There are so many magical pieces of Paul McCartney that are easy to miss at first glance.
The songs are usually what stand out the most whenever he puts on a show, but aside from singing along to ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Let It Be’ every single time he performs, it’s hard to ignore how hard some of those tunes are to sing. And while Macca has tried his best to try out different spaces within his voice, he was always looking towards singers who had a distinctive sound from the moment that you heard them.
Then again, it’s not like McCartney is singing as he used to whenever he takes the stage. Everyone gets old, and you need to find times where you can rest your voice during a show, but it’s not like he was ever going to retire any of his songs, either. ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ may still come and go throughout the setlist, and while he might not get into the habit of singing a song like ‘Monkberry Moon Delight’ or anything, it’s always fun to hear him go from the crooner on ‘Yesterday’ to burning the entire stadium to the ground on ‘Helter Skelter’.
He was born to sing rock and roll in many respects, but that’s not always how the story’s told from everyone’s perspective. Because if you only looked at the historical accounts of everything, you would swear that McCartney was used to singing the granny-shit ditties throughout most of his career. John Lennon had no problem painting him as the soppy one, but nothing could have been further from the truth.
Sure, McCartney did have a soft spot for some of the retro stylings of the 1920s, but he was also the one taking the most risks. No one in the band could hit those Little Richard high notes as he could, and when the band began working on Revolver, he was the one bringing in all of the strange sound effects that turned up on tunes like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’ At the same time, those old tunes never go away.
And it helps that McCartney was actually good at writing these kinds of songs. Anyone else would have fallen on their face trying to make a tribute to the vaudeville era, but the fact that everything from ‘When I’m 64’ to ‘Honey Pie’ to ‘You Gave Me the Answer’ from his Wings days actually sounds pretty good all comes from him dissecting those old records and spitting them out in his own way.
But even if he would casually write songs with Marianne Faithfull or even Frank Sinatra in mind, he felt that Doris Day was virtually untouchable in her field, saying, “I had the privilege of hanging out with her on a few occasions. She had a heart of gold and was a very funny lady who I shared many laughs with. Her films like ‘Calamity Jane’, ‘Move Over, Darling’ and many others were all incredible and her acting and singing always hit the mark.”
Day might not have been earning him a lot of points with the rock and roll purists, but it’s not like her influence wasn’t felt on the rest of the music world. Brian May felt that she was one of the few perfect singers that he had ever come across when he first discovered music, and when looking at the biggest hits for people like Elton John, you can definitely hear that dramatic heft that Day put into all of her classic tunes.
So while it’s easy to dismiss most of McCartney’s granny songs as nothing but whimsical ditties, it sometimes takes those slow songs to appreciate the kind of singer you were working with. Day wasn’t going to join the likes of Elvis Presley and Little Richard by screaming her head off, but it was always more fun seeing her put everything she had into her material while an orchestra roared beneath her.
