Happy Birthday Paul McCartney
One of the first records I remember repeatedly playing when I was a lickle boy was Paul McCartney’s Pipes of Peace. It isn’t really revered as one of his greatest, with respect to the rest of his catalogue, and I was mocked for even knowing about it. I mean, come on guys, give an 8 year old a hard time! What they didn’t realise was that it had Michael Jackson on it. So.. nurr.
This post won’t be a “oh man, Paul had such an impact on me; he is music ascended from heaven” because that’s not true. He has, though, learned through years of songwriting to trust his writing voice, and when you figure that out, your music levels up automatically. And that is something to be admired. He can write a whole song from beginning to end, with all the hooks, moments, harmonies, emotional lifts we need for music to feel like music. I’d love to see him in a room with 8 ‘songwriters’ out-writing each other. The monster songwriters vs “the writing team”. Why isn’t that a TV show?
So today is Paul’s birthday and he is a magnificent 80-earth-cycles-round-the-sun old. If that isn’t an age to write home about, I don’t know what age is.
I’m rubbish at cards and gifts and stuff but I do write people birthday songs, and have done for longer than I can remember. But I had no intention of writing a birthday song for Paul; now that would be a reach. But I can edit stuff.
A few years ago I was thinking about making (faking) a group performance from other people’s performances. The obvious starting point is the youtube-of-delight. Had a poke around in the dirt for a few days and found the most performed song of all time is Yesterday. The people of planet earth will perform it on anything they’ve got: harps, saxophones, violins, and the strangest one of all, acoustic guitar? I mean, why would they ruin it like that? I jest, of course.
I spent weeks going through many MANY performances of Yesterday picking a good selection of vocals, bands and solo instrumentalists to create a virtual ‘crowd’ singing Yesterday. I knew it was a challenge as literally everybody sang in their own tempo and key, and how exactly would I bring those performances together without destroying them? Filtering out the performances who were more than 2 semitones away from the original F were discarded, which meant that re-pitching the remaining performances wouldn’t sound too artificial. The end result, after many hundreds of hours toiling away in the editing suite (in front of the computer) I have created a birthday gift for Sir Paul of 80 people all singing “Yesterday”, and an accompanying video of images of the performers.
I hope one of Paul’s people shows it to him (I’m guessing he doesn’t give two hoots about hashtags on Twitter, and who can blame him!) as it is made with love and respect, some of which I hope he would feel while enjoying the gift.