Bill King reviews Paul McCartney’s “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” album, set for release May 29. …
Aside from a general nostalgic bent on several of the tracks, Paul McCartney’s first album in more than five years doesn’t have any overriding concept or theme. But it’s one of his most contemplative, personal and consistent albums.
Yes, as the album’s title implies, there are several numbers that hark back to his days growing up in Liverpool, when he was getting to know the other Beatles, but there’s also a love song to his wife, a psychedelic number inspired by playing the Glastonbury festival a few years ago, some philosophy on life and hardship, and one of Macca’s story songs.
Musically, “Dungeon Lane” ranges from slower, piano-based songs to hard-rock numbers, with bits of pop, folk and swing jazz mixed in. It also features some overtly Fab touches.
And while there’s no classic McCartney big ballad, it does include his customary tempo, stylistic and vocal changes within the same song, plus some melodies that will linger in your memory.
Not surprisingly, the two most memorable tracks on the album are the pre-release singles — “Days We Left Behind” and “Home to Us.” But there are no throwaway tracks in this collection, although a few of them don’t jump out at you the first time and will make more of an impression after you’ve heard them two or three times — and, by then, they’re in your head as ear worms.
While Macca played most of the instruments, producer Andrew Watt (who has worked with artists ranging from Post Malone and Lady Gaga to Elton John and the Rolling Stones) gives the album a fuller, more polished sound than was heard on Paul’s earlier one-man-band collections.
The album sessions were split between Watt’s studio in Los Angeles and McCartney’s studio in Sussex.
Macca said of his playing drums on the album: “When we started … I know Andrew uses Chad [Smith] 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.”
The songs all are McCartney compositions, with “As You Lie There,” “We Two,” “Come Inside,” “NeverKnow” and “Home to Us” cowritten by Watt.
McCartney’s voice holds up well throughout, with his vocals ranging from suitably fragile on a couple of numbers that reflect a nearly 84-year-old’s perspective, to robustly rocking on others.
The album has a distinctive opener in “As You Lie There,” a musically complicated number that begins as a gentle acoustic tune with an unexpected spoken portion and later gets more intense as the melody shifts and rocky electric guitars take over. Macca uses at least three of his different “voices” in this one, which was the first tune written for the album, resulting from a chord progression he worked out in his initial introductory meeting with Watt over tea.
The lyric tells the tale of a girl (named Jasmine, Macca says) who was a neighbor of the McCartneys in Liverpool. Young Paul fancied the girl but never knew how to approach her. As he looks up at her bedroom window, he wonders: “Do I ever cross your mind as you lie there?”
Later, he sings: “I like to fantasize I’m something in your eyes, ’cause that would mean the world to me.”
In reality, Macca revealed at one of his listening sessions for the album, “I never spoke to her. The joke was, she did show up later that year and knocked on the door. I was indisposed — I was on the toilet — so I missed Jasmine!”
On this one, McCartney handles the vocals, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass, piano, harpsichord, Rhodes,
Moog, shakers, vocal percussion and drums, while Watt is on electric guitar, synths and Wurlitzer, and Ringo Starr contributes tambourine.
Next up is “Lost Horizon,” a midtempo rocker that is one of the tracks that benefit from multiple plays. The strongest portion is the song’s “Day breaks …” chorus, and the basic message is that “you gotta live for now.”
This one is not a new tune. Macca recorded it at some point years ago and his late engineer Eddie Klein dug up the tape somewhere, with Paul not remembering even doing it. As he explained recently, “We produced it exactly like the cassette.”
McCartney does it all on “Lost Horizon”: vocals, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass and drums.
The album’s first single, “Days We Left Behind,” is a wistful recounting of the area of Liverpool where McCartney spent the early part of his childhood. As he goes through memories, he concludes that “nothing stays the same.”
The very nostalgic acoustic number features a high, timeworn vocal, and in the middle of the lyric it references Paul and John Lennon developing their songwriting relationship during sessions at his teenage home on Forthlin Road (now a National Trust site). Lennon is not named, but Macca said at a London listening session that the part in the middle is “memories of John.”
