McCartney’s Medleys: Looking For New Ways Of Writing

It is a recurring phenomenon among McCartney's songs: the medleys. The first, and best known, is of course on Abbey Road. But there are more: on the album Memory Almost Full there is one, Egypt Station ends with a medley, just like Red Rose Speedway, of which the re-issue will be released next week.

Well, I kind of like the idea of medleys, as it’s structured. It’s sort of operatic, you know. And it’s good fun putting things like this together, finding little links and ways to go from this to that. We had done it on the Abbey Road album, at the end. And what we’d done there was John and I both had bits of songs that we hadn’t finished. So we put them into a medley and it worked. So this was me doing it again.

But hidden here and there are actually many more medleys to be found, packed in one single song. More than once McCartney combines different songs, or bits and pieces of songs, into a completely new composition. The most famous example is Band On The Run, which actually consists of three parts. Less known to the general public is The Pound Is Sinking, from the 1982 album Tug Of War, which is also composed of three different songs. And Despite Repeated Warnings from Egypt Station is the most recent example. In an interview on his website, McCartney explains that this way of working to forge different songs into one new whole has been born more or less from necessity; through a persistent urge to keep renewing itself:

It’s just interesting finding new ways to write a song - especially when you write as many as I do. I mean, I notice looking back at The Beatles, that we never really did the same song twice. It’s interesting, you’ve got ‘Please Please Me’, and then we don’t do another ‘Please Please Me’. Our next song changes, and then the next changes again. And that happened with all the singles. Whereas, other bands like The Supremes, it was a bit of a formula: ‘Stop! In The Name Of Love’, ‘Baby Love’. You know, it was a conscious decision to avoid the formula thing. And so if you do that you have to look for new ways of writing songs.

Related Posts:

Abbey Road Medley

Red Rose Speedway

Read more about the Red Rose Speedway Archive Collection in my Paul McCartney 2018 Fanbook, only available at Macca-News: 

click here to order now!

André Homan

André Homan is a Dutch writer and journalist.

Nieuwere post Oudere post