FEATURE:
Paul McCartney at Eighty
Thirty-Nine: When I'm Sixty-Four: Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full at Fifteen
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FOR the penultimate part…
PHOTO CREDIT: Søren Solkær
of my forty-run series on Paul McCartney ahead of his eightieth birthday, I am focusing on an album that turns fifteen on 4th June. My final feature will be about my thoughts and experiences of his music. The reason I wanted to write about Memory Almost Full, is because it remains one of best solo albums – thought it is massively underrated and deserves some fresh listening and reviews. I cannot understand why so many have given it mixed reception, as there are some cracking songs on the album! I have already done a couple of anniversary features – about Tug of War (1982) and Flaming Pie (1997) -, but there is another interesting aspect to Memory Almost Full. A lot of its seems to be about mortality and growing older. There are nods back to McCartney’s past. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band turned fifty-five last month. One of McCartney’s songs, When I’m Sixty Four, springs to mind. Macca was sixty-four when Memory Almost Full came out. I like the idea of this man who once thought being sixty-four was an old age releasing an album at that age full of vigour, range and life! Now he is almost eighty, I wonder how he thinks about albums like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Memory Almost Full. His fourteenth solo album is one of those that people need to hear and spend time with!
Even if the title reference’s McCartney’s mobile phone saying that its memory was almost full, the album is deep and has some hugely moving songs. Memory Almost Full was produced by David Kahne and recorded at Abbey Road Studios, Henson Recording Studios, AIR Studios, Hog Hill Mill Studios and RAK Studios between October 2003, and from 2006 to February 2007. At this time, McCartney was working with Nigel Godrich on a very different album: the superb and stronger-reviewed Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. I cannot find any press interviews with McCartney around the album. There is some Wikipedia information, sourcing McCartney discussing Memory Almost Full on an official website for the album:
“In the website constructed for the album, McCartney stated: "I actually started this album, Memory Almost Full, before my last album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, released September 2005. (...) When I was just finishing up everything concerned with Chaos and had just got the Grammy nominations (2006) I realised I had this album to go back to and finish off. So I got it out to listen to it again, wondering if I would enjoy it, but actually I really loved it. All I did at first was just listen to a couple of things and then I began to think, 'OK, I like that track – now, what is wrong with it?' And it might be something like a drum sound, so then I would re-drum and see where we would get to. (...) In places it's a very personal record and a lot of it is retrospective, drawing from memory, like memories from being a kid, from Liverpool and from summers gone. The album is evocative, emotional, rocking, but I can't really sum it up in one sentence”.
Songs like Vintage Clothes, Mr. Bellamy, Ever Present Past, Gratitude and The End of the End makes it essential listening! It is interested how, in AllMusic’s review, they also mention my observation about Memory Almost Full/Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band/When I’m Sixty Four:
“Allusion to the digital world though it may be, there's a sweet, elegiac undercurrent to the title of Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full, an acknowledgement that it was written and recorded when McCartney was 64, the age he mythologized on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released almost exactly 40 years before Memory. Certainly, McCartney has mortality on the mind, but this isn't an entirely unusual occurrence for him in this third act of his solo career. Ever since his wife Linda's death from cancer in 1998, he's been dancing around the subject, peppering Flaming Pie with longing looks back, grieving by throwing himself into the past on the covers album Run Devil Run, slowly coming to terms with his status as the old guard on the carefully ruminative Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. But if that previous record was precise, bearing all the hallmarks of meticulous producer Nigel Godrich, Memory Almost Full is startlingly bright and frequently lively, an album that embraces McCartney's unerring gift for melody. Yet for as pop as it is, this is not an album made with any illusion that Paul will soon have a succession of hit singles: it's an art-pop album, not unlike either of the McCartney albums. Sometimes this is reflected in the construction --- the quick succession of short songs at the end, uncannily (and quite deliberately) sounding like a suite -- sometimes in the lyrics, but the remarkable thing is that McCartney never sounds self-consciously pretentious here, as if he's striving to make a major statement. Rather, he's quietly taking stock of his life and loves, his work and achievements. Unlike latter-day efforts by Johnny Cash or the murky Daniel Lanois-produced albums by Bob Dylan, mortality haunts the album, but there's no fetishization of death. Instead, McCartney marvels at his life -- explicitly so in the disarmingly guileless "That Was Me," where he enthuses about his role in a stage play in grammar school with the same vigor as he boasts about playing the Cavern Club with the Beatles -- and realizes that when he reaches "The End of the End," he doesn't want anything more than the fond old stories of his life to be told”.
Reaching the top five here and in the U.S., Memory Almost Full was a commercial success. It showed that, forty-five after he started recorded/working with The Beatles, there was still so much love and demand for McCartney’s music. In terms of the songwriting quality, I feel Memory Almost Full is one of his most nuanced and eclectic albums. The fact so many songs hark back to the past suggest that he was both looking at brighter times – McCartney was experiencing marital issues at the time; his divorce from Heather Mills was finalised in 2008 – and reflecting on ageing and the future. This is what Entertainment Weekly said in their review:
“Paul McCartney isn’t about to let a little thing like a contentious divorce send him on a bleak confessional bender. He opens Memory Almost Full, his 21st solo album, in fancy-free fashion, pulling out the mandolin and inviting pals over to ”Dance Tonight” (an alternative gala to Dancing With the Stars?). Still, now that he’s 64, even rock’s most sanguine superstar is ultimately drifting toward weightier thoughts on mortality and the passing of time. Many of these Memory pieces have Macca taking stock of a pretty cool life that ”went by in a flash” or, in ”End of the End,” serenely anticipating his own final curtain. It’s his version of Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind…if Time Out of Mind had cutthroat pop instincts and whistling solos.
Any Starbucks employee who’ll be forced to spin this nonstop — since Memory‘s the flagship release on the chain’s new label — should take heart: McCartney’s ruminating has somehow inspired his zestiest music in eons. ”If fate decreed that all of this would make a lifetime, who am I to disagree?” he yowls in ”That Was Me.” The lyrics are nostalgic, but the music avoids the self-consciously Beatlesque touches of his other recent discs, freeing him up to make the equivalent of a great Wings album (a quality you’ll recognize as soon as you hear ”Only Mama Knows,” a rocker with a distinctly ”Jet” engine). His best record since 1989’s Flowers in the Dirt, Memory is beautifully elegiac and surprisingly caffeinated”.
A terrific Paul McCartney that everyone, fan or not, should check out, I wanted to use this penultimate eightieth birthday/anniversary feature to urge some reappraisal ahead of the fifteenth anniversary of Memory Almost Full. On 4th June, two weeks before Macca’s eightieth birthday, one of his underrated gems of an album is fifteen. I hope that it provokes people to listen to and realise, after so many years as a songwriter, he had this capacity and innate ability to surprise. Maybe it should not be a shock that a then-sixty-four-year-old would release an album with such phenomenal songs. The greatest songwriter who has ever lived, Paul McCartney is so incredibly musical and curious. Ideas and inspiration flow out of him! For any McCartney fans that might not have heard Memory Almost Full, it is an album that I can definitely recommend. Solid and filled with remarkable moments, I am almost now at the end of this forty-feature run to celebrate the master’s birthday on 18th June. One of the most interesting Paul McCartney releases, it only showed that age could never dampen or distil his incredible talents! That is one reason why he is…
SUCH a legend.