Taylor Swift is famous for her “Secret Sessions,” where, for most of her albums of the pre-COVID era, she invited a few dozen select fans to sit in a living room and be the first to experience a new album and hear her stories about how she wrote and recorded each song. Paul McCartney might have seemed like a less likely candidate to give fans that severe a level of intimacy in unveiling a new album, but he did just that Thursday night, as his team invited between 30-40 fans to hear his forthcoming “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” album at Andrew Watt‘s L.A.-area studio. Invitees were hoping and suspecting McCartney might pop in for a wave or a comment before or after the listening session. Few guessed they would be spending an hour and 40 minutes with the man himself — with Watt as a gleeful but mostly silent bystander — as the former Beatle shared fairly detailed musical and lyrical insights into all 14 tracks from his first album in six years.
The track list has already been out for a while, and fans have become well familiar with the one single to have been released so far, “Days We Left Behind.” But there were still surprises aplenty to lay on fans about the album, which is not due for another six weeks.
Foremost among them: The track that was rumored to feature Ringo Starr on drums turns out to have quite a bit more Ringo involvement than that. “Home to Us” turns out to have Starr on vocals, and not just backgrounds, but alternating on lead lines — a truly historic moment for Beatlemaniacs.
“It’s a duet,” McCartney plainly put it, as he addressed the small audience. “It was really nice, because we’ve never done that. Ringo’s never just taken a duet with one of the Beatles, you know? So, there you go. We had it.” Indeed, for as often as the ex-Beatles have played or sung harmony on each other’s solo records over the years, there’s never been any true, formal duet between any of the former bandmates since the breakup, until now.
Some fans may rush to hear that first-of-its-kind collaboration first when the album comes out May 29. But the rest of “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” will not seem anticlimactic to those who’ve been waiting years to hear the results of McCartney’s and Watt’s long-aborning labor. Although McCartney played most of the instruments himself, it doesn’t feel like a homespun album in the tradition of “McCartney,” “McCartney II” or “McCartney III,” the albums from over the decades that he has made a point of spinning as one-man affairs. As anyone who knows Watt’s work with other veteran artists like the Rolling Stones and Elton John might guess, it’s a very full production — and definitely a rock album — with some unmistakably Beatle-esque touches along the way, but ultimately not with too many toes in the past.
“I think it’s so cool when you’re listening just as a listener,” said Watt, in one of the few times the usually garrulous producer spoke up, as he happily took a back seat to McCartney’s greater chattiness. “I’m a listener right now — I’m forgetting I’m part of it! You’re playing every instrument on all these songs. No one else can do that. You play the bass and it sounds like a bass player; the drumming, It sounds like a drummer; the guitar… It doesn’t sound like one person. It sounds like a band.”
“There’s a few people who can do it,” McCartney responded, correcting Watt’s assertion that “no one else” could. “But not many!” he added, claiming a little pride for himself after all. “It’s something I’ve always liked to do. And if you have an idea for something, it means you don’t have to try and sweat” through explaining what you want to studio musicians. “It’s a shortcut, in my mind.” The artist and producer also made a point at the end of noting that they mixed it themselves, with McCartney harking back to Beatles days when they would do a mix upon the completion of each track, rather than outsourcing that to an outsider in some lengthy process.
They noted that the studio where the listening session was taking place, Watt’s new Diamond Dust studio, was not where the album tracking took place. Recently completed, this room was too new for that. It actually took place at what McCartney called the “B” studio on the property, as well as in England, over the past few years. “You are gonna have to come back” to use the new room, Watt told McCartney.
The handfuls of fans selected to attend were smitten to be on hand for this christening of Watt’s studio, even if the collaboration was a purely speaking one for this occasion (notwithstanding two moments when McCartney picked up an acoustic guitar to demonstrate how he worked out a chord progression). None of the just-over-30 fans in attendance were completely sure why they’d been chosen to receive an invitation, although, comparing notes online, many found a point of commonality in that they had all pre-purchased special editions of the coming album either through McCartney’s website or a fleeting sale on Jack White’s Third Man Records site. Journalists from three publications were also in attendance — along with a small camera crew filming the proceedings for usage in the album’s promotional campaign.
Oh, and Nancy Shevell. Although everyone in the room was hoping for eye contact with the star, and may have gotten some, he mostly had eyes only for his wife, sitting on a front-row couch. There may have been some mass swooning going on as McCartney frequently looked her in the eye as he sang along with his own new material, especially during the numbers he’d noted were about their relationship. But McCartney also had a lot of visual interplay with Watt, as they sometimes played air-guitar or air-drums together; the star also sometimes pointed to his producer during certain instrumental parts, suggesting that these were parts laid down by Watt.
