Run Devil Run represents Paul McCartney’s second album of (mostly) cover tunes, after 1988’s Снова в СССР. While the latter was released as something of a lark — basically Paul and a bunch of musician friends noodling around in the studio, recording a bunch of 50s/Broadway/R&B tunes, and releasing the album in the Soviet Union…
Paul McCartney’s Driving Rain is a problematic but intriguing record, probably the least-regarded of his much praised “later career rebirth” (which arguably began with 1997’s Flaming Pie and continued through 2013’s New). Whereas Flaming Pie was a strong artistic statement that seemed to invoke all the classic McCartney songcraft tropes to great effect, 2001’s Driving…
Flaming Pie is held in especially high esteem by Paul McCartney fans, as the 1997 release was viewed as something of a “return to form” for McCartney as a solo artist. The album came at an interesting time in his career, as it was his first rock record since 1993’s Off The Ground. While McCartney…
There’s a reason I haven’t delved too deeply into blogging about and reviewing the extensive multiverse of Paul McCartney bootlegs, mostly because there is simply no getting out of that particular rabbit hole. I’m not kidding either. No matter what your opinion on McCartney’s solo material, there is no denying that the man’s output was…
Well, welcome to the Robbers’ Ball Both gentlemen and ladies all Are welcome to the revelry tonight… Hey lookee here, Hokeyblog is hyping some Paul McCartney. I am sure you’re quite shocked. And stunned. And that will be the last Rutles reference of the evening… But bear with me here, because Robber’s Ball is strongly…
With Off The Ground, his first of three studio album releases in the 1990s, Paul McCartney had positioned himself in uncharted waters of sorts. After the critical and commercial triumph of 1982’s Tug Of War, McCartney began what can be best described as a career slide. It was a slow one, to be fair; the…
I’m not going to spend too much time discussing Снова в СССР, Paul McCartney’s 1988 album of cover tunes. It’s not even so much because it’s a bad record, or a boring, uninspired collection of mostly 1950s rock standards (with some Duke Ellington and George Gershwin thrown in for good measure). Your enjoyment of his…
Back in 1989, I was 18 years old and neck deep in college/alt/indie music (mostly) and had no use for new Paul McCartney records. Oh don’t get me wrong, he was (and still is) a musical hero and inspiration and legend and all that, but his solo work had long since run it’s course with…
If there’s one word I’d use to describe Paul McCartney’s 1986 album Press To Play, it would probably end up being ‘homogenized’. Let’s take a fourth-dimensional step thataway and appraise where Sir Paul was standing by the mid-1980s. The Wings era was long since gone, even more of a cultural relic than anything he ever…
To look at Wings Over America objectively requires one to place themselves in the post-Beatles/contemporary-Wings mindset of Paul McCartney in the mid 1970s. To wit: the 1970s breakup of The Beatles was ostensibly the result of Paul announcing he was leaving the band in April of 1970 — despite the fact that, by most reports,…