Paul McCartney has collaborated with everyone from John Lennon and Rihanna to Dave Grohl and Elvis Costello. The Beatles member and Wings frontman has worked with the best in music, but one revolutionary in-studio effort did not land well. Two of McCartney‘s most popular releases in the 1980s were collaborations with two music legends, but they did little in the way of artistic satisfaction for the Let It Be hitmaker.
Speaking with Playboy Magazine back in the 1980s, McCartney suggested that the work he released with both Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson was simply not up to scratch. Not compared to his work with the likes of Lennon, Linda McCartney, or Denny Laine, that is. He told the outlet: “I loved working with them. I admire their voices and their talent. But it wasn’t what I’d call serious collaboration; it was more like we were singing on one another’s records.”
The difference in the collaborations was made clear by McCartney, who would have some surprise success in the late 2000s and early 2010s when he began collaborating with the likes of Kanye West, Rihanna, and Nirvana. He continued: “Michael and I happened to write a couple of songs together. But we never actually sat down and thought, ‘We’re now a songwriting team.’
“I think Michael and I both treated it as a kind of… just a nice thing to do. He started out ringing me up and saying he wanted to see me. So I said to him, ‘What’s all this for?’ you know? Like, why? It was all very nice, but… He said, ‘I wanna make hits.’ I said, ‘Great, lovely.’ So I don’t take that kind of thing that seriously.”
Despite not taking it all that seriously, McCartney has been responsible for plenty of hits. Whether it’s topping the charts with The Beatles in the 1960s, his streak of success with Wings in the mid-1970s, or his chart domination in the 1990s, he has always been somewhere close to the top of the charts. Efforts like FourFiveSeconds, a song McCartney wrote and performed with Rihanna and West, planted him at the top of the charts once more in 2015.
McCartney’s most recent album efforts have fared well, too. The Boys of Dungeon Lane netted McCartney a number one album. His album before that, McCartney III, also finished top of the charts. Before those two releases though, McCartney had not topped the charts as a solo artist since 1989’s Flowers in the Dirt, an album that relied on songwriting collaborations with Elvis Costello.
While the pair would write up some of McCartney’s all-time best works, the likes of My Brave Face, Figure of Eight, and You Want Her Too, it had been some time since the Eleanor Rigby and Band on the Run songwriter had managed to release a hit song. Costello was aware of this before starting the Flowers in the Dirt sessions.
He said: “When I’d got the call to say Paul wanted me to write some songs with him for his next record, I didn’t know what to expect. But as his last co-written hit had been with Michael Jackson, I wondered whether I should be taking some dancing lessons.
“I’d brought an early draft of Veronica that you would have recognised, but we immediately got to work putting a better flow into the chorus and shifting the bridge into making that part of the song seem more like a dream.”
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