Paul McCartney says the one thing Wings gave him was the “freedom” to write as much, and when, he wanted to.
The Beatles member and later Wings frontman wrote of his time in both groups and broke down how he and John Lennon would work together. Though McCartney and Lennon would collaborate through much of the 1960s, it was when McCartney began fronting Wings that he found himself with a new “freedom” in the way he wrote. Sharing the process in his book, The Lyrics, McCartney said the record deal and lack of pressure on him to continually create was a major help, though he always found himself writing anyway.
He wrote: “I’d pretty much do a record every one or two years. I was lucky to have that freedom, so I would write whenever I felt like writing, which was nearly always when I just had some time off, and I’d fit it in around the family’s plans. Instead of sitting around, I’d write something.
“Always with a guitar or a piano, never with anything else, and a pad and a pencil with a rubber on the end (even then, I was old school). When you’ve written enough, it’s time to put those songs in a bottle, so you can write some more. I like to get them out, get them away and clear the deck, let them ‘float out to see’.”
It marks a very different way of writing from what McCartney had done when collaborating with Lennon. McCartney wrote: “Normally, for me, a song takes a few hours. Sometimes they fall out more quickly, but normally it’s about three or four hours of sitting there and thinking about it, and the first verse comes in and then the second verse. In the early days, when John and I first started writing songs, that’s about how long it would take.
“I’d go round to his house, we’d sit opposite each other, and by twelve o’clock, one o’clock, we’d start writing and I’d leave about three or four o’clock. You’d think there’d be a few days when we’d just go, ‘Can’t get it. Sorry, man; I’m feeling a bit, you know, unproductive.’ No. Every single time we sat down, a song came out. That’s pretty amazing. And I find that’s still roughly true.
“The danger now is having devices like the iPhone that think a sketch is a song; it comes too easily in some ways. Or you put it down and you think, ‘I’ll finish that later,’ whereas John and I couldn’t have done that.
“It wouldn’t have made sense for us to meet and write, ‘Let me take you down / ‘Cause I’m going to…’ and then say, ‘Okay, see you tomorrow,’ or ‘We’ll finish this later.’ It just wouldn’t make any sense.”
