Paul McCartney's 80 Best Songs Ranked: From The Beatles to Wings
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On the occasion of Paul McCartney reaching another birthday — he’s turning 82 on June 18, 2024 — we bring back this critical ranking of his greatest tunes, first published when he turned 80 in 2022, with a list topping out at that number to match. Of course, anyone reading this is probably thinking the same thing: Only 80 Paul McCartney songs? The hope, of course, is that he lives to 120, because assembling a 120-best list is something to look forward to, and would not involve so many tough decisions about leaving out so many gems. But 80 is just enough to cover the breadth as well as greatness of the 20th century’s (and beyond’s) greatest journeyman singer-songwriter, from the Beatles to today.
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This critical list of major, world-changing accomplishments and delightful trifles runs the gamut from “The Long and Winding Road” (sorry to anyone who still has PTSD from the Phil Spector arrangement) to “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” (sorry, just generally, on that one). We know what you’re thinking: Will “Wonderful Christmastime” be on the list? No — we’re not monsters, all right? But you may find a guilty pleasure or three — if that should really even be a thing — amid dozens of selections as worthy of veneration as anything to hit a classical concert hall or juke joint in the last hundred years. Here’s to Sir, with love.
80. ‘I Will’
McCartney said recently that this White Album track is “still one of my favorites of the melodies I’ve written.” Listen to what the man said — he has good taste. While he declared that “I Will” is “a song about the joy of love,” listen more closely and it’s an imagined joy of love, written from a still-solitary fellow to his future beloved, whom he hasn’t met yet. It’s perhaps telling that McCartney wrote this while he was in the last stages of his relationship with Jane Asher, not so very long before he met the Lovely Linda.
79. ‘She Loves You’
The rare pop song from the point of view of a love broker. McCartney (then at the peak of his direct collaborating with John Lennon, in 1964) says he may have been influenced to write from the point of view of “a middleman, an agent, a go-between” by being aware of, if not having read, the novel “The Go-Between” at the time. But you’re not really thinking about the songwriterly conceit of second-person pronouns when you listen to “She Loves You,” are you? You’re singing along with those “yeah, yeah, yeahs.” Or shrieking.
78. ‘That Was Me’
McCartney was at his most lyrically backward-looking on 2008’s “Memory Almost Full.” The peak of that was “That Was Me,” a song that treats nostalgia as a romp, not something to get too bittersweet about. “In a cellar, on TV, that was me,” he sings in one line, casually making the leap from the Cavern Club to “The Ed Sullivan Show” in a single bound — “the same me that stands here now / When I think that all this stuff / Can make a life that’s pretty hard to take it in, that was me.” It’s as if he’s doing his own version of that Chris Farley “SNL” sketch: “Remember when I was in the Beatles? That was awesome.”
77. ‘Martha My Dear’
Find yourself a partner who looks at you the way Paul McCartney looks at (and writes about) his English sheepdog. “At the time, almost no one listening to the song knew that Martha was a dog,” McCartney says in the “Lyrics” book. Over time, virtually everyone learned that, but they may not have sussed that “actually, as the song proceeds, Martha morphs into a person” — specifically, a relative of his who confided in him about an illicit tryst. “I’m the only person who knew the song was about having an affair, and that gives a line like ‘When you find yourself in the thick of it’ an added layer of poignancy.” The beauty of the White Album was that, while a song like this might have seemed too eccentric or slight squeezed into a single album, “Martha” got its own breathing room amid the double-LP expanse… and endured enough to leave us learning about its double-meanings decades later.
76. ‘The Song We Were Singing’
In the liner notes for 1997’s “Flaming Pie” (his collaboration with Jeff Lynne) McCartney wrote of this song, “I was remembering the ’60s, sitting around late at night, dossing, smoking pipes, drinking wine… jawing, talking about the cosmic solution… It’s that time in your life when you got a chance for all that.” But the chorus isn’t so much about middle-of-the-night bull sessions… it’s about how, if you’re a certain type of personality, all chats and all roads ultimately lead back to music. Maybe you can relate.
75. ‘Love Me Do’
Yoda did not come up with this song title. Although Lennon and McCartney were writing very collaboratively at that point, the offbeat verbiage seems to be a product of the Macca imagination, with plenty of valuable input as well from his partner. “John came up with this riff, the little harmonica riff,” McCartney said. “It’s so simple. There’s nothing to it; it’s a will-o’-the-wisp song. But there’s a terrific sense of longing in the bridge which, combined with that harmonica, touches the soul in some way.” McCartney is a man who does know his middle-eights. Released in 1962, it “wasn’t a major hit,” as McCartney says, but it the one that the most attentive fans of the time heard first, before the explosion to come. And their wish in the title became our command.
74. ‘The Back Seat of My Car’
Before Meat Loaf had “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” McCartney had his own paean to what can happen in cramped automotive conditions, although he extended his backseat anthem to encompass the full sweep of teenaged love, not just eroticism. In fact, it’s really a suite more than a single song, with a lot of movements swept into four and a half minutes, with McCartney practically trying to wrap an “Abbey Road” Side 2 medley into one tune. Fans have hoped in vain for decades that “Back Seat of My Car” would show up as a staple of his live sets, but apparently it’s too sweeping (or too obscure) for that. Nonetheless, in the spirit of the song, we can only tell its teen lovers: Ram on.
