Paul McCartney thinks of life in sounds. Not just notes and chords, as one might expect of the lifelong musician. He sees the world as an aural library of memories. “I still remember that sound,” he sings in his latest album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane. Now exactly two decades older than his once far-away milestone, “When I’m Sixty Four”, McCartney has much more to archive.
There’s a litany of work dissecting the Beatle‘s life and songwriting process, from seven-story museums to eight-hour documentaries, but McCartney himself remains the best narrator of that story. “Step right up and take a look,” he beckons in the album, inviting listeners to “come inside my mind”. What follows is less a memoir than a scrapbook, patched together through snippets of conversation, flashes of a scene, and sounds that linger in his mind long after the moments have passed.
The Boys of Dungeon Lane is built from remembered details. A bus screeching to a stop as the light turns red, a child’s laugh rippling above the street noise from the playground, a clock softly ticking over the kitchen table—all bring him back to specific memories, which become lyrical fodder for his songs. He doesn’t divulge the full plot, but he doesn’t need to. The details bring out the feeling of being inside the story, nonetheless.
McCartney’s sonic philosophy reveals itself from the album’s opening chord. A discordant, jocular set of notes—D, C, E flat, and B—layer on top of one another, clustered so close on the staff that they resist resolution. The result is something effortlessly whimsical, as if a hand might’ve brushed across the guitar strings at random. In a sense, it has. When McCartney sits down to write a song, “one of the things I do lately is just put my fingers on the piano and see if it’s good”, he told the Guardian. Using that technique for “As You Lie There”, he chose a found chord to crack open the album, letting its meaning arrive behind it.
That’s not to say the veteran songwriter’s work is random. The following notes in “As You Lie There” are actually the perfect preview of what’s to come: starting slow and sweet, it quickly devolves into gritty yet buoyant rock, while documenting an innocuous piece of his past we’ve somehow—despite all the existing works that pick apart the Fab Four’s lives—not heard about yet. The result is an album orchestrated not around an attempt to preserve the story itself, but around his assured understanding of how memories live on in the vivid cues in our lives and the emotions they draw out.
That perspective shapes the records’ many returns to Paul McCartney’s early days in Liverpool. The album title nods to the street where McCartney and George Harrison spent their childhoods, and where McCartney, the future Wings leader, did his bird watching.
Beatlemaniacs will love “Home to Us”, in which McCartney gets a little help from his friend Ringo Starr, trading lines back and forth in a charming track about growing up on the Mersey Shore. The down-home, free-wheeling “Down South” reflects on hitchhiking with Harrison and John Lennon before fame found them: “It was a good way to gеt to know you, before we learned to twist and shout.” Using little more than his voice and a simple acoustic six-string, McCartney draws on textures that evoke the feeling of sitting right next to the teenage Beatles, enduring the bumpy bus ride and the conversations about guitars and rock and roll that started it all.
Beyond its subject matter, the acoustics of memory are even folded into the album’s construction. “Life Can Be Hard” draws on the drumline in the foursome’s 1968 “Rocky Raccoon”, an idea from McCartney’s co-producer, Andrew Watt, that adds an eclectic snare in all the right, offbeat places. McCartney’s Sussex studio is essentially an active archive of the Beatles’ original gear. The plaintive and winding “We Two,” for example, was recorded on the same Studer four-track recorder they used to spin out hits like “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. Virtually every instrument on this album, aside from the Starr duet, is played by McCartney, too, ever in pursuit of the right sound.
Of course, any new work late in a legacy artist’s career could risk falling flat among years of hits or becoming yet another tour of familiar landmarks by relying on nostalgia, and plenty of them have. The Boys of Dungeon Lane flirts with both at times through its copious Beatles references, but it largely avoids either fate because its attention remains grounded in the senses rather than the story.
In “Days We Left Behind”, gentle guitar and piano settle behind McCartney’s wistful falsetto as he thumbs through black-and-white photographs of “smoky bars and cheap guitars” but finds “nothing built to last”. Even if physically ephemeral, “no one can erase the days we left behind”, he assures us, acknowledging that while they are best in the rearview, they’re not gone.
A few tracks also help escape that trap by indulging McCartney as the bard he’s always been, with lyrics seemingly not about real life at all. “Mountain Top”, a toytown psychedelic track about a girl tripping at a music festival (“Magic mushrooms peeping through, Seem to want to talk and say hello”), walks in the delightfully nonsensical footsteps of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and “I Am the Walrus”. “Momma Gets By” is perhaps the melancholic sister of “Lady Madonna”, about a fictional woman working hard to keep her family afloat. Sung from the perspective of her son, the track admires her perseverance over billowing strings, but McCartney insists it is not autobiographical (for that, look to “Salesman Saint”).
Throughout the record, McCartney’s instrumentation is exemplary, but the most revealing one may be his voice. He flips between delicate reediness and gravelly spunk, and carries the same unmistakable bright diction as he did 60 years ago. Still, a slight waver is present, a weathering that comes with age, adding emotional weight and the tune of time passing to his description of the days left behind.
However, his songs are not entirely retrospective. He also considers the act of making memories in real time, suggesting his understanding of making the present count is informed by his past. “Ripples in the Pond” is a spirited rock song about his wife, Nancy Shevell, that twists and turns like riding along in the undulation of calm water just disturbed. “Life Can Be Hard”, a gossamer track meant to spur hope (“but that’s when we start, to put it together again,” the chorus encourages), was inspired by spending time with Shevell and her family during the coronavirus lockdown.
His songwriting, above all, feels like pure Paul McCartney. There’s a bit of everything: his classic hypnotic whimsy that conjures the boyishness of the album’s title, the exquisite rock balladry that dotted his midlife, and the vaudevillian “granny music” that Lennon famously poked fun at but that always rises to the top.
Paul McCartney says he didn’t consciously build the album around any one topic. Commonalities arguably run throughout, but he worried at first about a lack of thematic harmony, he told the audience at an early listening session. Then again, “you remember the Beatles albums,” he said, smiling as he also reflected. “We didn’t worry about that.” To this Beatle, perhaps what’s more important has always been scoring our lives with sounds that we, too, will always remember. Eighty-four years later, that alchemy remains intact.