The Voice

It is busy in the supermarket when I suddenly hear a voice that I recognize. The background music is soft and it is noisy. I put my basket aside, because I don’t know the song. With some effort I understand a few words of what should be the chorus. Later at home I find out that I was treated to a rare B-side from the nineties. McCartney has such an recognizable and familiar voice that you almost forget how special it is.

His vocal abilities are widely highly valued: search the Internet for lists of the best singer of all time, and you'll find him consistently in the top ten, with an eleventh place in the Rolling Stone top hundred. It is not so much the scope that makes his voice particular; McCartney is a tenor with an above average range of four octaves. What makes McCartney's vocals unique is a one word catch: versatility. Because he is uniquely able to adapt his voice to any music whatsoever. Very convenient, moreover, for someone who shows the same versatility as a composer. Whether it is a solid rocker, ballad, folk, jazz, country, music hall, or whatever kind of music he has done, he can adjust his voice on it.



A good example is a recording session for the album Help! in 1965. Two album tracks and a single are recorded in one day. Listen and you'll hear three very different voices: The delicate, mournful one on Yesterday, country during I've Just Seen a Face and in I'm Down McCartney uses his screaming voice. Much more variation during one session is hard to imagine.

Video: The Beatles - I'm Down (live)

McCartney could have been a great voice actor, because he is uniquely able to play with his voice. It’s something he already did for fun in his childhood and you can hear him doing it in the songs for the two cartoons he made, We All Stand Together and the lesser known Tropical Island Hum. In the latter he takes multiple vocals of several cameos on his behalf, including English accents as cockney, American and Jamaican. And he knows to use this talent by placing the right feeling in his songs. That makes his narrative songs such as Eleanor Rigby and She's Leaving Home seem so credible.

Video: Tropical Island Hum

He also isn’t cautions to use technical tricks. If he wants to sound younger during When I'm 64, he simply accelerate the audio track a bit, so his voice goes up half an octave. As for him, producers can’t go far enough to get the right sound:

I said to producers and engineers: 'People are always too respectful of my voice. It’s nice to be respectful, but they sort of think ‘It’s Paul McCartney’s voice, we’ve got to record it just as it is'. But I’m going ‘No, we can speed it up, we can do crazy things, put it through a thing, and make an effect or something’. When you listen to The Beatles-records, you’ll hear we’ve always done that. Because there was no respect, hahaha!”

The use of technology offers more opportunities to him. For example the sound of seagulls in Lennon's Tomorrow Never Knows is in real McCartney's laughter, which becomes completely unrecognizable by the accelerate, decelerate and again accelerate the recording tape. In the same way McCartney's voice is used on the hit single Four Five Seconds, with Kanye West and Rihanna in 2015. There are just a few lines, but so distorted that it sounds like Rihanna could’ve sung it as well. Although McCartney has played no further role after the recordings, he probably would have been content with it.

Also typical McCartney: he is using his voice frequently as a kind of extra musical instrument. For example, the bass line on I Will isn’t played by a bass guitar, but sung. Or, if you listen to guitar solos, you can occasionally

hear him humming along, as clearly audible during the solo single Fine Line (2005). And the term "human beat box" may not exist yet in the sixties, it's exactly what the Beatles are doing during Ob-la-di Ob-la-da.

McCartney made the best impressions with his screaming voice, which strongly influenced by Little Richard; In fact, McCartney once explained, he does a Little Richard imitation, something the American likes to remind him time after time. McCartney:

I could do Little Richard's voice-which is a wild, hoarse, screaming thing, it's like an out-of-body experience. You have to leave your current Sensibilities and go about a foot above your head to sing it

Video: Wings - Long Tall Sally

But the student has surpassed the master with songs like Helter Skelter, I've Got a Feeling and Maybe I'm Amazed. His inimitable voice on Monk Berry MoonDelight, from the album Ram, arguably is his best track when it comes to his screaming voice. And how hard and raw he sometimes sounds, McCartney's trademark is audible here as well: the ever-present strong melody line. And as the perfectionist he is, he takes his screaming voice very seriously: He is spending days to get his voice as raw as possible on the Abbey Road-track Oh! Darling: Every day, early in the morning, he does one attempt:

When we were recording Oh! Darling I came into the studios early every day for a week to sing it by myself because at first my voice was too clear. I wanted it to sound as though I'd been performing it on stage all week.

In 2012 McCartney proves he still got it when he records Cut Me Some Slack with former Nirvana members Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear: Although at age, he is seventy at the time, his screaming voice hasn’t lost much strength. It brings him a Grammy Award for Best Rock Song of the year.

Video: Cut Me Some Slack

Aside from Little Richard, Elvis and the Everly Brothers inspired him for his way of singing. Also clearly audible is the influence of Buddy Holly: McCartney's well known 'Oooooh' originates from him. And his father Jim has

contributed as well, by learning his son at a young age to sing along with backing vocals. And he is still learning. When he is recording the jazz album Kisses on the Bottom, consisting of standards from the American Songbook, he finds out that his usual way of singing doesn’t work in this genre. He needed to find a different approach: "It is not really my world, so I had to find my way in."

Nowadays you can hear that his voice is aging. Especially at live concerts it is increasingly notable, although his band supports him vocally very well, especially drummer Abe Laboriel jr. They may disguise the change, but some songs starting to sound more labored. McCartney still sings his songs in the original pitch, this in contrast to most of its peers that are still active. But the question is how long it lasts.

In the studio, his aging voice is less a problem. A recording can be done again and again, up to infinity. Besides, the old voice adds a new dimension to his already wide arsenal. On the song Early Days from his latest album NEW  the old McCartney can be clearly heard for the first time. The song is about Lennon and McCartney’s teens, a song by an old man looking back on his childhood; And that’s exactly how it sounds. In the final version producer Ethan Jones used the very first recording take, especially because it comes across as incredibly honest. And that is precisely the strength of McCartney's voice in any music genre whatsoever: he sounds sincere.

Video: Early Days

Related Posts:
Drummer Boy McCartney

The Lead Guitarist

The Bass Player

André Homan

André Homan is a Dutch writer and journalist.

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