Paul McCartney’s Best Three-Album Stretch Came Much Later Than You Think

When do you think Paul McCartney’s finest run of three albums of original material took place? In the 70s, when he was riding high with Wings? Or maybe in the 80s, when he began his solo career in earnest?

Videos by American Songwriter

We’re here to argue that it was much later than that. In terms of consistent excellence, we believe Macca had his best stretch with a trio of albums released between 2005 and 2013.

Embracing ‘Chaos’

Paul McCartney is too talented and conscientious an artist to deliver an absolute clunker of an album. That said, Driving Rain, released in 2001, came off as a bit directionless and ineffectual. To his credit, McCartney took drastic steps to correct course, and those moves paid off brilliantly.

After initially starting work on an album with his touring band, McCartney jumped at the opportunity to work with producer Nigel Godrich. Godrich convinced McCartney to play most of the instruments himself on the new LP. He also pushed the former Beatle in the songwriting department, which sometimes caused friction between the two men.

Chaos And Creation In The Backyard, released in 2005, made it clear that it was all worth it. McCartney’s melodic skills shone extra brightly without a lot of heavy instrumentation around them. Songs like “Jenny Wren” and “Riding To Vanity Fair” captured a somber side of Macca far from his usual crowd-pleasing ways. The album was rightfully hailed by many as a standout.

A Warm ‘Memory’

Wanting to keep the momentum rolling, Paul McCartney returned with the follow-up to Chaos and Creation just a year and a half later. He went back to some of the tracks that he’d begun with his band before Godrich intervened. To fill out the album, he wrote another handful of songs, which he recorded all on his own.

The resulting album, Memory Almost Full, stands out for the way it shows off the opposite sides of McCartney’s artistic personality. He gets gritty with the band on “That Was Me” and “Only Mama Knows”. But then he flashes a more tender side on solo efforts like “You Tell Me” and “The End Of The End”.

McCartney wouldn’t release another studio album of all original songs for six years. He did use Kisses On The Bottom, an LP of mostly standards, as a stopgap in 2012. When he came back the following year with his next project, his studio momentum hadn’t yet abated.

The ‘New’ Stuff

Unlike the previous two albums, New, which arrived in 2013, found Paul McCartney working with four different producers. The approach helped the album achieve a kind of effortless variety that recalled his 1971 triumph Ram.

You get a little bit of Wings’ forward thrust on songs like “Save Us”. “Appreciate” recalls his experimental side project The Fireman. And “Early Days” indulges in some Beatlesque nostalgia, as McCartney both remembers the Fab Four’s exploits and castigates the pretenders who think they know the story.

There are surely other McCartney albums that can hang with those three. But the sustained excellence of this trio is what stands out. If you’re one of those folks hung up on the good old days of this amazing career, we’d suggest you check out this more recent string of masterworks to see what you’ve been missing.

Photo by Ray Tamarra/Getty Images