Paul McCartney has irked fans as he is seen to be “endlessly meddling” with his greatest hits. Fans of The Beatles and Wings members may not be surprised to hear McCartney is tinkering away at his best songs, as it has been a constant occurrence since Let It Be. McCartney had stood against Phil Spector’s mixing of The Beatles’ final album release and would, decades later, release a Naked… version of his songs.
Remasters of Band on the Run, Ram, and other classics from his post-Beatles period have also been released consistently over the last few decades. But it appears fans have now had enough of the Get Back songwriter tooling around with songs that were perfect on first release. Listeners still love McCartney but believe his constant revisits to old material are damaging his reputation.
One fan asked on the Paul McCartney subreddit: “What do you think Paul McCartney’s strongest and weakest attribute as a musician?” Fans have since weighed in, with one believing the “meddling” of old material to be his weakest attribute, something other listeners agreed with.
They wrote: “Strongest – His astonishing breadth of talents. The number of instruments he can play and the array of styles he can write in.
Weakest – His inability to let go of a work and let it be done. Seemingly has the George Lucas trait of endlessly meddling and trying to make things ‘perfect’. Often this can be a good thing of course, but sometimes it results in him doing unnecessary things like adding weird end tracks to albums they don’t need, or overproducing songs and albums.”
Another added: “Strongest: basically everything. Weakest: There are endless exceptions to this, but I think he has too much fixation on pop and broadness. I wish he’d tap his inner tortured artist, his inner iconoclast, more often. Would love to hear him collaborate with people like Brian Eno or Trent Reznor or some insane producer mad genius pushing the boundaries. For the record I’d also love to hear him just make a pure early Beatles-style skiffle pop album.”
Others have suggested that McCartney, for all his incredible songs, suffers from “quality control” with some of his works falling well short of expectation. One fan wrote: “Strength – he’s ridiculously talented naturally as a musician, songwriter, and creative. He’s a very rare sort. Weakness – quality control. He’s thrown out far too many half-finished and weaker ideas over the years. They’re rarely bad, but there’s a whole lot of mediocre in there when everyone knows he’s capable of more.”
Another fan countered: “His biggest strength? His amazing creativity. His biggest weakness? His amazing creativity. He just kept creating and let others determine which ones were genius.”
McCartney’s team are rumoured to be working on remasters of London Town and Back to the Egg, two Wings albums which McCartney has rarely spoken of and has seemingly erased from his mind. Neither album has been represented during live shows over the last twenty years and the veteran songwriter hasn’t spoken all that fondly of Back to the Egg in the past.
Discover more from Cult Following
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
