Album reviews and music journalists can be as harsh as they desire, but in most cases, a record’s biggest critic will be the person who made it in the first place.
It is a lot easier to be hyper-critical of your own work than anybody else’s – it is human nature, after all – and even a songwriter as accomplished as Paul McCartney has had those moments of severe self-doubt.
Although, particularly during the later years of the Fab Four, it was McCartney leading the charge into the studio, being in a band like The Beatles certainly offered the songwriter a sense of security. If, for example, McCartney was to be chased through the Philippines by a wannabe dictator with a chip on his shoulder, he had three other blokes to share that rather distressing situation with. Whereas, when he went out on his own, the onus typically rested entirely on his own shoulders.
Even during the age of Wings, Macca tended to bear the brunt of both praise and dismissal, thanks to his name often preceding the band’s. Inevitably, then, the songwriter has spent the majority of the past five or so decades under a pretty constant level of pressure to create something that rivals the earth-shattering mastery of his Beatles-era compositions.
As a result, when masterpiece records like Ram roll around, they are – eventually – afforded a beloved reputation. Whereas, when an album doesn’t quite hit the mark, or enters the equally dreaded realm of being too middle of the road, they tend to face far more criticism than they would have had another artist been responsible for them. Not least from McCartney himself.
One such record was 1979’s Back to the Egg, which would end up being the final Wings record. While it would be difficult to describe the album as being offensively bad, it didn’t receive much in the way of positivity upon its release. McCartney, presumably somewhat burned out after multiple decades at the epicentre of the music industry, wasn’t at his songwriting peak, and the instrumental performances couldn’t make up for that fact.
McCartney, of course, was well aware of that fact, and even during the album’s production, he knew it wasn’t one of his best efforts. “Linda and I were so disappointed, thinking, ‘God this is a terrible bloody record,’” he told Guitar World back in 1997, a sentiment which was shared by much of the music press of 1979, too.
Nevertheless, the multiple decades that have followed Wing’s conclusion has allowed McCartney to reassess that album. No matter which way you spin it, it is not one of his best records, but it is hardly a travesty, either. “My son pulled it out recently and it’s really not as bad as I thought it was,” he shared.
“It’s not easy to do your tightest, most succinct work all the time, and I think if my work does slip it probably is in the lyrics,” the songwriter continued. “And I hate to tell you, but I put a lot of it down to laziness, where I just thought, ‘Yeah, that’ll do.’ And in mitigation, I think that sometimes I probably was right.”
Given how exhaustive Paul McCartney’s music career has been, going right back to those early days of The Beatles in Hamburg, even the most hard-headed of music reviewers can surely cut him some slack for occasionally taking his foot off the accelerator. Back to the Egg might not have been the Abbey Road farewell that Wings arguably deserved, but it still triumphs over a lot of the albums which populated the charts back in 1979.