The track features Paul on vocals, acoustic guitar, bass, piano and harmonium.
At one point, McCartney said, 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,” he said, “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.”
Next up is “Ripples in a Pond,” an engaging, bouncy pop-rock love song for Paul’s wife Nancy.
This very McCartneyesque track is another one that, stylistically, takes on a different, slightly spacey feel on the bridge (another of Paul’s trademarks).
Macca handles vocals, electric and acoustic guitars, piano, bass, maracas and drums, while Watt plays synths, mellotron and tambourine and Mike Davis is on trumpet.
Paul said he wanted this track to have a poppier sound and so turned it over to Watt to “make it a little bit more sort of dancey, a little bit more sort of up.
“When we first met, one of the things in 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.”
The next track, “Mountaintop,” is a midtempo rocker with a very psychedelic feel. There are a lot of tape loops and vocal effects, and the song’s use of harpsichord gives it a very late-’60s atmosphere.
At the end, it suddenly breaks into an upbeat, rockier ending, and buried in the mix you can hear someone speaking — it’s Paul’s wife Nancy (who is credited with the last name McCartney, not Shevell as usual).
The song was inspired by when he played the Glastonbury Festival, Paul said that he was “trying to get that feeling of a young girl at the festival, tripping out.”
Of the use of tape loops, a late-Beatles trademark, he said: “Any excuse to get tape loops for me! I love them,” adding: “We put Nancy’s voice through a tape loop, at the end there.”
The track has McCartney on vocals, harpsichord, bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, piano, Wurlitzer, Moog, Moog bass, drums, maracas, “book slap,” bongos, tambourine and Brenell loops.
Next, the acoustic guitar number “Down South” has a catchy riff. It starts out sort of folk-rock and has a more stripped-down sound than most of the tracks. It also incorporates a lot of musical Beatles references, including the repeated use of “oh, yeah” (sung as it was in “I’ll Get You”).
It’s a fond reminiscence of Paul and George Harrison first meeting on the morning bus and later hitchhiking in the South of England, which the lyric says was a great way to get to know each other “before we learned to twist and shout.”
This is a solo McCartney track, with him handling vocals, acoustic guitar and electric guitar.
Next up, “We Two” is a midtempo number with a heavy drumbeat, and it ends with the sound of the track playing backward. The lyrics appear to reference Lennon, and Paul sings: “Last night I dreamed of you.”
The number was recorded on an old Studer four-track machine that McCartney rescued from Abbey Road, and it was produced in the old style, McCartney said, “bouncing down” two tracks into one “and all that sort of stuff.” He said he’s particularly proud “of the snare sound.”
Paul is credited with the vocals, bass, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, Mellotron and drums, and Watt played electric guitar.
The next track, “Come Inside,” is an upbeat tune that rocks convincingly with an overall sound reminiscent of Wings.
The lyric has McCartney singing “Step right up and take a look / See what you can find / All my life’s an open book / Come inside my mind.”
At one of the listening parties, this one had the audience clapping along, and it grows on me more with each listen. I’d love to see Macca and his band do it in concert.
Paul is credited with the vocals, acoustic guitar, bass, piano, Wurlitzer, synth, drums and claps, and Watt with synth, acoustic guitar, maracas and tambourine.
Inspired by what McCartney called a “Laurel Canyon vibe” from California in the 1970s, the track “Never Know” is a dense, midtempo number that again makes use of backward tape loops. Adding to the late ’60s feel is the use of recorder and Mellotron. It has a very catchy “oh, oh, oh” chorus.
McCartney is credited with vocals, bass, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, piano, Wurlitzer, Mellotron, organ, recorder, drums and Brenell loop. Watt added electric guitar, tambourine, drum loop and Brenell loop.