Highlights from McCartney’s track-by-track exegesis:
“As You Lie There” — The first track on the set is the first one he and Watt did. The project “started off when my manager Scott said to me, ‘Do you want to meet this young producer? Maybe just go and have a cup of tea or something?’ So, I said, yeah, sure, why not? … Now the thing is, Andrew’s prepared, so there was tea.” (McCartney apparently likes a man of his word.) Eventually music theory discussion turned to actual licks. “We were talking about how sometimes you start a song and it can come in all sorts of ways. I said, ‘Sometimes I like to just try and find a really crazy chord that I don’t even know what it is, and just, whoa — maybe that will inspire me.” He picked up a guitar, recreating just that moment, playing a chord as odd as the one that starts “A Hard Day’s Night.” “I now know what the chord is,” he said. Actually, he added, “I don’t know what it is. I really don’t; we don’t know what it’s called. But I know how to play it. … And so that was exactly what I was looking for” as a form of kick-start inspiration. He recalled Watt picking up his guitar to play along with a three-chord progression he was developing, “and Andrew said, ‘Should we record it?’ That was the fatal mistake! Knowing Andrew now, that meant there was no going back.”
This is one of many true-memory songs on the album, of the sort fans have figured would be coming, ever since he revealed the title and put out the first single. “When I was a kid in Liverpool, we lived in the little council houses and then there was a block of flats across the road, and there was this girl I kind of really fancied called Jasmine. Sorry, Nance — a long time ago,” he quipped. “Anyway, I absolutely like that. “And so whenever I walked by there, I would be looking up to see if I could see her.” The song starts off gently, so anyone coming to the album afresh might be thinking that the whole album will be in the gentle-reminiscence spirit of “Days We Left Behind.” But that expectation is undercut when loud electric guitars eventually kick in and it becomes clear this will be an album to turn up, too.
“Lost Horizon” — After work had begun with Watt, McCartney said, he began looking at older tracks he’d laid down. He talked at length of “a great friend of mine,” Eddie Klein, who used to work at Abbey Road and had helped him build him home studio, and who died in 2020. Showing just how far back this goes, he said, “Eddie was transferring things from an old format to a more modern format, from tape cassette to DAT” (itself a long-bygone format). “He was doing this and doing that, and he was doing DAT,” McCartney punned, adding, “I was up all night thinking of that.” Klein asked him if he remembered doing “Lost Horizon,” which McCartney had long forgotten. (He did not put a date on the original inception of the song, but if possibly predated even the adaptation of DAT, which was around from the late ’80s through early 2000s, it must go back quite a ways indeed.)
Cut to the 2020s, and McCartney resurrected it on his own, “reproducing it exactly like the cassette, only just a more modern sound,” and then brought it to Watt for additional guitar work. “This is the track that came back from the past and nearly got lost, and good old Eddie found it. … Thank you, Eddie.”
“Days We Left Behind” — McCartney has already explained the single in some detail, but had additional notes. “On these tracks it’s pretty much me playing drums, except for one track. When we started… I know Andrew uses Chad of the Red Hot Chili Peppers a lot as his drummer, and I said, ‘You’re gonna get Chad in?’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you have a go?’ So I did.”
Speaking again, as he has, about Dungeon Lane, which was his childhood path the Mersey shore, McCartney said, “I was a big bird watcher.” Knowing how that could be taken, he made a playful point of flapping his arms like wings. “No. That kind.”
The star talked about how he was playing a piano riff as “a throwaway for me” before Watt insisted on inserting it into the tune. “When I first met Andrew, I thought, ‘He’s a bit pushy.’ And he is! But I suddenly realized that’s what you want in a producer… someone who’s not gonna be a shrinking violet, who’s just gonna say, ‘We should do that. Let’s do that.’ And then I can turn it down” — if need be.
“Ripples on a Pond” — McCartney described it as “basically a love song to Nancy,” to considerable awww-ing from the small congregation. He originally wrote it in the third person, about a “she,” “but I decided it is much better to just do direct. So I changed the ‘she’ to ‘you,’ so it just means a bit more.
McCartney indicated that he thinks the production on this track is more poppy than the rest of the album — at his own instigation. “When we first met, one of the things n the back of my mind was, [Watt] has done Justin Bieber and a lot of kind of modern pop records. So on this one I said, ‘well, ‘Andrew, you haven’t done that… You’ve been a bit quiet… On this one, I really do think I’ll hand it over to you.” He gave Watt instructions to “make it a little bit more sort of dancey, a little bit more sort of up. So I saw another side to him… It’s a nice one and you did a nice production on that track.”
