McCartney goes deep, divinely
He had fellow Beatles on his mind as he wrote
Paul McCartney doesn't keep score. He has no clue that his new album, ''Chaos and Creation in the Backyard," in stores today, is his 20th studio record since his Beatles days.
''I just kind of do it. I don't count," McCartney says. ''Other people get into it, but I'm not a stats man."
What he is, this time around, is a multi-instrumentalist -- and a reflective one at that. The new album, produced by Nigel Godrich (who has worked with Radiohead and Beck), features McCartney playing up to 10 instruments on a single song. While a few tunes have a chirpy pop bounce, there is a relative lack of the ''silly love songs" (as McCartney referred to them years ago) he's been known to pen. The album's bittersweet tone is, in part, Godrich's doing.
''I might have gone toward my natural optimism if he wasn't there," says McCartney, who opted to work with the producer after a recommendation from Beatles producer George Martin.
The results are extremely gratifying, as McCartney digs deeper than he has in years, peering, at times, into the darkness. On ''At the Mercy," McCartney wistfully confesses, ''I guess you'd rather see me grow into a better man than the one you know." The experimental ''Riding to Vanity Fair" is a quasi bossa nova blending toy glockenspiel and strings, with McCartney dreamily singing, ''I was open to friendship but you didn't seem to have any to spare while you were riding to Vanity Fair."
''I wasn't talking to anyone particular there, but about lots of people I had met during my life," he explains. ''When I first brought that song in, it was a different beast altogether. It was faster and more staccato. It didn't have as good a melody and the words weren't as good. We halved the tempo, and it was very much a collaboration between myself and Nigel."
McCartney, who headlines the TD Banknorth Garden on Sept. 26 and 27, intended to use his touring band on the album, but Godrich asked him to make it more personal by playing most instruments himself.
''I could see the direction he wanted to go," McCartney says. ''And he knew how to layer things. He'd say, 'I just need a certain color here.' And I'd say, 'What, an organ or something?' Then he'd say, 'No, have you got a flugelhorn?' And I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, what is he on?' But sure, I got the flugelhorn out and we oiled it up and got the valves working and I would maybe just play a single note on it for the song. So the more you hear the album, the more you can hear little colors like that, little subtle touches."
The song ''Friends to Go" was inspired by George Harrison. ''On that one I very much referred to George, so much so that I almost felt that George was writing it. There was a certain melody and chord changes that for some reason reminded me of George. . . . And lyrically, too. Listen to it and imagine George's voice singing, 'I've been sliding down a slippery slope / I've been climbing up a slowly burning rope but the flame is getting low.' I could see George having written that."
Harrison isn't the only late Beatle who's influenced the album, McCartney says.
''I do refer in my mind to John [Lennon]," he says. ''If your parents passed away, you might still think, 'Well, what would my dad think of this?' Or, 'What would my mom have thought?' In my case, because I write, the natural person I would refer to in my mind would be John. . . . I don't do it all of the time, but often I can be just thinking about a song and go back to how John and I would have dealt with it."
For his tour, which begins Friday, McCartney has lined up two corporate sponsors to defray production costs: Fidelity Investments and Lexus.
''The difficulty for me is getting involved with a good sponsor that I can be proud of," McCartney says. ''We don't really know [Fidelity] over in England, but my promoter for the tour said they're really great. . . . It has to be something that I believe in." As for Lexus, he says, ''I'm getting involved with their new hybrid [car] . . . and I was told that all of Lexus's cars are going to be hybrids in the next 10 years."
McCartney is 63 and has toured more in the past few years than he has for a couple of decades. He says that it's partly because he loves his band -- and that he has again fallen in love with his work. Expect no farewell tour yet.
''Are you kidding? I'm not giving this up," he says. ''They're going to have to pull me out screaming. People say to me, 'Why do you do it? You've written enough songs.' But I say, 'I know I have, but it's my hobby and I'm lucky enough to get to do my job as a hobby.' " 