73. ‘Michelle’
The song that for years assured the high school French teachers of the world that they could count on fuller classes than their faculty contemporaries.
72. ‘Slidin”
It may still be premature to guess how any of the songs from his most recent album, the year-and-a-half-old “McCartney III,” will hold up over time. And maybe it’s showing undue favoritism to the idea of McCartney as a still-fresh force to include one of those tracks amid the classics on this list. But 2020’s “Slidin’,” unassuming as it is, is remarkable when you think of how few other performers in their late 70s could come up with such a completely natural, heavier-than-lead hard-rock number. Even when it comes to sounds usually best left to younger generations, McCartney can’t stop going back to the top of the slide.
71. ‘Let ‘Em In’
Is it a song of inclusiveness… or just a party song? McCartney has indicated it’s the latter, and there’s not much to read into the list of imaginary guests he recites, which range from John Eastman to Michael Jackson to Martin Luther King Jr. (It was the latter he was referring to when he sings “Martin Luther,” not the guy who nailed the articles of faith to a door, even though we can be excused for thinking that in a song about door-knocking.) He considered this song a trifle, and, OK, we’re hard-pressed to really disagree. We’re also hard-pressed to not start marching along in time when those gentle snare-drum cadences kick in.
70. ‘Great Day’
The king of poptimism was at his sweetest, simplest and most uplifting in this “Flaming Pie” epilogue. “I liked the idea of a song saying that help is coming and there’s a bright light on the horizon,” McCartney said. “I’ve got absolutely no evidence for this, but I like to believe it.” On a down day, we’ll take it, with or without backup documentation.
69. ‘P.S. I Love You’
This ballad dates back to the Beatles’ Cavern Club days but provided an early indication of the unusual chord changes that would later figure into his writing, and that it’s safe to say no other Liverpudlians were coming up with. For McCartney, it was a simple subgenre song — “The letter is a popular theme, and it’s just my attempt at one of those” — but when it soon became part of their almost one-band British Invasion, no one marked it return to sender.
68. ‘Ballroom Dancing’
McCartney was the master of songs that harked back to a pre-rock era, like “Your Mother Should Know,” “Honey Pie” and “When I’m Sixty-Four.” This cut from 1982’s “Tug of War” album stands out among them because, beyond evoking a more innocent time, it actually rocks. “Ballroom dancing made a man of me!” he claims, giving a song about a youth spent learning to cha-cha-cha in Great Britain’s ballrooms sound like a nearly sexy macho rite of passage.
67. ‘A World Without Love’
McCartney thought this song was just “okay” and not good enough for the Beatles. He was wrong. A lot of songs he gave to other artists back in the ’60s like “Come and Get It,” a hit for Badfinger, are numbers the world finally got to hear his demo versions of, in the “Anthology” series or other boxed sets. But with “A World Without Love,” a chart-topper for the duo Peter and Gordon in early ’64 in both the U.S. and U.K., we’ve still never gotten any leak of more than 32 seconds’ worth of Paul demo-ing the tune. But that’s no reason not to include it on a list that represents his finest compositions as well as best recordings.
66. ‘My Love’
The release of this single in 1973 was when the rock intelligentsia really started going after McCartney as an alleged simp… and you can tell from the subsequent “Silly Love Songs” just how much heed he paid to that. “My Love” is easy listening at its lazy best, and should find a place on some best lists if it consisted of nothing more than Wings guitarist Henry McCullough’s brilliant solo, which, if you’re a McCartney fan, you can probably recall note-for-note as much as any lyric.
65. ‘Little Willow’
Just one more death song, although “Little Willow” doesn’t really present itself as such. Touched upon hearing of the death of Maureen Starkey, Ringo Starr’s ex-wife, in the mid-’90s, McCartney was moved to compose: “Instead of writing her kids a letter I wrote a song.” (Writing material for other Beatles’ or their wives’ kids had certainly proved fruitful before — see “Hey Jude.”) McCartney is obviously drawn to nature when it comes to writing about resilience: In writing “Bend, little willow / Wind’s gonna blow you / Hard and cold tonight,” he’s echoing the words of his earlier hit “With a Little Luck,” which promised, “The wiliow turns his back on inclement weather / And if he can do it, we can do it.”
64. ‘Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five’
There’s always a bit of cognitive dissonance hearing this song show up in stadium shows 37 years after the date in a title put out into the world 11 years before that. But the “Band on the Run” album-ender has such funky piano playing on McCartney’s part — it swings as much as anything he’d done rooted in the piano since “Lady Madonna” — that it’s worth the slight toll it takes on the modern brain.
63. ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’
How suite it was, once again, although this time McCartney sounded more like he was scoring a kids’ movie in coming up with one of his trademark medleys. There was a real Uncle Albert in McCartney’s British life, and a historically significant Admiral Halsey over in the U.S., though no one would exactly call this a docudrama, as silliness prevails in what the artist called “a playlet.” “Hands across the water / Heads across the sky” didn’t just refer to the two title characters being on different sides of the Atlantic; it referenced Paul and Linda’s own relationship being international, he said. It became his first post-Beatles No. 1 in America.
62. ‘Listen to What the Man Said’
To listen to this track is to be filled with regret — that Tom Scott didn’t get called in to add sax solos to way more Wings records in the ’70s. It was a first, take, too, after McCartney called him on the spur of the moment to try to set some fire to a tune that wasn’t quite igniting. He’s the man! Well, maybe not the man — it’s never clear who the title figure is that McCartney is referring to, but it’s more likely to be Christ or Buddha or Gandhi than a session player. It’s a buoyant, groovy, only slightly strange piece of pop that seems to have a touch of divinity to it, whether it’s in the love-affirming words or some real studio serendipity.
61. ‘Magical Mystery Tour’
Can a song this ubiquitous be underrated? It can. However uneven a curiosity the 1967 Beatles TV special of the same name turned out to be, it will always be worth it for the fanfare McCartney wrote for it, which sounds like such a spectacular portal into something that maybe even a terrific movie couldn’t have lived up to it.
60. ‘Arrow Through Me’
If there is one album that is a secret handshake that separates the true McCartney fans from the sightseer, it is probably 1979’s “Back to the Egg,” the last album to go out under the Wings aegis. Although commercially it was close to a non-starter, and even now it’s one of the few ’70s albums of his that hasn’t gotten its own deluxe boxed-set edition, devotees adore it because it felt like an attempt to do something that had the energy of the new-wave music of the time without actually bending to its tropes. The production hasn’t dated at all, and it might be McCartney’s most rock ‘n’ roll “solo” album. “Arrow Through Me” was a slight outlier amid all that power-pop — it’s loosely R&B based, with a very lightly funky groove and horn interjections. You can start here if you want to draw a picture of Macca as an un-self-conscious soul singer.
59. ‘Mother Nature’s Son’
McCartney has always loved being outstanding in his field, as it were. He admits he was influenced on this White Album track by the most famous “nature” song of them all, Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy,” but primarily in the concept; musically, he was in California folkie mode. (Not that it’s ever that simple; he’s also cited the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams as partial inspiration for this number.) It was hardly the last of his pastoral songs — “Heart of the Country” was another terrific one, early in his solo career, and even recent “McCartney III” songs found him working in his barn — but this remains his finest outdoorsman anthem.
58. ‘With a Little Luck’
Of the two “With a little…” songs McCartney wrote or collaborated on — the other being “With a Little Help From My Friends” — is it wrong to show some favoritism toward this deceptively breezy 1978 Wings hit? In some ways it defines the increasingly synth-based era of late ’70s adult-contemporary… if you ignore McCartney’s vocal, which gets determinedly soulful, almost to the point of anguish, amid the pleasantries. It might even be one of his best vocal performances, if only for how his virtuosic curlicues and heartfelt rasp take a happy song and make it better.
57. ‘Birthday’
Eat your hearts out, Patty and Mildred J. Hill. It may be “Happy Birthday to You” we’re singing at parties, but it’s the Beatles’ track we’re hearing in our heads, at some point, at least, during the festivities. It’s as close to an instrumental as the Beatles came; never was the riff more the essential thing than in this White Album entr’acte standout.
56. ‘Temporary Secretary’
The ultimate polarizer in the Macca catalog, other than maybe “Wonderful Christmastime.” If you find someone who thinks this 1980 combo of Kraftwerk/Devo synths and funny voices represents a peak in McCartney’s creativity and not a nadir, hold onto that person for dear life. The few, the proud, the “Temporary Secretary” adorers… we’re a special tribe.
55. ‘Junk’
Aren’t we glad it didn’t live up to its title? McCartney said he wrote this very minimalist song — which appeared on his first solo album after being tested out in Beatles rehearsals — both as a love song and a comment on consumer society throwing things away and replacing them unnecessarily. He was even influenced in writing it by the popularity of the junkyard-set TV series “Steptoe and Son” (precursor to the Americanized “Sanford and Son”). It’s really the chords that count with this one, anyway. That was clear when a wordless version, “Singalong Junk,” became arguably more popular than “Junk” ever had been after Cameron Crowe used the reprise variation to great effect in “Jerry Maguire.”
54. ‘Here Today’
Regrets? He’s had a couple, and one that definitely bore mentioning, in a 1982 song. McCartney has made this a critical mid-point part of his touring setlist for decades now, as a chance to tip a hat to John Lennon, its subject — and to remind audiences that they should reach out to loved ones they are a little estranged from, lest they, too, find that the cutoff point for making full amends can come sooner than they imagine.
