Anyone who’s been in the music business long enough is going to start thinking about how they want to be remembered. Nobody can have the final say in what their last album is going to be, and while artists like David Bowie have bowed out gracefully with their farewell albums, we’ve all been fortunate enough to see Paul McCartney go through his twilight years making some fairly decent music on his own.
But while many of us hope that we have a few more years of Macca being active, making fantastic songs, he had already started thinking about his final bows decades before now.
Then again, McCartney has never been one to slow down even for a second. Throughout The Beatles’ career, he was always the one begging for everyone to get back into the studio to make a record. He may have been somewhat of a workaholic compared to his bandmates, but given how much time he spent with Linda out on the road with Wings, music wasn’t another hustle for him. It was his way of having fun, and even after Linda’s passing, albums like Chaos and Creation in the Backyard may as well have been his way of getting through his emotional moments.
Were there some bumps in the road? Sure. His attempts at trying to tap into the zeitgeist in the late 1980s made him look like a trendchaser on a handful of occasions, but by the time the 1990s started up, records like Off the Ground and Flaming Pie helped remind everyone of the kind of tunesmith that made those Beatles songs so catchy. If that era was a return to his Fab sound, Memory Almost Full feels like taking everything great about Wings and putting it under one roof.
Outside of being a fantastic pop record, Macca’s 2007 album might be one of the most diverse records he made during his later years. New and Egypt Station may have different themes going for them, but nearly every song on Memory Almost Full offers something new, like the catchy opening ‘Dance Tonight’, the sprawling epic ‘House of Wax’, or finally dialling up the intensity again on ‘Only Mama Knows’.
But for anyone worried about McCartney, ‘The End of the End’ saw him pondering the same question thinking about his own death, saying, “I heard someone – I think it was James Taylor – say in a lyric ‘the day I die,’ and it prompted me to think of my death as a subject. So I got into that and found that I was interested in the Irish Wake idea, and jokes being told and stories of old, rather than the solemn, Anglican, doom-laden event.”
It’s admittedly not the cheeriest song in the world, but it makes sense why it would be on his mind. He had gone through the heartache of losing Linda at the end of the 1990s, and after paying tribute to George Harrison’s style of songwriting on the album prior, he had to be thinking about the kind of legacy he was leaving behind.
And hearing him talk about remembering the good times is very indicative of what McCartney was all about. It’s going to be a sad day when either of the remaining Beatles passes away, but since McCartney was used to remedying pain in song, it makes sense that most people would remember all the great times that they had listening to his music rather than cry about the fact that he’s gone.
Because looking at McCartney’s career trajectory, his legacy isn’t that far off from what people thought of when Brian Wilson passed away. Both men were put on this Earth to make their audiences smile as much as possible, and even if they’re not on this earthly plane of existence anymore, it’s comforting knowing that somewhere in the cosmos, McCartney would be reunited with his musical soulmate, John Lennon, once again.
