Paul graces the cover of the new Mojo, which ships this week.
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Released on May 29, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane finds McCartney looking back on his life, drawing from eight decades of personal stories stretching back to his childhood growing up in Liverpool, and pouring them into a set of songs that make up what might be his best album of the past 20 years.
Produced by Andrew Watt, who helmed both The Rolling Stones’ Hackney Diamonds and their forthcoming Foreign Tongues, songs such as Life Can Be Hard and bittersweet lead single Days We Left Behind hark back both to events in McCartney’s past and the vintage sound of classic Beatles, Wings, and McCartney solo records, while resisting being tied too closely to his musical legacy.
“If you’re working with the Stones, they’ve got the Stones sound. It’s kind of the opposite with me - we’re trying not to do that,” McCartney explains to MOJO’s Grayson Haver Currin. “The way we approached this album was: We’ve done that before. Let’s do it different.”
McCartney first met Watt in 2021, shortly after the producer had won that year’s Producer Of The Year Grammy for his work with Ozzy Osbourne, Miley Cyrus and Post Malone. The night before McCartney’s visit to his basement studio in LA, Watt recalls how he woke up in a panic realising he didn’t have any left-handed instruments to hand in case the former Beatle wanted to work on any ideas, so ordered a selection of Macca-friendly gear – a Höfner bass, a Rickenbacker bass, an Epiphone Casino, a Martin D-28 from 1969 – which arrived just before McCartney did.
“We were just talking, and he says, ‘You can write a song from anything. Sometimes I just pick a random chord I’ve never played before and go from there,’” Watt remembers. When McCartney looked for a guitar to demonstrate, Watt handed him one of that morning’s deliveries. “So he played this weird chord and smiled with this boyish charm. He had to resolve it because it was hanging out there so fucking weird. I grabbed a guitar, and we were off.”
The pair wrote The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’s opening track As You Lie There that day, beginning a four-year period of sporadic sessions while McCartney toured and Watt worked on Hackney Diamonds, McCartney having recommended Watt to the Stones’ guitarist Ronnie Wood.
“I came away from the first session thinking, Well, I like him, but he’s a bit pushy,” McCartney tells MOJO of their first encounter. “But pushy’s not a bad thing in a producer. It’s just enthusiasm from someone who wants to keep making this record. It’s infectious.”
Unlike 2020’s McCartney III, which he wrote, performed and produced almost entirely alone at his studio in Sussex during the pandemic, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane features a number of guest contributions, including, in a subtle nod to Wings, his wife Nancy. On the upbeat Home To Us, McCartney sings not only with The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri from Texas, but with Ringo Starr. McCartney’s first actual duet with his former bandmate after frequent appearances on one another’s records, the song’s lyrics trace a montage of childhood memories.
“Things people write often do refer to the past, but it’s hard to just refer to tomorrow. We don’t know what’s gonna happen then,” he says of the albums’ reflective themes. “But the past is even just talking about yesterday. It’s full of stuff. It’s a rich place to mine for ideas.”
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