53. ‘That Day is Done’
This funeral song stands as McCartney’s other great song about a death — in this case, the deceased protagonist’s own. The idea for the tune and its verses came from co-writer Elvis Costello, who has talked about how flabbergasted he was when McCartney took what he’d written and sat down at the piano to belt out a spontaneous, glorious chorus that gave the song eternal life. Costello has done his own excellent versions of this since it was penned in the mid-’80s, with a more gospel/New Orleans feel… but not even he could sing it as movingly as McCartney.
52. ‘One After 909’
This rocker from the lads’ youth got revived for the Beatles’ “Get Back”/”Let It Be” project, at least partly as a result of the original conception that the documentary would chart the group making a back-to-roots album. Some fans considered this beneath the band at the time: After you’ve made “Sgt. Pepper,” you’re really going to go out with a Chuck Berry knockoff? But in Peter Jackson’s recent “Get Back” documentary miniseries, “One After 909” is the song that practically powers the whole movie into its ultimate momentum.
51. ‘Souvenir’
Yet another song of the singer offering comfort to a depressed or downtrodden friend… a running theme in his catalog, obviously. It starts as a gentle 6/8 ballad, but when the guitar power chords kick in as a very different chorus starts up, there’s some real muscle behind the trademark empathy. McCartney wished an R&B singer would have covered it, and beyond that, “I would have loved it as a single but I knew that no one on earth would ever have chosen it as a single,” he said. It was a cool Hot 100 entry in fans’ heads, at least.
50. ‘Letting Go’
“Letting Go” is one of the harder Wings songs to get a handle on. What does he need to let go of — the obsessive level of his attachment to Linda, as some writers have surmised, so that “like a lucifer,” she can “always shine”? Or let go of a resistance to falling even more madly and deeply? Beyond being a love song, it’s a little ambiguous, but there’s nothing that’s difficult to suss about the song’s easygoing rock groove, which has kept it as a slightly deeper cut in tour setlists all the way to 2022. This, as much as “Got to Get You Into My Life” or anything else, may be why McCartney finally started taking real horn sections out on the road — it just doesn’t make sense doing this one without the cathartic brass in the last stretch.
49. ‘Too Many People’
McCartney wrote this in response to Lennon “firing missiles at me with his songs… one or two of them (being) quite cruel. I don’t know what he hoped to gain, other than punching me in the face… I decided to turn my missiles on him too, but I’m not really that kind of a writer, so it was quite veiled.” Well, not so veiled that most of the watching music world didn’t get the point and celebrate McCartney giving almost as good as he got in his answer song in the 1971 beef. “The first verse and the chorus have pretty much all the anger I could muster” )which is not all that much, in the overall scheme of things; the force of his new farm life was strong). McCartney revealed in “Lyrics” that he really sang “piece of cake” as “piss-off cake.” God bless this peace-loving songwriter for trying to be vitriolic, even if it sounded measured in the end.
48. ‘She’s Leaving Home’
McCartney’s fascination with all the lonely people extended from the spinsters and ministers of “Eleanor Rigby” to teen runaways and clueless parents in “Sgt. Pepper’s” most somber moment. For someone also known for nonsense numbers like “Hi, Hi, Hi,” he sure has known how to draw a narrative as literally and precisely as any playwright. Combine that with a sentiment that seems to show some sympathy for the kids ditching suburbia to head to Haight-Ashbury or its likes, and voila — you have a very studious and formal anthem about kids letting their freak flag fly.
47. ‘Put It There’
You can thank McCartney’s dad for taking the standard handshake catchphrase “put it there” and adding the suffix that is key to this song’s 1989 chorus: “Put it there if it weighs a ton.” It took McCartney, of course, to extend that further still with a great closing line: “As long as you and I are here, put it there.” In the “Lyrics” book, he says, “I wonder whether I wanted to direct this song towards John — if it’s not, in its own way, a peace offering to a man who died way too young.” But, going back to the song’s origin, it also makes for a very sweet Father’s Day anthem.
46. ‘Getting Better’
OK, there’s one character line in the bridge that hasn’t worn so well in the 21st century, which is why we probably won’t see this in a setlist again. Barring that, though, this remains the most conventionally crowd-pleasing moment of “Sgt. Pepper.” The “couldn’t get much worse” call-and-response adds a funny barb that offers some grounding to McCartney’s sunny-side-of-the-street outlook.
45. ‘Getting Closer’
For “Back to the Egg” cultists, this remains one of his most fun post-Beatles singles. “One of the things about Wings was this freedom not to make sense,” McCartney said in talking about this late-period Wings rocker, which has him repeatedly addressing his beloved as “my salamander.” (Maybe lizard-phobia was responsible for this 1979 number not being the huge hit it deserved to be.) And: “I was probably smoking a little too much wacky baccy at the time.” That may have affected the lyrics, but this is one clear-headed rocker, when it comes down to the pure, unlazy drive of the song.
44. ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road’
How primal could Paul “Two chords is enough” McCartney get? With this love-it-or-hate-it White Album deep cut, we found out. McCartney has always been a master of character voices, and the guy who’s singing about dotted-line sex here gets very baritone about it, until some imagination of concrete ecstasy sends him into a fleeting falsetto. Kids, don’t try this at home — either the vocal inflections or the mid-highway congress.