That led Watt to (presumably) joke: “I’ll do a pop remix of the whole album.”
“Mountain Top” — And suddenly, the psychedelia kicked in, or as close as this album gets to it. “It’s like Coachella and Glastonbury … kind of people going off for the weekend to trip out and get stoned. And we go to quite a few festivals these days. We would’ve gone to Glastonbury this year, but it’s not on this year. I was trying to get that feeling of a young girl at the festival, tripping out.”
After the track played out, he addressed an obvious touch that was delighting Beatles fans in the assemblage. “We use tape loops,” he said. “Any excuse to get tape loops for me! I love them,” he affirmed, noting it produces an effect “you don’t get any other way.” And he confirmed whose spoken voice appears at the end of the track, although it was hard to decipher on first listen what she was saying. “We put Nancy’s voice through a tape loop, at the end there,” he said.
From the front row, Shevell jumped in with a one-word assessment of her own contribution to the stoney track: “Riveting!”
“Down South” — “Some of the tracks on this album are memories of mine,” he reasserted, and none more than this recollection of hitchhiking with George Harrison, catching rides with lorries to vacation spots on a couple of occasions so that “you had a holiday for nothing.” “The great thing is, it really bonds you, because you’re just stuck with each other, and so you learn each other’s humor and each other’s likes and dislikes.” He also recalled a separate trip with John Lennon to Paris, using a hundred pounds John’s relatives had given him. (“He sang ‘Working Class Hero.’ I used to go, ‘You are the least working class!’ Ringo was really working class. Me and George were from Speke — pretty working class. And John was from a posher (area). We always made fun of him.”)
But despite the similar experience catching rides with Lennon, McCartney made it clear this one is specifically about “very affectionate memories of George” (with whom he also sometimes used to share bus rides to school). Among the lyrics: “It was a good way to get to know you / Before we learned to twist and shout.”
“We Two” — This one was done by McCartney and Watt over in England, on a four-track machine that the star rescued from Abbey Road, buying it at a time when Thorn Electrical had taken over the studio and was cavalierly selling off the classic equipment and instruments, to his great chagrin. The four-track “uses a fat tape, like an inch… so you get a great bass sound, a great snare drum sound. So we made up a song to go to record on the four-track,” and they did the same hazardous style of overdubbing as back in the day, “and we did the same post, you know, “‘bouncing down’ and all that sort of stuff. And we’re particularly proud of the snare sound.” After the playback, McCartney and Watt continued to amusingly concur on this very fine point: “Best snare drum ever!” … “Best snare drum.”
“Come Inside” — Shortest preamble ever: It’s “basically a rocker,” McCartney said. “There’s not a lot you can say about it, actually.” And indeed, it’s the most full-bore rock song of the bunch. But afterward, he found quite a bit to say about… the final chord. “I’d learned years ago about a musical term… this is kind of in a minor key… a bluesy key.. (but) it resolves at the end with a major chord. That, in classical music, apparently — I could be wrong — is called ‘Tierce de Picardie.’ Has anyone ever heard of that?” An audience member spoke up, saying he’d studied music theory and indeed knew it by another name: a “Picardy third.” Unfortunately, there was no door prize awarded for this.
“Never Know” — McCartney said this was inspired when he was out in California and thinking about how “I always loved that Laurel Canyon vibe, the ’70s thing that went on.” The song, he said, “is me trying to do that, basically.” Not everyone thought it sounded as explicitly Laurel Canyon-esque as he might have, but, he further allowed, the vibe of the song is “kind of West Coast develop(ing) into something else.”
“Home to Us” — As previously mentioned, this is a new wrinkle even in Beatles history, as a full-on Ringo duet, just when you thought all the bases had been covered. McCartney explained how he had Starr come by Watt’s studio just to lay down some drum tracks, initially, without even a song to necessarily play along to. “I think Ringo thought that all he had to do was play a little bit of drums, and Andrew would make some marvelous thing out of it.” It wasn’t that easy, and this isolated drum track got set aside, with the suggestion that maybe Ringo was “a bit pissed” that perhaps nothing would come of it. Then later McCartney asked Watt to pull it up to “just see what he did, out of curiosity… I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really good… We should make the track that Ringo hoped, and then get it over to him and complete the circle.’”
