What Are You Listening To?

[CRAZY-HORSE]

Paul McCartney "mccartney II" 1980 vinyl,cd and deluxe boxset cd

solo career stats:
studio albums..................36
singles............................77

this album..................#1 UK...#6 AU...#3 US
singles:
"coming up"...............#2 UK....#2 AU...#1 CAN...#1 US
"waterfalls"................#9 UK..#31 AU
"temporary secretary".....no chart action

back in the midsts of time again with this one...
Macca's first truly solo set since the debut "McCartney" back in 1970...
was never intended as a commercial release....
Paul had just built a new home studio and loaded it up with all the latest recording gadgets
and was simply playing around trying to get used to the new hardware etc...
Ringo went to his house for dinner one night and asked if he had any new material,
Paul let him hear the tracks that eventually made the album...
when Ringo heard them he apparently said "oh, so this is your new sound and new album then",
after a few seconds pause Paul replied "i guess it is" or words to that effect....
lots of electronic sounds on here (synths) along with regular instruments....
Paul wrote, produced and played every instrument with Linda chipping in for a couple of backing vocals...
Paul has always said the album sounds unfinished to him but likes the sounds he got from basically half baked demo tracks....
sure, you can hear that its not polished, but that's the quaint attraction to it for me, wasn't always that way though,
I used to think it was fairly average but its grown on me a lot over the last couple of years....
Dani isn't a McCartney fan by any means but she loves this album for some reason....
album contains a couple of ballads, several rootsy blues rockers that wouldn't sound out of place on a Steve Miller album,
a couple of synthed up instrumental pieces, a couple of muck around experimental pieces and of course the huge hit "coming up"...
strange thing about that single is that in the UK/AU etc the studio version was issued as the "A" side but in the US the single was flipped
over and the live version by Wings became the "A" side, either way it became a #1 hit in the US and the studio version was top10
just about everywhere else...
I absolutely adore the quirky third single "temporary secretary", apart from its annoying repetitive synth work, it would not be out
of place on an album like Abbey Road, nor would "one of these days" (my favourite on the album) or "summers day song"...
all up, a very good album that has really grown on me of late...

I LIKE THIS ALBUM

worst track: frozen jap
best track: one of these days

[video=youtube;zPizFm-2jo8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPizFm-2jo8[/video]

tracks:

1...coming up ***
2...temporary secretary ***
3...on the way ***
4...waterfalls ***
5...nobody knows **
6...front parlour *
7...summers day song **
8...frozen jap *
9...bogey music **
10.darkroom **
11.one of these days ***

3s=5
2s=4
1s=2

rating: 2.2