43. ‘The Long and Winding Road’
A more sober, CHP- and AAA-approved “road” song. McCartney was probably never as mad at John Lennon as he was enraged at Phil Spector for adding a massive orchestra and choir to the “Let It Be” album track, to the point that it’s probably this number alone that spawned the whole “Let It Be… Naked” spinoff of un-Spectorization. And yet the song is so good that it survives — even flourishes under — the ungodly amount of lily-gilding on the original single.
42. ‘Drive My Car’
“It was always good to get nonsense lyrics in, and this song lent itself to ‘Beep beep, beep beep, yeah.’ We did it in close harmony so it would sound like a horn, McCartney said. It won’t go down in his list of great melodic accomplishments: “Two chords are more than enough,” he said of “Drive My Car” — “maybe even one more than enough.” It’s not part of his current touring setlist, but the audience would surely miss all that toot-tooting along this time, if only they weren’t distracted by the other two hours and 40 minutes of hits.
41. ‘This One’
In the same spirit as “Here Today” and other emotional carpe diem anthems comes this announcement that there has never been a better time to get your affairs with others in order. Unlike “Here Today,” it’s not too late — McCartney sounds positively jubilant that there’s still time to say and do the right thing. The rest of us should be, too.
40. ‘All My Loving’
It was John’s idea to do a guitar arrangement for this that would involve more furious strumming underneath a featherweight pop melody than the normal human arm and hand can withstand. But the promise to the children and especially young ladies of America and England in 1963-64 that he was never gonna give them up, never gonna let them go? That was all Paul. The song, like him, was a very, very cute one.
39. ‘Band on the Run’
Admit it: The middle section of this tri-part song is the most exciting, with its nervous “If we ever get out of here” energy and cranky guitar; the long, main concluding section after the introductory moments are just gravy. No? That’s just me? Never mind, then. “Band on the Run” is an eternal celebration of group bonding, which is ironic given how closely it came on the heels of the Beatles’ breakup. As his many attempts to find the perfect iteration of Wings proved, he hadn’t given up on the concept yet. And maybe, given how many decades his current “solo” touring band has been together, he never has.
38. ‘Figure of Eight’
One of McCartney’s most underrated solo tracks combines a great riff with a ragged-but-right vocal affirming the power of estranged parties to re-greet one another coming back around the track. If only he’d consider belatedly adding this back into his setlists.
37. ‘And I Love Her’
The Beatles love their cold openings, but McCartney has cold openings in his song titles, as the witty “and…” has us joining a love story already in progress. Before Jane Asher inspired some memorable breakup songs, she prompted this all-timer. McCartney freely admits that George Martin added the chord modulation that really turned the tune into a classic.
36. ‘Every Night’
Not expressly written for the pandemic, as the 1971 copyright date proves. But McCartney was into staying in for the evening instead of going out when staying in wasn’t cool.
35. ‘Another Day’
In speaking of this song, McCartney has described himself as a “voyeur.” Probably only in his imagination — even though he was known to take walks around London even as a superstar, we don’t imagine him getting to be much of a peeping tom, even for song research purposes. But writing about lives other than his own, however real or imagined, has served him extraordinarily well. He shows his usual penchant for empathy in writing about a single woman who may have a date for the evening but definitely has not landed a keeper. The way the melody bounces from good cheer to sheer pathos during the “so sad” section is the kind of turning-on-a-dime even the most accomplished songwriters have trouble pulling off.
34. ‘Got to Get You Into My Life’
McCartney’s ultimate dive into stacking — or Staxing — horns. The Beatles were supposed to be leading the charge into psychedelia, not soul, in ’66, but one R&B-loving Beatle in particular couldn’t help himself. Even Earth, Wind & Fire as supreme cover artists couldn’t outdo what the Fabs and George Martin came up with here.
33. ‘Jet’
It’s nonsense! Nearly. Which, in the world of Paul McCartney classics, is usually rendered as a compliment. Somewhere in there is the thwarting of young love, rendered a little bit (OK, a lot) more fantastically than it was a few years earlier in “The Back Seat of My Car.” The joyous feistiness of the arrangement grounds the lyrical fantasy and assures us the young heroes will leave the sergeant major in the dust.
32. ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’
Can’t buy a thrill? Actually, for just under a buck in 1964, you could, in this concentrated form. “It’s 12-bar blues, with a Beatles twist on the chorus, where we bring in a couple of minor chords,” McCartney has said by way of explaining the song’s economics. But he’s forgetting something endemic to the Beatles: the greatness of a brilliantly delivered cold opening.
31. ‘Coming Up’
In a variation on accidentally putting what should have been the A-side on a B-side, McCartney put a wan, nearly annoying studio version of “Coming Up” as the leadoff track on “McCartney II,” then offered an exponentially superior live version as a bonus 7-inch 45 within the packaging. It was all right — everyone quickly found the right one, and all was well, and classic. As good as the horn arrangements on “Got to Get Your Life” were, he may have surpassed them with the manic horns-manship on the live track. It’s still one of his most assertively joyful feel-good tracks. You really can envision the flowering amid the funk.
