Paul McCartney has admitted that he can’t remember how to play all the Beatles songs, after penning some of the most celebrated songs in history.(Source NME)
The music icon, 79, says he has to rely on bandmates and listen to some of the deeper cuts that he hasn’t played in a while, with the Fab Four’s back catalogue dating back some 55 years.
“I have to re-learn everything. I’ve written an awful lot, you can’t retain them all. We go in rehearsal and I’m, ‘Oh yeah, that’s how it goes,'” McCartney told The Mirror.
And while he has worked on over 1,000 songs, he believes that most of them have stood the test of time.
When asked if he thinks his songs are “pretty good,” he replied: “I do, I really do. Some of the old songs you say, ‘Oh, that’s clever, I wouldn’t have done that’. It’s exciting to think that still works. We were a little rock and roll group from Liverpool, it just kept going.”
On being asked if he still improvises at soundchecks, McCartney said: “Yeah, we do!” and added: “We’ve got millions of them! And fortunately, there’s a guy in our team called Jamie, who logs them. And he tells me we’ve actually got thousands. Some of them are really good and occasionally I’ll pick one out and work on it.”
Paul McCartney hints that a new album release of outtakes may be on the way after amassing “millions” of them during studio recordings.
Describing the outtakes as a “treasure trove” in an interview on his website, the 77-year-old said the material comes from various ab-libbed sound checks and rehearsals.
On being asked if he still improvises at soundchecks, McCartney said: “Yeah, we do!” and added: “We’ve got millions of them! And fortunately, there’s a guy in our team called Jamie, who logs them. And he tells me we’ve actually got thousands. Some of them are really good and occasionally I’ll pick one out and work on it.
“For ‘Egypt Station’, I picked one out, though we didn’t finish it. I picked one out and we’re kind of making a track around this riff from the soundcheck jam. ‘Cause it was like, ‘That was a good little riff!’ But because they’re improvised they’re instant and then they’re gone.
He added: “Thankfully our stuff is captured because these days you can record just about anything that moves! It’s a little treasure trove…And one day we will have to put together an album, or something, with a selection of these songs that we’ve gathered. Because they are from all around the world!”
