With a sufficiently well-equipped studio at his disposal in his own home, the exbeatle created McCartney III, the latest installment in a trilogy in which the unifying factor is Paul McCartney himself in charge of the execution and production of all the songs. And if the first volume was an intimate bet in contrast to the titanic magnitude of the Beatles and the second put experimentation as a counterpart to his fame as the author of "silly love songs", this closure is located as an intermediate position. From the domestic tranquility, he created an album that is disruptive towards his own figure, without the intention of entering a chart to validate himself at 78 years old ...
The opening, with "Long Tail Winter Bird", makes the rules of the game clear, and makes comparisons inevitable. Where in his previous work he had put an emotional ballad to pave the way for the rest of the album, now there is a piece that does not seek to please.
The pandemic as an artistic trigger takes center stage in various segments of the album. “Find My Way”, a McCarthy pop that appears to have been processed by an 8-bit filter, has lyrics that seek to offer comfort to those who were overwhelmed by confinement (“You never used to be afraid of days like these / But now you're overwhelmed by your anxieties ”). In front of the piano, McCartney also turns "Women and Wives" into a ballad with a lowering of the line towards tolerance with others for a peaceful coexistence ("What we do with our lives seems to matter to others / Some will follow paths we have already traveled”), and he outlines his own carpe diem in “ Seize the Day ”, a beatlism that seeks to convey the urgency of not wasting time ( “ When they arrive cold days and old habits fade away / There will be no more sun, and we will have wanted to make the day last / Seize the day ” ).
Without the necessity of having to please by dint of hits on autopilot, McCartney III's best moments appear when Sir Paul gets out of his comfort zone as much as possible. In its eight minutes and coins, “Deep Deep Feeling” begins as a love song made only with voices and drums, until a minimal series of instruments are coupled between textures, layers of echo and oscillations, and everything grows until it sounds like The Beatles read by Massive Attack. The same goes for “Deep Down”, a circular soul of minor tones that shines with its own light. On the other hand, when he seeks to play with conventions, Paul McCartney makes water, as evidenced by “Lavatory Lil”, a manual rock and not very inspired.
The logic that unites McCartney III with its predecessors it manifests itself in two key moments on the album. In the finale, "Winter Bird / When Winter Comes", Macca rescued a song recorded in 1992 in which, accompanied only by its acoustics, he reviewed a series of household tasks, which were actually the ones he had to perform in 1970 to condition the house in which he recorded his solo debut (putting up a fence so that foxes do not enter to scare the chickens, tending the harvest, planting trees for shade, the earthly side of a musician with the status of a demi-god). A couple of minutes earlier, "Slidin '" shows him accompanied by two of his backing musicians, Rusty Anderson on guitar and Abe Laboriel Jr on drums. The song is an energetic rock with a brittle rhythm, and also notable joviality, with lyrics that are a declaration of principles: At 78, who could.