30. ‘Hi, Hi, Hi’
The BBC thought McCartney was singing about his “body gun” and banned the song partly on that basis. If only they’d known he was really singing “polygon” — who doesn’t love a song about geometry? Or, all right, geometry as phallic metaphor and blatant talk of getting stoned? One reason this rocker was such a breath of fresh air was that it assured the world that, however much he was retreating into pastoral life and making woodsy albums like “Wild Life,” he could still get randy, and rocky.
29. ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’
Fanfare songs don’t come any better, even if McCartney pretty much dropped the narrative/conceptual idea after introducing “Billy Shears,” until the reprise came around. Dock this number only one or two points at most for inspiring the Bee Gees/Peter Frampton movie. There’s a reason Jimi Hendrix covered the song the week the Beatles’ version came out — the frilly uniforms and evocations of provincial British show business aside, it really does rock.
28. ‘Get Back’
The original concept of the “Get Back” project inspired what was originally to be a title track (and of course did eventually provide a title for Peter Jackson’s doc, and a name for his 2022 tour). But leave it to McCartney to find a way to make a throwback rocker into a trans anthem, too, out of silliness if not an actual progressive agenda. Played on the rooftop for their last release and live show (if not actual album), there couldn’t have been a better end-to-an-end of an era.
27. ‘I Saw Her Standing There’
Whatever wedding reception ever managed to proceed without this standby — fire the DJ, retroactively.
26. ‘Lady Madonna’
Hero Fats Domino had nothing on Paul’s ability to deliver a piano-pounding tune, when he set his mind to it. Well, maybe a little. But just a little.
25. ‘Let It Be’
It’s easy to take “Let It Be” for granted — it feels like a song that’s always been there, like “Happy Birthday” or “Nearer My God to Thee.” So it’s startling to hear demo versions where McCartney sings about “brother Malcolm” instead of “Mother Mary” and realize that, no, this was actually a written thing, not the result of automatic writing. What is the thing, or the things, that we need to let be? Maybe the same stuff that was blowin’ in the wind earlier in the decade. It’s about accepting whatever you need to accept, ultimately — delivered with a melody that could make you accept just about anything: war, a bad boss, your own death. Apart from maybe “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” it’s the ultimate secular spiritual.
24. ‘Paperback Writer’
Having met writers like Harold Pinter as the Beatles’ circle expanded beyond fellow moptops, McCartney developed at least the fantasy of literary aspirations himself and imagined writing a letter selling himself to publishers. Clearly he had a sense of humor about possible limitations as a man of letters, and so the song became a witty, subtly self-effacing rocker, with great riffage and harmonies borrowed from the Beatles’ Beach Boys and Everly Brothers influences. It’s a melange that’s even greater than the sum of its odd parts.
23. ‘I’ll Follow the Sun’
Many years before he wrote a song called “Hope of Deliverance,” McCartney came up with this song of post-split optimism that offered hope for the downhearted in self-affirming spades. “Some day you’ll know I was the one,” he sings, yet there’s not a trace of bitterness as the singer sweetly aims himself at the western horizon.
22. ‘My Brave Face’
Every one of the handful of songs that McCartney wrote with Elvis Costello in the mid-1980s is a keeper. In fact, the bonus disc of demos the two of them recorded together that was included in the “Flowers in the Dirt” boxed set a few years back is a great album in its own right. The first single to have emerged out of their hookup, “My Brave Face,” was an instant classic that betrayed traces of both their musical and lyrical styles. It’s probably McCartney’s wittiest breakup song — the antithesis in mood to “For No ONe,” certainly — with verses that take a cue from the country music tradition of bragging about how great you’re doing when you’re really hitting the skids. The melody and arrangement are pure power-pop, with McCartney dragging his Hofner bass out of mothballs for the first time since the Beatles, reportedly at Costello’s behest. As anyone who saw Macca’s recent U.S. tour can attest, that Hofner never got put in the closet again.
21. ‘Let Me Roll It’
There’s nothing especially salacious about these lyrics, yet there’s something about the guitar licks between lines in this Wings scorcher that’s so down and dirty, it almost makes the song feel filthy. We will always lay out the welcome mat for Paul’s heart, especially when he rolls it to us sounding this irresistibly laconic and raw.
20. ‘Hey Jude’
How long can a 45 be? In 1968, fans got their first test of that. It was the epic singalong and fade that made the single iconic, but it’s the sweetness of Paul’s affectionate advice for Julian Lennon, the prompt for the song, that ultimately lingers after the nearly eight minutes are up.
19. ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’
Another chorus that seemed to have come out of some folk tradition, not written anew. If he’d slowed it down just a few beats per minute, it might have become more of a campfire perennial. But the speed with which he approaches what could have been a more relaxed melody is part of what gives the song its rapid-fire charm.