McCartney and Watt then constructed a song around the drum track, sending it to Starr to sing on. “Ringo got the wrong idea,” he said, noting that when he sent it back, he’d only sung on a little of it. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, he doesn’t like it.’ … He thought I maybe just wanted him to sing on the chorus . … I said, ‘Did you not like it?’” After Starr said explained he figured they only wanted a little out of him, “I said, ‘No, it’d be great if you sing the whole thing.’” After Starr followed through, McCartney and Watt came up with the final scheme: “We decided to give one line to me, the next line to Ringo, one line to me. It was really nice, because we’ve never done that.” (McCartney did want backing vocals, too, but brought in Chrissie Hynde and Sherleen Spiteri of the British rock band Texas for those duties.)
This is another memory song for the album, expressing the idea that “even though where we lived was pretty rough, it was home to us. … You had mates and you made the best of it, and you had a great time.”
“Life Can Be Hard” — McCartney wrote this during lockdown, when “a lot of people had a hard time, but then a lot of people didn’t. We were lucky. I was with Nancy and she had her niece and her spouse, and they had a new baby, so it was really cool, the two of us in the house with the two of them and the baby.” He recalled how “every morning Nancy would get up and say to Marissa, her niece, ‘Can I wake the baby up?’” He pulled out a guitar to play some licks from the song, then talked about how the baby would touch the guitar, which adds to their affection for the tune — a “hope for the future” number.
“First Star of the Night” — This was written during a day off from tour in Costa Rica, when “it pissed down rain,” ruining plans for a sunny sojourn. McCartney is even heard remarking on audible rainfall at the beginning of the tune before it turns into a song about (obviously) a clearer evening. “The first star of the night is always a sort of special thing when you see it — it always gives me a bit of hope.”
“Salesman Saint” — Coincidentally or otherwise, the last two tracks on the album are about married couples, one making it through as good partners and the other running into turmoil. This, the more positive song, is about his parents as he pictures them during World War II — his dad, the salesman of the title (and a fireman during the war, putting out blazes after German bombings), and the woman known to the world as “mother Mary,” a midwife and the titular saint.
This is easily the most musically fascinating number on the album, with the most striking use of orchestration extending to brass clearly meant to evoke the big band style of the period, even though the tune is otherwise not even remotely in that style. McCartney noted that, at that point, there are two time signatures happening at once. He had Watt tap out a 3/4 rhythm on his thighs, while McCartney clapped a 4/4 rhythm. Having both happen “at the same time isa really funky thing. … You hear a lot of African music does this, and I’ve always been fascinated.”
“Momma Gets By” — From the title, fans might have assumed this closing number was about McCartney’s mother, as the previous song was … but no. “Sometimes in writing a song, you don’t draw on memories or or anything in particular except just you’re making up a story. Like ‘Lady Madonna,’ it’s about not particularly people I know.” For this, he was imagining a couple where “the mother is like the strong one and the father is a bit of a wastrel… It’s actually written from the point of view of their kid, (but) it’s nothing to do with my parents, honestly. It’s a little story I always had in my mind, like ‘Porgy and Bess.’”
After running through all 14 songs, McCartney said, “As you can hear, there’s no one theme. They’re very different, the tracks.” He admitted that putting together an album, “I sometimes worry and think, shouldn’t it have a theme all the way through? But then I remember Beatles albums…” At this, the audience laughed in recognition, as McCartney further pointed out the incongruity of following “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” with “Here Comes the Sun.” “All the songs are very different, so I didn’t worry about that.”
Neither will his fans. They will welcome the variety — although it’s nearly half a concept album, with “As I Lie There,” “Days We Left Behind,” “Down South,” “Home to Us” and “Salesman Saint,” at least, all being songs overtly about his youth (or, in the case of the last song, his family before he was born). In the case of talking about all these “memory” songs, he even quoted another song title of his from 20 years ago that could serve as an umbrella for this particular batch of songs: “Ever Present Past.” But the final result of hearing “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” is being struck by how very much in the present McCartney is, with the more modern themes of some songs but also, most of all, how excited and engaged by music he is, making an album that sounds much more energized than just about any other new album a highly regarded rocker has done into his 70s, let alone 80s. Even with so many unabashedly nostalgic themes, it actually feels like one of the least elegiac records he’s made in the latter part of his career.
McCartney didn’t actually answer Watt when the producer suggested at the end that he needs to come back to this newly constructed studio to give it a test drive for a followup album. But the three dozen or so in attendance for the session were quick at that point to vocally register their vote.
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