Dan's Papers - June 29, 2007 - music review: memory almost full

A knight, a painter, a planet, Paul McCartney's talent and influences seem to flow farther and wider with each passing year. His newest album, Memory Almost Full, continues to widen his depth as a writer/composer, a musician and a man. While you may bump into McCartney in Amagansett or even remember him in his days when he spent his East End time with Willem de Kooning, McCartney's connection with the Hamptons has deep roots. A friend once told me that while walking along the beach, her father saw a bedraggled man heaving a boat onshore. Windswept and sun-parched, it looked like he had been lost at sea for days -- it was Paul McCartney.

Unlike his adventure on the high seas, Memory Almost Full is anything but bedraggled. An album that has been in the works for five years can sometimes suffer the fate of too many cooks in the kitchen (or editors at the mixing board), but Memory seems to carry something strictly McCartney about it.

Initially begun prior to Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, his previous album, McCartney had cut several tracks for Memory before he and Nigel Godrich (producer behind Radiohead's OK Computer and Beck's Mutations) started a conversation that led them down a different musical path. The Chaos album was that path. The collection garnered three Grammy nominations and proved to be another chapter of McCartney's career, connecting with a new generation and re-inspiring an old.

Allowing several of the songs on Memory to ferment for five years before returning to them gave McCartney the opportunity to approach them with fresh, new ears. Upon reexamining the tracks, McCartney noticed nuances in need of tweaking. He dropped in guitar tracks, reworked drum beats and created a single subtle thread to carry the work from beginning to end.

Playing almost all the instruments himself, the opening track, "Dance Tonight," has Paul dusting off the mandolin for a spirited little ditty about coming together and "feeling all right." Like the Chaos album and any good exercise routine, repetition here is the key. At first, tunes like this and "Feet in the Clouds" seem to be light and simple. The kind of work that enters one ear, makes you think, "Oh, that's nice," then is lost in the vapors. But upon hearing them several times (Just ask anyone working at Starbucks on June 5th) ingrains the melodies and intricacies of the songs in your mind the way "Fine Line" did on the previous album and even back to "Blackbird" so many years ago.

The album has been released under Starbucks new music label, an attempt at gaining another hold on American addictions. While many have thrown their hands up in the air at the "infestation" of Starbucks on the East End, you have to give a nod to their creative marketing. To get even the simplest coffee takes at least three minutes. That's just enough time to hear at least one song. It's a captive audience and after a week of mocha lattes, you'll understand exactly what the buzz is about.

The album is introspective, nostalgic and personal in ways that are anything but overt. "Vintage Clothes" (which has almost a "Paperback Writer" feel to it) and "End of the End" seem to be realizations that age is catching up to the 65-year-old ex-Beatle, but more so, they show that success, accomplishments and time make him who he is.

The perch Memory Almost Full has taken at #3 on the Billboard Top 200 albums (oddly enough Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is # 8 under Billboard's Top Pop Catalog) is a testament that, almost 40 years to the day, McCartney's ability as a songwriter and musician perceivers. He is a vintage jacket, aged, but far from worn out, timelessly stylish and contains more character and heart than the mass produced products of today.