18. ‘Penny Lane’
McCartney says that “there’s a documentary aspect to ‘Penny Lane,’ though it’s best viewed perhaps as a docudrama.” But it’s still strange to grasp that Penny Lane is a real place, no matter how many years or decades you’ve known that is is, when McCartney does such a fine job of making it feel like an imaginary fairy land, not just a roundabout that he used to pass through on the way to songwriting sessions at Lennon’s place. The specificity of detail weirdly makes it feel more fantastical, not less, even if it’s a working-class milieu and no strawberry field. With its tooting horns and key changes and resistance to anything that feels as new-fashioned as rock, “Penny Lane” rivals the Kinks’ “Village Green Preservation Society” as the thing that gave twee a good name.
17. ‘Eleanor Rigby’
McCartney loves to write in the third person, and he never got more narrative than the short-story collection that is “Eleanor Rigby.” The irony, of course, is these characters are just connected enough that they could be lonely together, instead of lonely apart… if they only had Paul, the overseer with the God’s-eye-view, playing matchmaker to them all. But no. Thankfully, McCartney didn’t write a lot of songs about people dying alone en masse… but if he were going to write just one, he did it right with what may be pop’s most universally beloved trip down bleak street.
16. ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’
And then the lawyers arrived. Never has there been a sadder or more heartfelt song written about what happens when boys end up in boardrooms, although this song has surely been the unsung soundtrack in a lot of divorce courts, too. When McCartney moved on to the bucolic solo pastures of his “McCartney” and “Ram” solo albums, it was hard not to cheer him and Linda finding peace, but he sure got a beautiful and lasting song out of the preceding discontent.
15. ‘We Can Work It Out’
“Try to see it my way,” McCartney pleads, in what could have almost been his theme song for the “Let It Be” sessions he tried to be a benign leader of a few years later. McCartney can certainly be a boss, but this peppy number always seemed like an anthem for those of us who like to feel like we’re reasonable in a conflict — even if, like Paul at Twickenham Studios, that can lead people to feel you’re still being a passive-aggressive alpha. He sure paints a beautiful picture of productive detente, at least.
14. ‘Live and Let Die’
Let it… not be? Give the other fella hell? The opportunity to write a Bond theme has a way of taking a guy to a less spiritually placid place. It’s easy to lose sight of how crafty this song is amid the nightly lasers and explosions and massive pyro on tour, but the song is almost hilariously ambitious, moving from very effective John Barry wanna-be passages to an out-of-nowhere reggae interlude and right back into a sweet paean to killing. But even vegans need some murderous role-play now and again.
13. ‘Two of Us’
Probably the most underrated of all the songs McCartney wrote in the second half or so of the Beatles’ tenure. Is its strong presence in Peter Jackson’s recent “Get Back” documentary finally curing that? It seems like it. It’s a modest song in so many ways, compared to McCartney’s other achievements during that era, but modesty becomes it. And so does the sense that this could be a song Paul wrote for either Linda or Lennon, during that sweet period of overlap. In the end, it seems more like a buddy song, if only for the spectacularly subtle way in which McCartney’s and Lennon’s voices somehow become one.
12. ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’
Well, this one has probably been retired from McCartney’s sets for good, for obvious reasons — thanks, Vladimir. But it was fun while it lasts, when Russian provincialism could still be made into the stuff of post-Cold War comedy. Of course, it’s a pastiche of the early Beach Boys and Chuck Berry, with McCartney proving that it was not just “Pet Sounds” he listened to. It’s a masterpiece of comic writing even before he somehow marries Ray Charles’ geographical references with the Russian Georgia… maybe the funniest rock song ever written, actually, that’s such a strong rocker you almost forget about the parade of punchlines.
11. ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’
Lennon and McCartney never had a more blatant co-write, and John’s wet dreams, et al. made this their craftiest bifurcation since “A Day in the Life.” But whereas Lennon did the lion’s share of the work on that strange epic, McCartney did the heavier lifting here on a song that might’ve been a classic even without Lennon coming in to stick a landing. As his voice rises to a trademark near-scream as he sings “All that I’ve been looking for was somebody who looked like you,” the Beatles go higher than any mere rooftop could hold.
10. ‘For No One’
His breakup with Jane Asher provided a wellspring of thoughts he was able to channel into some darker songs, including this all-time corker about feeling emotionally rejected, regardless of who is destined to do the dumping. It’s a sort of twin to “Eleanor Rigby” on the “Revolver” album as a piece of dispirited chamber-pop, but while that other number reserves its loneliness for the third-person, McCartney’s use of the second-person “you” throughout these lyrics don’t disguise the fact that this one was personal. When he sings “Your day breaks,” you know the day isn’t the only thing that’s broken, however strangely formal and upright the song sounds.
9. ‘I’m Down’
McCartney’s Little Richard worship found an early culmination in this wild rocker, back in the era when the real gems were often found in the back seat of his car — that is, as B-sides on the Beatles’ 45s. How can we laugh when we know he’s down? We’re not laughing at you, Sir Paul… we’re chuckling with glee that any song ostensibly about depression could make us all want to squeal like schoolgirls in the Ed Sullivan Theater.
