Egypt Station: A headphones-for-an-hour trip

With a little more than a week to go, it becomes slowly clear what we can expect from Paul McCartney's new album Egypt Station. It's a concept album inspired by a painting he made in the late 1980’s: 

What I thought was, these days you got the big stars like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and those people, their albums are in a way a collection of singles, you know, they’re all great, commercial tracks. But it doesn’t kind of roll through like a Pink Floyd album used to, or a Beatles album. So I thought, well, I can’t compete with that kind of Taylor Swift thing. She got better legs than me! But maybe what I can do, is a sort of what we used to call a concept album. So it is an album, that if you want to, you can go listen to it all the way, it should roll through and take you somewhere. (…) If you want to do the headphones-for-an-hour trip, you can do it with this album.

The album consists of sixteen tracks; hereby an overview of all the new songs, based on some interviews and the first reviews:



Opening Station
The opening track is one of the two under-one-minute instrumental, consisting of ambient sounds like you are sort of in a station. Then a choir swells out of it where after it goes into the first song.

That started with a choir piece that Paul had worked out on the keyboard. Then we brought in David Campbell to help arrange the choir. We went into a cathedral to record that, which was really cool. It started with us in the studio. Paul had worked out some chords that he wanted the voices to do. Then we started creating different ambient noises, some of which came from tape loops. He had a little portable reel-to-reel player, the one they used on Revolver for “Tomorrow Never Knows.” That was done on this little Brenell tape machine. We created some of the sounds on that, like slowing down guitars.

Greg Kurstin 

I wanted to open it with sounds of a station, which is a nod to Sgt. Pepper’s, (with) the sounds of a concert hall. I played it to Geoff Emmerick actually, when we were in LA and he said: “That reminds us of something, doesn’t it?” and I said “Yup”. So it’s a tribute to that.”

I Don’t Know
Where Opening Station is a tribute to the legendary Beatles album, is the production of I Don’t Know inspired by the Sgt. Pepper-era. McCartney discovered at the time of Sgt. Pepper’s 50th anniversary that he had used no less than four pianos on Penny Lane. A little trick that he repeated here by again dubbing several pianos.
The song is, certainly to the standard of the optimistic McCartney, one of his most gloomy tracks from his entire career.

That’s a grown-up song. (…) There was a private occasion – I’m not gonna get into it – that brought me down. “God, what am I doing wrong?” I’m not knocking it, I have a great life. But from time to time, reality intrudes. This was one of those occasions where it was like “Oh fuck me…”. The only thing I could do was sit down at the piano. (…) I didn’t really know what to do about it, other than write a song. So I wrote the song and then felt I had more of an idea what to do. You write out your demons. It felt good to just say “I don’t know what to do”. It’s like owning up.

Come On To Me
Like on his previous album New, Egypt Station contains songs with Macca completely solo as well as tracks with his live band playing along. Come On To Me is one of the songs on which Paul Wickens, Abe Laboriel jr., Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray participate.

Happy With You
This is a very simple, light bouncy song with not much production, comparable, according to one review, to Mother Nature Son. Another review mentions McCartney ‘doing what could only be described as a McCartney-version of beat-boxing throughout the song’. Happy With You is reflective, where Paul is looking at his past, but in the end it turns out to be a love song for his wife Nancy:

I sat around all day
I liked to get stoned
I used to get wasted
But these days I don’t
‘Cos I’m Happy With You
We’ve got lots of good things to do

That’s a very simple acoustic song. It’s one of my favorites on the album, actually. It’s some acoustic and then I think he doubles it on electric guitar. He compressed it on the Fairchild, which was a real Beatles technique. I’m a music nerd, so I love to geek out on stuff like that. It’s so fun. And the song has such a simple little melody. I love it.

Greg Kurstin 

Who Cares
Another track with Macca’s full touring band. It’s described as a bit of a self-empowerment rocker, including his by Little Richard inspired screaming voice. Growling with real intensity, Paul is asking "Who cares what the idiots say? Who cares what the idiots do?"

Fuh You
There’s already said a lot about this song. But for those who don’t like it, and criticize its contemporary sound, there is some good news: In several reviews Fuh You is described as ‘out of place’ from everything else on the album, or as a 'minor detour'. In other words, Fuh You is not representative to the rest of the album. 
It’s the only song not produced by Greg Kurstin, because he was double-booked at some point during recording the album. This track was produced and co-written by Ryan Tedder (OneRepublic).

I liked Ryan, rung him up and we chatted. He said, ‘What do you hope to get out of this?’. I was like, oh I don’t know. And then I thought, come on Paul, don’t be so shy. So I said, ‘A hit?’ And he was like ‘Yeah! Now you’re talking my language! The world loves a hit!’ So that was our brief. To do something commercial. In a week, we ended up with three songs and one of them was Fuh You. (…) It’s only a fun song anyway. It’s not trying to be important.

