has been likened to ‘Honey Pie,’ a pastiche in a 1930’s pop style, but there is a difference. While ‘Honey Pie’ was a sly parody of the style, ‘Baby’s Request’ is a straightforward adaptation of the style’s hallmarks, commissioned by a vocal group that specialized in it. It also suited one side of Paul’s compositional sensibility at the moment: except for the overt punk-influenced tracks, a growing number of his recent compositions used a harmonic language more germane to jazz than rock. In ‘Baby’s Request,’ augmented chords, and chords with added sevenths and ninths are plentiful and support a gentle, eminently croonable melody.

There was no easy solution for ‘I Me Mine,’ so Paul, George and Ringo—John was in Denmark—gathered at EMI Studio Two to record the song on January 3, 1970. It was the first time the three had worked together since John’s September 16 bombshell, and George noted John’s absence with deadpan comic obliqueness in an introduction to one of the takes. George: You all will have read that Dave Dee’s no longer with us. But Mick and Tich and I would like to carry on the good work that’s always gone down in No. 2.* Paul: What Dozy says goes for me and Tich.

I think that Denny was part of the rock ’n’ roll-folk-R&B axis of the band,” Laurence suggested, “and you get it right from the get-go, even with ‘Go Now,’ which is an R&B song that Denny brought into a kind of an English consciousness. And then you add Denny’s folkiness to it; he’s like a soul-folk musician. So I think that Denny was a part of the balance of the band, you know, as much as Linda was bringing her New York rock ’n’ roll sensibility to things. And Paul could be influenced by that. Even Denny’s voice modulates Paul’s voice in a way that John Lennon would modulate Paul’s voice. You need that extra dimension sometimes just for variety, and in the context of the band. And I think that was an important factor. It wasn’t like we were just hired to be Paul’s backup musicians; we were encouraged to have a band consciousness. And I think that Denny was our kind of anchor within that.”35

The band spent much of June 29 jamming and playing through ‘To You,’ the song Paul wanted to record once the studio was set up and tested. If having two new band members wasn’t enough of a wild card for Paul, there was also his decision to bring Chris Thomas in to co-produce. Paul had mixed feelings about producers, George Martin excepted. It was handy having another pair of trusted and experienced ears in the studio, and in theory having someone who would challenge you could yield a better album. But Paul was secure enough in his ideas that challenges were often batted away. “I don’t care what you think, this is what we’re going to do.” The few times Paul tried working with a producer, post-Beatles, had ended in grief. Jim Guercio, brought in to help get Ram over the line, lasted only a few days. Glyn Johns left the sessions for Red Rose Speedway early, complaining that Wings were unfocused.

I woke up,” Paul recalled, “and I could remember dreaming that the Rolling Stones were onstage doing this amazing number called ‘No Values.’ It was a song I pictured them doing and it suited them down to the ground.20 And then I woke up and thought, ‘What’s that one?’ and they had never recorded it.”21 After discovering that ‘No Values’ was not a Jagger-Richards original, but rather something he had dreamt up, Paul noted the chord progression for a later date.