“Home to Us” is another Merseyside nostalgia trip that boasts the first true post-breakup duet between two Beatles — as Macca and Ringo alternate singing the lead vocal. It also has Beatlesque harmonies, tempo shifts, key changes and layered vocals, with Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri of the band Texas contributing the backing harmonies.
I really love this track, which was born when Macca suggested to Ringo that he work with Watt and “Ringo came over to Andrew’s studio and played a little bit of drums.”
Ringo came up with a drum track that McCartney then turned into a song about growing up in Liverpool.
The track’s creation involved a bit of confusion, McCartney said. He sent the demo to Ringo and asked him to sing on it and Starr, misunderstanding, only added vocals to the chorus. leading McCartney to think Starr didn’t like the song. But Paul wanted Ringo to share the lead vocal, and eventually they worked it out, with Starr also adding more drums.
For the lead vocal, Macca said, “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.”
Macca is credited with vocals, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass, piano and Wurlitzer; Starr added vocals, drums and tambourine; and Watt handled electric and acoustic guitar and synth.
Another high point of the album is “Life Can Be Hard,” a very sprightly love song that is tastefully orchestrated, including woodwinds and strings. Macca again goes with a high, slightly frayed vocal on the tune, which was written during the pandemic lockdown when he and Nancy spent time with her niece’s family, including a newborn baby.
The lyric has sort of a “hope for the future” message. “I like that tune,” Macca said after it was played at one of the listening sessions. “It has very good memories.”
He handles vocals, acoustic guitar, piano, bass, Mellotron, Moog, drums, tambourine, maracas and shakers, with Watt on synth and acoustic guitar. Macca wrote the string arrangement, and the woodwind arrangement was created by Ben Foster and Giles Martin, with Foster conducting.
“First Star of the Night,” written on a rainy day in Costa Rica when McCartney was on tour, is a quiet acoustic tune. The lyric tells how Macca finds the first star of the night in the sky reassuring: “I know my little world is alright.”
McCartney does it all on this track: vocals, acoustic guitar, bass, electric guitar, drums, tambourine and “paper percussion.”
“Salesman Saint” is an ode to McCartney’s parents, as he notes, “My father was a salesman, my mother was a saint.” It’s a wartime tale of hardship and perseverance. “They couldn’t take anymore, but they had to carry on,” he sings.
Musically, the track is very interesting, with an opening trumpet and big-band orchestration (in honor of his father also being a jazz musician).
It also has more of Macca’s signature shifts in time signature, sometimes with the different tempos going on simultaneously. Having a 3/4 rhythm and a 4/4 rhythm both happen at the same time “is a really funky thing,” McCartney said at the L.A. listening session. “You hear a lot of African music does this, and I’ve always been fascinated.”
Paul is credited with vocals, acoustic guitar, bass, electric guitar, Mellotron, spinet, drums, tambourine and claps. The brass and string arrangements were written by Foster and Martin, and Foster again conducted.
Quite a few folks have misinterpreted the album’s final track, “Momma Gets By,” with its tale of how “Momma gets by, while Papa gets high” as also being about his parents. However, while Macca sings from the point of view of the couple’s child, he said this is one of his “made up” story songs, and not about his family.
“Sometimes, in writing a song, you don’t draw on memories or anything in particular except just you’re making up a story,” he said. “Like ‘Lady Madonna,’ it’s about not particularly people I know.”
He said he was imagining a couple where “the mother is like the strong one and the father is a bit of a wastrel. … It’s a little story I always had in my mind, like ‘Porgy and Bess.’”
The orchestrated piano ballad features a lyric that’s rather like a short story, and Macca sings of the rather one-sided relationship: “She loves him with all her heart and soul.”
McCartney is credited with the vocal, piano, nylon acoustic guitar and bass. Foster and Martin again wrote the orchestral arrangement, with Foster conducting.
Overall, this is an album that rewards repeated plays, with you picking up on little details and flourishes each time you listen.
“The Boys of Dungeon Lane” exudes warmth and humanity — just like its creator.
Bill King
 copy)
SOMETHING NEW