Paul McCartney - Chaos And Creation In The Backyard

Paul McCartney's solo career has been famously uneven. Fantastic constructs of songcraft such as McCartney I or Band on the Run have been offset by albums such as Give my Regards to Broad Street and Off the Ground. Even on albums as impressive as Flaming Pie, McCartney has had a terrible tendency to toss off filler left and right, and one often gets the sense he was simply checking off styles or specific song types from a list of what he felt each album ought to have. "Okay," you can hear McCartney saying, "I've got a rocker, a folksy ballad, two piano-driven sentimental tunes..." Fans of McCartney's solo work have thus come to accept the notion that, on any given album, there are going to be at least two or three filler tracks, but at least those filler tunes will sparkle and glisten with McCartney's unerring sense of songcraft.

That's part of what makes Chaos and Creation in the Backyard so impressive: there's absolutely no filler. McCartney didn't include songs out of some misguided sense of obligation to be all things to all his fans, as he often came across in earlier records (hey, when even Band on the Run contains a couple of filler songs, you can tell it's part and parcel to the records he's going to cut). Each song is on the album because it is an excellent song, period.

Part of the credit must go to producer Nigel Godrich, who is probably best known for his work with Radiohead. Godrich actually had the chutzpah to tell McCartney when he thought Macca could turn out a better song than he'd offered up. Godrich pushed McCartney to create the best album the Cute Beatle could, and the results are outstanding.

McCartney and Godrich stripped away all of the extraneous bits from McCartney's music and revealed its core: melodic tunes, sweet-but-not-too-sacharine lyrics, and charm. McCartney plays virtually all of the instruments on the record, hearkening back to such homespun gems as McCartney I and Ram. All of this gives the songs an immediacy and closeness they would have otherwise lacked, and the album would have felt as distant as Driving Rain did (for all of its charms and good points, Driving Rain did suffer from feeling too purposefully arty, as though McCartney were trying to say "Look, I can do this arty stuff, I can write tunes that wind into jams, I can reference strange things you've never heard of. I can be aloof"). It often recalls the brighter moments of Flaming Pie, actually, which was definitely the best McCartney album in ages when it came out.

Even though he's not out to try to please each one of his demographics this time, McCartney still hits all the styles and themes he's fond of: sweet and lilting ballads, bouncy pop songs, and somber dirges. He doesn't really rock out very much on this record, but let's be honest: McCartney was not really the rocking Beatle. That was John. Many of McCartney's rockers have felt labored, plodding, and stoggy, as though he were having to force something he were not (one of the exceptions, of course, is "Helter Skelter," but that's a Beatles tune, remember: most of McCartney's solo "rock" songs haven't been nearly as good). There are some uptempo numbers here, of course, but don't expect McCartney to break into extended solos here or anything.

McCartney sounds exceptionally relaxed here. The music feels natural (which Driving Rain never managed), comfortable, lived-in. This isn't to say its boring or uninteresting: McCartney is still a masterful songwriter and craftsman. This is familiar ground, but that just makes it that much easier to get caught up in the music. McCartney is clearly having fun, and it's hard not to get sucked into that feeling while you listen to the album.

Really, Chaos and Creation is the sort of album we always hope McCartney will make each time out. It's fun, well-crafted, comfortable music by a man who still seems capable of cranking out perfect pop songs more than forty years into his career. It's worth a listen for that even if nothing else.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Paul McCartney, "At the Mercy"