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Sun 2 August 2026 2:00, UK
From the moment The Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney was always going to do whatever the hell he wanted.
He didn’t want to be limited to one kind of sound for the rest of his life, and throughout his entire career, he has tended to be ahead of the curve when it comes to some of his greatest songs, whether it’s him defying the trends of the day or making tunes that wouldn’t be appreciated until years after the fact. There are many moments where he hit the nail on the head, but people have never forgiven him for being corny every now and again.
And Macca was never going to apologise for it, either. He lived for the bright side of life, and when you look at the way that he and John Lennon worked together, that’s half the reason why they were perfect partners. Lennon was the realist who was looking at the uglier side of life and holding a mirror up to society, while McCartney was the one telling all of us that we could take a sad song and make it better all the time.
That’s what made their tunes so magical, but there were moments where McCartney’s saccharine songs could get the better of him. There are more than a few times where his bandmates have talked about being sick of tunes like ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, and when he started working on songs that sounded like they were from the 1920s, it’s not like the rest of the band were particularly thrilled about it or anything.
Lennon had little tolerance for his partner’s ‘granny shit’ music, but that nostalgic bug never left him, even when he started his solo career. His debut was a lot more raw than what everyone expected, but when he got a better handle on what Wings was going to be, it wasn’t hard for him to write tunes like ‘You Gave Me The Answer’ and ‘Baby’s Request’, both of which sound like they should be soundtracking some black and white dance sequence.
It could have come off as cringy, but McCartney knew better than to go full tilt into that style of music. He didn’t need to be the person who was making the songs of yesteryear, but as the years go by, anyone can get nostalgic every now and again, and McCartney felt that it was the perfect time for him to go back to his roots when making the standards album Kisses on the Bottom.
Making an album of jazz songs wasn’t out of the question for rock stars of his generation, but he felt that the songs were what really drove him to make an entire album based around this style of music, saying, “In the end, it was ‘Look, if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it. When I kind of got into songwriting, I realised how well-structured these songs were. I always thought artists like Fred Astaire were very cool. Writers like Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, all of those guys – I just thought the songs were magical. And then, as I got to be a songwriter, I thought it’s beautiful, the way they made those songs.”
Further reading: From The Vault
And for someone who had been dreaming about this kind of job his entire life, McCartney does a great job at getting every song to sound perfect. He knew that he wasn’t going to be going for cool points whenever his rock and roll fans heard about the record, but this was his chance to embrace his inner crooner and make the kind of tunes that Frank Sinatra would have been proud to have sung back in the day.
There are still some McCartney originals for people who wanted to hear what he could do, but Kisses on the Bottom was never supposed to be a pure McCartney affair. This was him trying on a new musical costume, and after years of playing a rock and roll star that has soundtracked the world for decades, this new suit actually fits him quite well.
