Paul McCartney/Wings-song by song thread

Agreed.
While I would never call it’s true predecessor POP dull and lifeless, in some ways PTP is it’s exact opposite.
A very fresh sounding album.

 

Lets agree to disagree on that matter

 

Press To Play is great. I consider it to be better than Pipes, Flowers and Off The Ground. Lyrically it's weak at times, but I've never understood the complaints about the production. Yeah, the 80's pop sound has mostly aged like milk, but PTP is nowhere near the worst offender in that regard. The song Press, despite the lame lyrics, sounds as vibrant now than ever. Plus after Pipes, It's nice to hear him rocking again on Angry and Move Over Busker. "BUT I'M IMPATIENT!" Excellent stuff.

 

I agree.

 

Yes, I should have specified that I was referring to the US charts. By this point Paul's US and UK chart performance had diverged pretty significantly (though of course there were differences earlier, too, e.g. Mull of Kintyre).

 

Talk More Talk is really Paul scraping the bottom of the barrel. It's him desperately trying to sound cool and current and totally not pulling it off. The song itself isn't good enough to be worth including on any album, and the self-consciousness of the production and arrangement is just embarrassing.

 

Wouldn’t call it ‘excellent’ myself, but it sounds as if Paul ‘moved on’ from the post-Lennon struggles.
No mega-star to be found here (Costello’s around the corner, but that’s from a different kettle of fish) and it sounds as if he found a new purpose, be it the possibilities of the (then) modern production -whatever you might think about it- or a new well of inspiration. PTP might be many things, but the last thing I personally hear is a struggling artist suffering from malaise.

 

Chris definitely got around.

I remember seeing his name on numerous album liner notes, including Son Of Dracula [as most of those tracks were recycled from Nilsson Schmilsson and Son Of Schmilsson]..

And he also played on the "Original Concept Recording" of Jesus Christ Superstar, along with... Henry McCulloch!

 

Agree
It s more Monte Python than Peter Gabriel
Unintentionally I guess

 

Next one
Footprints
There are a few good songs on the album. This is one of them. Perhaps the best song to come out of the collabration between Paul and Eric Stewart. Yvonne is another good one -never officially released by Paul but instead by 10cc
Ok it s a good song with nice lyrics and some great melodic patterns so all is well then?
Unfortunately no-this great song is all but spoilers by in-necessary and clumsy sound-effects. To bad but the more acoustic take without all the disturbance lucklily exists

“Footprints” is a song from 1986 album “Press To Play“.

From “Club Sandwich 42 – Autumn 1986“:
“It came from an image of a magpie looking for food out in the snow. Eric and I changed the magpie into an old man, although the magpie came back for the third verse. The old man is out there looking for Yule logs or something, like the character in ‘Good King Wenceslas’.. .The song goes into what his story might have been, the heartaches there might have been…” Indeed, the lines ‘His heart keeps aching in the same old way/He can’t help feeling that she might come back some day‘ recall the sentiments and melodic sweep of ‘Another Day‘. A Spanish guitar sparkles and there’s even a spinet, a small harpsichord with a string for each note more readily associated with Sir John Betjeman than Paul McCartney.
Eric Stewart, from CultureSonar, December 3, 2018:

[…] You’ve probably heard this story: I went to his place telling him how beautiful it was walking through three feet of snow with the sun shining. He started singing “it’s beautiful outside” which became “Footprints.” An amazing experience for me! […]

 

For those who have not noticed.
We have now reached page 200 on this thread so I would like to say a great Thank you to all the great music minds who have kept this seemingly impossible project goin

 

Thank YOU for keeping it positive and civilised! I expected worse when this thread started ...

Footprints 2.5/5 ~ A good song, unfortunately another victim of the cheap sounding production. Too bad! I have to look for those alternate takes some day.

 

Footprints - See Stranglehold

 

I'm not going to bother going song-by-song, but, I bought the CD when it came out and I find the album to be pretty good. "I don't know why so many people dislike it.

 

Yes, thanks to you Bemagnus for steering this thread along with enthusiasm and insight.

Footprints is an enjoyable if not top-tier tune, which succeeds in evoking a wintry atmosphere and features some lovely acoustic guitar playing. It provides a pleasant interlude between the upbeat and 80s-sounding first three tracks (crashing snares and all!) and the more traditional Macca power ballad.

It's a solid 3/5 for me.

 

Great album.

 

I called Paul on the phone to tell him this. He was pissed that ' Wings Over America ' wasn't discussed.

 

Footprints is a fine song, probably my fave on the record along with Pretty Little Head.

 

In fact WOA introduced to many Wings songs because it was one of the first I got from them. Same with Wings Greatest.

 

That's interesting given how different they are.

 

Footprints: 3/5

This song which easily could have just been him on guitar received a very complex series of percussion instruments stitched together creating the rhythm of the song. This method is also used to some degree in Talk More Talk (drum track), Press (with breathy voice bits), etc. This ballad is pretty different for Paul as it’s very sad, almost hollow in its emotion. Much like Hand In Hand is later on Egypt Station. There is stark bleakness to it. The lush “white blanket” melodies do not add enough warmth to melt the ice here. I do think this song suffers the most from over-production on the album. I appreciate the complex rhythm bed but at the same time, he could have played up the stark nature of the song perhaps without so much stuff layered on top.

 

Exactley
With a stripped down acoustic arrangement and perhaps some percussion and strings this could have been a grand track. The delicate melody and subtle lyrics doesn t need the imo clumsy effects.

 

Happy Birthday Bemagnus, I hope you have a ….wait a minute. No really, congrats on a very smooth 200 pages. I'm always on here reading if I'm not posting. I was hesitant with the commitment and I commented it would take a few years but time has flown and we're moving and grooving well. I know there's a been a lot of criticism when you add it all up but you and everyone has remained civilized like everyone else said already. I know we're all Paul fans so if we don't like a song or an album, there's so much in the catalog, it doesn't matter.

 

I agree on some level but it would have been the easy way out to do this. It's been done. He's done it quite a few times now. I like how Paul didn't paint by numbers with this album. He really did try some different things out. Different sounds, different styles, songs he wouldn't normally have written. Chords he wouldn't normally have used.

This is why I really consider P2P to be an experimental album for Paul much in the same vein as his Fireman works. And I applaud him for this. YES, not all of it worked out so great but that doesn't take away the charm and appeal these songs have. As @kaztor said a few posts ago, this album still sounds fresh. It isn't locked up in the 80s despite all this overproduction 80s blah blah we talk about. It's such a different sounding thing for Paul that we cannot compare it to something else and so it doesn't age or get boring.

I wonder if some people (I'm not categorizing you all here) just dismiss this album simply because of how different it is. They don't like it because they just wanted another paint by numbers Paul success. Paul doesn't stuff himself into a box. It's just not him. He likes to experiment and try different things. I'm glad he did what he did on P2P and I consider it a success. This isn't a dud album at all, it just isn't formulaic is all.

 

Personally my problem with much of the album ain t the fact it s different or experimental. Remember McCartneyII is one of my favorite albums. Also like the Fireman stuff. Rather the opposite I enjoy Paul moving in different ways. For me though much of Press to Play seems a bit overproduced. With that said I have not given up that I one day will enjoy it more. Some of the early takes /alternate mixed that I have in my collection are goegeous. Guess it s impossible to connect to everything Paul ever does given how long his career has lasted