Confidante
The only song on the album with mostly just McCartney on his own. A simple acoustic track.

Confidante is a song which I wrote to my guitar, that may sounds strange but… well it’s one of my perversions… I write to guitars. I have to explain it, because it sounds like a break up song, about someone I don’t like. But it isn’t. 

People Want Peace
One of the tracks on which Paul is playing almost all of the instruments by himself from piano, bass, drums, guitars to harpsichord and even ankle bells.

It was one of these things where we needed some extra percussion instruments. We had these little bells and he put them around his ankles. He was just having fun, but he was like, “Let’s record these bells as a percussion instrument.” It was just a random idea, but he was dancing around for the length of the song during two or three takes.

Greg Kurstin 

It was something my dad said when I was a kid: ‘The people want peace, it’s the politicians who mess it up.’ And that’s held pretty true.” 

Hand in Hand
A classy, delicate McCartney piano-ballad, backed, with a touch of acoustic guitar, Indian flutes, a pair of cellists and a frail and small vocal.

Dominoes
Dominoes is a mid-tempo, acoustic-driven pop song featuring Paul on nearly everything, redolent of late-period Wings. It's hook-filled in a way that simply screams McCartney, with a lyric that cleverly looks both forward and backward simultaneously.



Back in Brazil
An up-tempo Latin jazz-ish and sunny, breezy track which took some time to record:

I’m really proud of Back in Brazil. (…) That was one of the first songs that we recorded and we probably did four or five different versions until we got the version that we ended up with. It was one of the trickier ones to get the feel of, to get the drum groove and all that stuff. It started out as something very different than what it became. But I’m really happy with it. It has the clarinets playing the electric-piano part. It started out with electric piano and drums and the whole band, and then we stripped it all down and built it all up with orchestra instruments. When it really came to life for me was when we brought in [composer] Alan Broadbent and he helped with the arrangement. He did the strings and the clarinets and the flute and stuff like that. I like the arrangements he did on that. (…) We spent ages not quite getting it and finally to get a version that worked was really satisfying.”

Greg Kurstin 

It's one of the album's biggest productions with a string quartet, a full orchestra, a huge choir, Pedro Eustache on flute and duduk, Abe Laboriel on drums, and Paul on everything else—from guitars to various keys to congas.

Do It Now
One of the favorite tracks of producer Greg Kurstin: “A song like Do It Now knocked me out”. One review compared it with Wind Chimes by The Beach Boys:

Caesar Rock
A roaring rock song, featuring drumming by both Paul and Abe Laboriel Jr. According to one review the track “would've been right at home on Electric Arguments”.

Despite Repeated Warnings
The album’s seven minutes long centerpiece is a song consisting of several sections, like we know from songs like Band on the Run and Live and Let Die. The song with lyrics like ‘The Captain won’t be listening’ or ‘Those who shout the loudest, may not always be the smartest’ has some political references and is above all about Paul’s worries about climate change:

Trump is in there, not Brexit. It was written before Brexit. But Trump definitely. It’s more about anyone who would deny climate change. You know, I’m married to an American, I go to America a lot and I have a lot of American family, American friends… and we tend to be liberal. But there’s one or two you don’t talk to if you’re out having dinner, ‘cos you know they’re gonna stick up for him. I don’t want to be an activist particularly, but if I feel there’s an injustice I want to get myself heard. Putting this guy (Scott) Pruitt in charge of the (US) environmental agency, a guy who fought against it when he was in office – it’s so insane!”

He took the band into the rehearsal room and worked out the structure of it and brought it to L.A. and I worked with them and we tweaked it and worked out the arrangement. It was a long evolution to get it to where it got in the end. A lot of orchestral musicians came in. We had brass players and the Muscle Shoals horn guys came in to do some brass stuff. It was quite the job of getting that together because it was like five or six songs in one.”

Greg Kurstin 

Station II
This track seems to be a kind of reprise of Opening Station with ambient sounds and a choir.

Hunt You Down /Naked/C-Link
The closer on the album is a straight-up rock number. As the name suggests Hunt You Down/Naked/C-Link is really three tracks in one, as we’ve seen McCartney doing it several times before in his career. Think of Abbey Road, Red Rose Speedway or Memory Almost Full. The first part is rock with “riffs and rhythms that make you want to move”. The second part is a little lighter with some fun musical interludes, while the third part is a bluesy instrumental “closing the album in a style that brings to mind a smoky basement barroom on the south side of Chicago”

After reading all the quite positive reviews that have been published so far, we can expect another exceptional album by McCartney. 

Related Posts:

Egypt Station Producer Greg Kurstin: “He’s Pushing The Boundaries”
New McCartney Album Inspired By Sgt. Pepper
Eight Sex-Related Songs By McCartney

André Homan

André Homan is a Dutch writer and journalist.

Nieuwere post Oudere post