“The past is a fruitful place to gather ideas,” Paul McCartney said a few weeks ago to the British magazine Mojo about The Boys of Dungeon Lane, the brand new 14 songs that place him, just days before celebrating his 84th birthday, at the forefront of current events. In this sense, the 18th solo album by the former Beatle, released this Friday, is an obvious exercise in nostalgia, but not so much for the glorious times as for the innocent childhood and that adolescence indelibly marked by the early and terrible loss of the maternal figure. And the most amazing thing is that, far from seeming like a complacent, sad, or self-absorbed album, it becomes an update of an infinite legacy. Enough to establish itself, with little room for doubt, as the second-best work of its illustrious author throughout the 21st century, only behind that immeasurable Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005).
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This old McCartney has long lost vocal strength, which translates into less reach in the high range and a slight feeling of weakness in the middle part of the tessitura. But the interpretive fragility of this unrepeatable octogenarian ends up translating into a very fresh closeness with the listener, astonished to see from the very opening, As you Lie There, how Macca can combine recitation, ballad, and rock outburst in just over four minutes.
The changes in rhythms and tessituras, already embedded in the melodic DNA during the Wings era, appear here and there, but right now there is nothing that excites our dear sir Paul more than breaking harmonic patterns and bewildering us with the sharp turns of a completely unpredictable writing. We may be confused at first; by the third or fourth listen, we are crying with emotion.
The first half of the album is sustained around the spell of the colossal Days We Left Behind, the initial preview of the album and a bittersweet collection of childhood scenes woven around a seemingly simple melody with a beautiful melancholic effect. But it is in the second half where the most illustrious Liverpudlian pours out the essence jar without restraint. There appear two huge titles, the evanescent Never Know and an old-fashioned love song, Life Can Be Hard, that only a sublime pen could conceive. The first leads to vocal games that seem like a toast to Pet Sounds, before culminating with a Scottish air flute in the style of Pipes of Peace. The second, a prodigious melody that seems to flow from his lips by osmosis, includes brass embellishments and even a cabaret touch (that clarinet, for God’s sake!) that takes us, almost six decades later, back to the ideas established with When I’m Sixty-four.
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The production by the thirty-something Andrew Watt, the same who oversaw the Rolling Stones’ Hackney Diamonds (2023), brings freshness and a pinch of boldness, but ultimately it is McCartney and only McCartney, with all his life and sentimental depth, who turns this The Boys of Dungeon Lane into a treasure beyond the media dimension of the author. It is charming, of course, to find the singing duo of Paul and Ringo Starr for Home to Us, a toast to an unrepeatable legacy joined by two natural heirs, Chrissie Hynde (Pretenders) and Sharleen Spiteri (Texas). But more substance is gathered by late small wonders like First Star of the night (which seems to refer to Every Night, from the eponymous first solo LP back in 1970), the big band sketches for Salesman Saint, or the tremendous epilogue of Momma Gets By, a deeply felt and moving orchestral ballad.
We don’t know how many more albums McCartney will have time to weave, and that is why each new release produces a mix of relief and an almost metaphysical unease. The Boys… has the merit of keeping the bar high without resorting to fanfares. It seems like a humble album, even more so with that very brief urban iconography cover, but it ends up becoming huge.
