There are many Paul McCartney albums, but only a precious few get to call themselves McCartney albums. McCartney III is the surprise third entry in a series that began with his 1970 solo debut McCartney and seemed to end with 1980’s McCartney II, two dramatically different records born of dramatically different circumstances that were nonetheless united by a DIY methodology. Unlike the other records in Macca’s solo discography, these were true one-man-band efforts, clearinghouses for the rough song sketches and home-recording experiments he’d never bring to his proper releases. And both were flawed-yet-fascinating portraits of a perfectionist embracing the purity of imperfection. So the appearance of that roman numeral in the title of McCartney III is loaded with significance, a promising indication that what we’re getting here is the man, not the myth. This is especially exciting news for that generation of fans who hold “Temporary Secretary” in a greater esteem than Sgt. Pepper’s.
The novelty of McCartney and McCartney II had a lot to do with the context in which they appeared: the former was a purposefully ramshackle response to the studio-sculpted grandeur of the Beatles, the latter a synth-shocked antidote to the arena-rock bombast of Wings. But while they were solitary efforts, those records were still plugged into the sounds and conversations of their times. McCartney was rooted in the agrarian, anti-psych aesthetic of contemporary groups like the Band, while McCartney II showed Macca having a go at the new wave and early electronic music seeping into the mainstream. On these albums, McCartney wasn’t so much the all-knowing auteur as a sponge soaking up the prevailing styles of the day and squeezing them out, without a care if he made a mess.
McCartney III, however, has no such guiding principle—other than the fact it arrives in a year when McCartney, like many of us, was stuck at home with a whole lot of extra time on his overly sanitized hands. Following a decade where he actively pursued modern-pop relevance through collaborations with Mark Ronson, Ryan Tedder, and Kanye West and Rihanna, McCartney III finds its maker shacked up at his Sussex farmhouse, tuning out the radio to indulge his every scatterbrained whim. With no desire to engage with the contemporary musical landscape or absorb new influences, McCartney III is less adventurous and revelatory than its eponymous predecessors. Mostly, it reiterates his well-established fondness for acoustic ditties, ruminative piano ballads, and hot-rod rockers. And yet it still offers intriguing evidence that, even when sticking to his usual lane, a septuagenarian multi-millionaire pop star comfortably ensconced in his rural estate can still get up to some pretty weird shit when no one’s looking.