Paul McCartney on playing guitar with Paul Mescal: 'He knew it better than I did!'

He was also a storyteller who loved wordplay – something that later informed his son's lyrics."He loved to do crosswords, and he would be very keen for me to know certain words that you wouldn't otherwise have known," the musician recalls."So I was the only kid in my class who could spell 'phlegm'."McCartney pays tribute to his parents on the new song Salesman Saint, a tender ballad with bursts of the dancehall jazz they'd have heard on the radio while subsisting on a diet of "tea and cigarettes".By contrast, the album's opening track, As You Lie There, finds the 83-year-old in full-on scream mode as he recalls the surging intensity of a teenage crush.It was the first song written for the album, back in 2020, as McCartney shared a cup of tea with Andrew Watt – a producer for Lady Gaga and Katseye, who's become the go-to collaborator for ageing rockers like Ozzy Osbourne and The Rolling Stones."It was a green tea," the singer discloses. "I was in LA, so I thought they're not going to be able to make a good cup of builder's."As they shot the breeze, McCartney started strumming."One of my recent tricks is to find any weird chord that may intrigue me," plucking the opening notes of As You Lie There on an acoustic guitar."I played this, and I got lucky because I don't know what that chord is."Somebody classically trained will be able to tell me it's a 'G demented', or whatever, but that started something."MPL CommunicationsMcCartney made his new album over the course of five years with US producer Andrew WattAnother song, Lost Horizon, was rescued from an early 2000s demo that McCartney's late engineer Eddie Klein had cherished."It was his job to archive all my old tapes and he said, 'This one's good, you should listen to it.'"If Eddie liked it, I knew it was good. So we played it, and it was very complete."Sometimes, if you were working to a cassette, you'll have half the lyrics, maybe a little suggestion for the chorus - but this [song] was all there. So we copied exactly what was on that cassette, with a little extra guitar."This raises the question: Are there other undiscovered gems sitting in the archive waiting to be released?"Hopefully there are no more," he laughs. "But, you know, I do think about it."John and I used to say we should just delete the outtakes - but it's a good thing we didn't because, until recently, they were still being released, and they're not bad."He's referring to The Beatles' Anthology project, which offered a glimpse into the band's creative process via studio outtakes and alternate versions of their biggest songs.Disney+Peter Jackson's Get Back documentary restored and reframed footage capturing The Beatles during the recording of their final album, Let It BeBut, for McCartney, the most revelatory archive came from Peter Jackson's eight-hour Get Back documentary, which observed the sessions for their final album, Let It Be."I had a strange view of that period," he says. "It was business hell, and I was blamed for a lot of things."The headline on the front of the papers was, 'Paul breaks up The Beatles', and I had to shoulder all of that stuff, even though I knew it wasn't true."He admits that the gossip and speculation, combined with bitter, post-break-up interviews by his bandmates, dented his ego."It changed my attitude to me," he says. "I thought 'OK, I am overbearing', and, yeah, I can be like that."But when I saw the film I thought, 'Oh, no, I'm not like that at all. I'm trying to make a record. I'm trying to encourage these guys to be as great as they are.'"So it took a weight off my mind."'John and I understood each other very well'Perhaps that's what gave him permission to reminisce about the Fab Four on The Boys of Dungeon Lane.He duets with Starr on Home To Us, which barrels along rambunctiously as they recall their humble origins. Later, on the country rock-tinged Down South, he writes about hitchhiking across Europe with his bandmates in the early 1960s."We decided that you need a gimmick," he remembers, "and our gimmick was bowler hats."You'd see John and me in leather jackets and bowler hats with a guitar each slung over the shoulder. We got quite a few lifts!"The point about all that, though, is that it bonds you. So when I came to write with John, we had all these stories and all these experiences. We understood each other very well."The result was (spoiler alert) the most influential songwriting partnership in rock.The Beatles' prolific output between 1963 and 1970 understandably eclipses their solo material. After the split, McCartney even likened his predicament to astronauts returning from the Moon. "What do you want to do with the rest of your life?"UPI/Bettmann via Getty ImagesMcCartney says shared experiences and stories helped to cement his bond with LennonHe found the answer through lo-fi, experimental albums like McCartney and McCartney II, and the jet-stream rock of his 1970s band Wings.