Paul McCartney has been a mainstay in the songwriting industry since the early 1960s. Over those many, many decades in the business, McCartney has contributed some of the all-time greatest additions to the pop music canon. However, of those many decades, we’d argue that one five-year period was more impressive than others.
From 1970 to 1975, McCartney was undergoing several life transitions. The Beatles broke up. He was a new husband and father. The musician was, in many ways, shedding one identity and growing into another. And it was during this heavy experimentation that McCartney was at his best.
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“Band On The Run” (1974)
Kicking off this list of all-time greatest Paul McCartney songs is, expectedly, “Band On The Run” from the 1973 album of the same name. Released as a single the following spring, this iconic Wings track saw McCartney experimenting in real time. With distinct, separate grooves ranging from soulful R&B to easy listening to driving rock ‘n’ roll, “Band On The Run” was the natural consequence of giving McCartney the freedom to stretch his legs with no restrictions.
“Heart Of The Country” (1971)
Paul McCartney offered some of his best love songs to The Beatles’ canon, but his proclivity for romance didn’t stop with the Fab Four. While “Maybe I’m Amazed” is, for all intents and purposes, the Paul McCartney love song, this writer would argue that “Heart Of The Country” makes just as big an impact—and perhaps even a more realistic one. It takes considerable skill to romanticize unassuming rural living so convincingly.
“Let It Be” (1970)
The final Beatles album, Let It Be, saw Paul McCartney reach new songwriting heights that would foreshadow works to come. The 1970 title track from the band’s twelfth album has become a pop music standard. Per the most common origin story of “Let It Be”, McCartney saw his late mother in a dream when she offered her titular “words of wisdom.” The song topped the charts around the world.
“Get Back” (1970)
The same album that featured one of McCartney’s most moving ballads also features one of his most raucous rock numbers. Although this song technically came out in 1969, it’s too good not to include the version that closed Let It Be. Some rock songs embody that early Americana spirit so authentically that they sound as if they’ve existed in one form or another since the 1940s. “Get Back” certainly saw McCartney get as close to that timelessness as he ever had.
“Live And Let Die” (1973)
Writing a piece of music for a film can be more challenging than writing a standalone song, but Paul McCartney proved he could do both exceedingly well with the 1973 James Bond theme, “Live And Let Die”. (The spy film of the same name featured Roger Moore as Bond and Jane Seymour as Solitaire.) McCartney’s Bond theme was a successful single as well, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and in Canada and Norway.
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