Send "Paul McCartney " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Seattlepi |
 The Paul McCartney Archive Collection's decision to release 1970's McCartney and 1980's McCartney II simultaneously makes sense for reasons other than the similar titles. Both albums represent extremely personal statements, and result from significant personal and professional crossroads. His first solo outing, McCartney, received critical acceptance years after its initial release, while McCartney II still baffles critics and fans with its distinctly new wave sounds. Regardless of opinions, both receive deluxe treatments, including remastering, bonus tracks, and rare videos.Back in 1970, McCartney was released during a tumultuous time. The Beatles had just disbanded, and the album included a terse Q&A where McCartney announced, unequivocally, his freedom from the band. Recorded at home, with McCartney playing all the instruments and singing all vocals (with some assistance from his new wife Linda), the album sounded much more intimate and bare-bones than The Beatles' final recording, Abbey Road. Still reeling from the Beatles' breakup, fans did not know what to make of this "new" Paul McCartney, whose selected Linda as his next collaborator. Lyrics from various tracks reflect the pain McCartney suffered right after leaving the band, most famously in his ode to Linda, "Maybe I'm Amazed": "Baby I'm a man, maybe I'm a lonely man/Who's in the middle of something/That he doesn't really understand," he sings. "Baby I'm a man and maybe you're the only woman/Who could ever help me." "Every Night" also reflects melancholy: "Every night I just wanna go out, get out of my head/Every day I don't want to get up, get out of my bed."...full text |
| Avclub |
| Paul McCartney’s best asset has always been his effortless mastery of melody; his worst weakness is his how often his songwriting seems a little too effortless. There’s plenty of evidence of both on 1970’s McCartney and 1980’s McCartney II, two famously low-key handmade solo records featuring one of rock’s most accomplished composers casually flitting about by himself in the studio, playing all the instruments and forsaking the polished professionalism befitting a star of his stature. Instead, these albums—which have been newly re-released in various formats, including deluxe editions rounded out by outtakes and videos—cater in the simple amusements of hastily performed doodles that only occasionally coalesce into fully formed songs. The sense that McCartney might’ve had two classics on par with his Beatles best had he worked just a little harder on McCartney and McCartney II sometimes makes listening to the reissues feel like retracing lost opportunities. But for the most part, what comes through is McCartney’s remarkable ability to create catchy hooks seemingly off the top of his head, as well as his playful sense of experimentation and lack of rock-star pretensions. Released just as The Beatles were breaking up, McCartney offered an intimate, off-the-cuff look at one of the world’s most famous people. As home movies packaged with the expanded version poignantly indicate, McCartney came out of a period in McCartney’s life when family life represented a blissfully calm respite from the rigors of Beatlemania. The pleasure of domestication is the dominant theme of McCartney, which pays tribute to McCartney’s wife (“The Lovely Linda,” “Maybe I’m Amazed,” the sublime “Junk”) and everyday normalcy (the light-as-air “Every Night”). Because McCartney already sounded like a collection of demos upon its original release—a star essentially releasing his own bootleg of works in progress—the disc of outtakes fits in surprisingly well, particularly the Harry Nilsson-like dark-humored ballad “Suicide.”...full text |
| Pitchfork |
| Released 10 years apart, McCartney and McCartney II are the first two post-Beatles albums to be credited solely to Paul McCartney, without Wings or Linda McCartney. In that respect, it makes some sense to reissue the two simultaneously, but their original contexts could hardly be more different. In 1970, when advance copies of McCartney were sent to journalists, they included a press sheet announcing Paul's departure from the Beatles, which had the further effect of breaking up the band. McCartney was released a month before Let It Be, and it contained a fair amount of music that had been kicking around for some time. McCartney II, on the other hand, was released in 1980, about a year before the breakup of Wings, a band that was never much more than a vehicle for McCartney's solo songwriting efforts. Wings had no John Lennon to play foil to McCartney. Lennon and McCartney, as everyone knows, were the songwriting partners who made the Beatles such a titanic force in the 1960s. By the time the band broke up, however, the partnership had been mostly dissolved for years. The two were almost always writing separately, and on those late Beatles albums, you can hear their personalities pulling apart. The separation is complete on the solo albums the two former Beatles released in 1970. Lennon's Plastic Ono Band is rough, nasty, self-absorbed, not a little narcissistic, and devoted to laying bare the rawest of emotions and memories. It has overshadowed McCartney since its release. McCartney is a different type of album. First, let's talk about that title. This is a name that had been paired with Lennon, separated by a slash, for years-- we weren't used to seeing it all by itself. When the media ran stories on McCartney, he was often just "Paul." He could have called his album Paul McCartney, but he pointedly did not. I think he wanted people to see his name out there as a songwriting credit, without the old prefix. And the album he made has some parallels to Lennon's, too. They share a rawness, a seeming desire to move away from the opulence of 1969's Abbey Road, the last album the Beatles recorded together. But where the rawness of Plastic Ono Band plays into anger, aggression, and disillusionment, the rawness of McCartney is only in the sound. The record has a homespun charm, and a feel that suggests McCartney wasn't putting too much pressure on himself to carry on the Beatles flame or make a statement. Paul played everything on the record himself, apart from some backing vocals by Linda, recording much of it at home on a four-track. No singles were released, there are several instrumentals, and it's all a bit ramshackle, the type of album that in the hands of most musicians would lend itself to introspection. And yet McCartney doesn't really tell us much about McCartney. As a songwriter, he wasn't (and still isn't, really) the confessional type. To a degree, McCartney is an actor whose medium is his songs. His love for Linda, expressed so ebulliently on "Maybe I'm Amazed", was certainly genuine, but he wrote this eventual FM-radio staple as a classic, universal love song. When presented with the opportunity to let his guard down and show us his unvarnished self, Paul McCartney never did-- even in this intimate setting, his songs remain extroverted and devoted to achieving some measure of pop accessibility....full text |
Paul McCartney lyrics
