Does Paul McCartney need an introduction at this point? Probably not. But it's worth noting that the now 65-year-old former Beatle is enjoying a higher-than-usual profile this year with a catchier-than-usual new album (Memory Almost Full) and an aggressive new record label, Starbucks' Hear Music. While in New York, McCartney sat down with The A.V. Club to talk about his funeral, among other things.
The A.V. Club: In "The End Of The End," you describe your funeral. People singing, laughing, telling stories… It sounds like it's gonna be great.
Paul McCartney: [Laughs.] It does, yeah. I wish I was there. It's taken from the Irish idea of a wake. They don't get morbid. They all just say, "Ah, he's a great fellow. You want another drink?" And they tell each other jokes and things. And coming from Liverpool, which we sometimes describe as the capital of Ireland, I've always enjoyed that idea. It's not like my tradition, which would be more serious, with hymns and sermons and things. So I kind of liked that, and I was looking for an end of a five-song medley that I had going. And I thought that would be a good thing to do. But, yeah, I discovered in writing that song how I would like people to be at my funeral. I'd never really thought about it before.
AVC: It seems like you just keep getting sunnier as you get older. When you were 23, you were writing about longing for yesterday, and Eleanor Rigby being buried alone in a church graveyard. Aren't you supposed to be darker now?
PM: Well, y'know, it's not unusual for writers to address those kind of subjects. It's also not unusual for writers to look backward. Because that's your pool of resources. If you were to write something now, I bet there's a pretty good chance you'd call on your teenage years, your experiences then, stuff you learned then. You're gonna write about girls, for instance, I bet you'd call up memories of then. Because that's a very rich period. So I think that's all it is, really. "Eleanor Rigby," I was looking at lonely old women, of which I'd seen a lot of in my childhood in Liverpool. And I was kind of friendly with a few. I don't know what it was. Maybe my parents had kind of encouraged me.
My dad was a particularly polite kind of guy, very courteous. So when we got on a bus, he would always encourage me and my younger brother to get up and offer our seat to an old lady. I grew up kind of liking that, thinking, y'know, that's a nice thing, that's a courtesy. The old ladies always liked it. So I would go around to neighbors and just sort of say to some old lady, "Would you like me to do your shopping for you?" I wasn't trying to be all goody-goody, it just felt like a nice thing. And the great side effect was that I would get a lot of information from talking to them about how it was when they were kids. I remember one old lady made a crystal radio, which people used to do in those old days. She had this fantastic little device, looked to me like from the future. But it was a real radio. Kzzz-rrrrrr-ggggghh! So I drew on that for things like "Eleanor Rigby." I don't really see it as dark. I see it as an aspect of life that an artist might be drawn to. "Penny Lane" is dealing with an area. But again, it's retrospective. It's looking at my youth. It's an area where I used to meet up with John. It was just a bus depot.
AVC: So you see it more as nostalgic than melancholy.
PM: Yeah. I do. But with writers, there's nothing wrong with melancholy. It's an important color in writing. It's not too cool just for everything to be "Jolly, jolly, jolly, jolly, jolly, jolly, jolly." It's kind of nice to be able to put "Jolly, jolly, jolly… darrrrk." It just helps.
AVC: A number of reviews have described Memory Almost Full as a Wings-y album, as compared to Chaos And Creation In The Backyard, which was supposedly more Beatles-y. Do you think in those terms when you're recording?