8. ‘Oh! Darling’
Listen to the early demos of this that were included in the boxed set of “Abbey Road” a couple of years ago, and you hear what could have been a nice bt very average song in McCartney’s semi-nostalgic vein. But after he tortured his voice to the point that it sounded absolutely ravaged, this was no longer destined to be heard as a throwback — it became one for the ages.
7. ‘I’m Looking Through You’
John was supposed to be the one who Does Cynicism, not Paul. But this deceptively chipper number from “Rubber Soul” permanently put the lie to the idea that Paul can’t write as barbed a kiss-off song as anyone. “Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight,” he sings, allowing for the possibility that these things just happen, but in writing about the end of his relationship with Jane Asher, it’s clear he was pointing a finger and not necessarily back at himself. He didn’t indulge in bitterness or recrimination often, but when he did, a little, we liked him when he was angry.
6. ‘Blackbird’
Chet Atkins meets the civil rights movement. At least, McCartney said he was inspired both by Atkins’ acoustic finger-picking style and the British slang for Black women when he wrote this song about the cultural emancipation of people of color that was happening in 1968. Only in later years did he make a point of contextualizing his original intent in concert every night. Even if you had no idea that race figured into it, as most fans probably didn’t for years after the White Album came out, it was still close to being the loveliest thing he ever wrote then or since, with a balm-like force for anyone who ever felt their wings were clipped, too.
5. ‘Here, There and Everywhere’
In the category of songs that have great introductions that never reappear again, this stands particularly tall. “We were trying to emulate the openings of some of our favorite old songs that had a completely rambling preamble,” he says in the recent lyrics book. Once that brilliant intro is dispensed with, though, McCartney is going for “circularity” — the song seems to spin around and within itself in some magical way that can’t be described, as if every element of the tune actually does exist here, there and everywhere. McCartney says that “if pushed,” he’d say this “is my own favorite of all my songs.” Lots of his contemporaries don’t need a push to agree with him there. Elvis Costello said the other day that “For No One” might be his old friend’s finest lyric… but when he picked a song to record and film an impromptu cover of for McCartney’s 80th birthday, naturally it was “Here, There and Everywhere,” the songwriters’ choice.
4. ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’
McCartney proved that a ballad could be a thrill ride, too. You can hear it a thousand times — many of us have, by a conservative estimate — and still be amazed by its twists and turns. They’re not all melodic, either. It’s typically taken as a song of romantic bliss, and fair enough, there. But McCartney himself said in the “McCartney: The Lyrics” book that came out last year that “it shows the fragility of love.” In what he calls an “intense, interior conversation that’s going on in the song… the elements of fear and loneliness are very much to the fore. ‘Maybe I’m afraid of the way I love you’ is itself a troubling idea.” But that’s easy to miss, amid the perfectly fitting vocal gymnastics that establish him here as much as anywhere as rock’s greatest singer. Never mind the shadings: This is one of pop’s great ecstatic experiences.
3. ‘Helter Skelter’
It would be an exaggeration to say we are hearing the invention of heavy metal here, but not by much. Ringo’s got blisters on his fingers at the end of it. We’ve got blisters on our soul, and still we want to go back to the top of the slide after that historic fake-out of a fade. With apologies to Bono, he never had to steal it back: This was always our thrill ride.
2. ‘Yesterday’
With a melody this indelible, McCartney’s most enduring and oft-covered ballad might have been a classic even if he’d stuck with the working title of “Scrambled Eggs.” (Thank God he did not stick with the working title of “Scrambled Eggs.”)
Living in the past is an illness that afflicts much of the world’s population. If they never had any anthem written for them other than this, it would be enough. The longing for a moment before mistakes were made or acts of God or personal cruelty occurred — it’s as if McCartney summed them up in one outrageously, deceptively simple song. So never let it be doubted that the man who sang “take a sad song and make it better” knew how to leave a tenderly melancholy moment alone. Is it ironic that Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky wrote music history’s most perfect downer? Probably not at all.
1. ‘Golden Slumbers’/’Carry That Weight’/’The End’
Is it unfair to count history’s most famous medley as a single item in pushing it to the top? Maybe no more unfair than it is for McCartney to end all his shows in recent years with the sequence of songs that serves as the lengthy climax of “Abbey Road.” Taken together, they make up rock ‘n’ roll’s most celebrated lullaby — and kind of a dark one, actually, until McCartney lightens it up at the end (and at “The End’), as he’s ultimately prone to. Is it only once upon a time there was a way to get back homeward? How heavy is that weight our boy is going to carry throughout his life? Throw in a reprise snippet of “You Never Give Me Your Money,” and the wistfulness threatens to take the Beatles’ final album down in bittersweet balladry. Until of course, McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison engage in a guitar showdown, Ringo Starr shows the world what a set of tom-toms are for, and the band’s (by then) fearless leader intones his famous benediction: “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” Is that aphorism, like, actually true? Yes, when you’re in the orbit of The Medley — it’s always a big part of Paul’s power, that he flirts with the melancholy and then makes us believe in happy endings.
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