Looking back, a turn toward traditional pop and jazz on Kisses on the Bottom seemed inevitable. Before the Beatles, before he put on that first Little Richard record and saw a whole new world open up before him, Paul McCartney listened to this kind of music.
He was the scion of old-time jazz performers, and that gave this LP a gravitas that made similar projects by the likes of Rod Stewart seem too fey by half – or more. And he’d been touching on this genre, off and on, for years.
There was 1967’s “When I’m 64” and 1968’s “Honey Pie,” 1975’s “You Gave Me the Answer” and 2005’s “English Tea.” Each, in its own way, was a transmutation of the songs his father used to play on an upright piano in the front room of McCartney’s childhood home. You could almost hear Paul trying to replicate the sound of his grandfather’s trusty old E-flat tuba, too.
With all of that in mind, it was actually somewhat astonishing that he took so long to get around to the Feb. 6, 2012, release of Kisses on the Bottom, an old-time record with billowing real-time emotion featuring tracks associated with last-century legends like Harold Arlen (“It’s Only a Paper Moon”), Frank Loesser (“More I Cannot Wish You”) and Fats Waller (whose hit with “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” provides the cheeky title for this album).
In more ways than one, I’m glad that Paul McCartney waited. It’s difficult to believe that, before then, he could have found a group so sympathetic as Diana Krall’s, or a producer in Tommy LiPuma with a such a quietly understated touch when it comes to the occasional string accompaniment – to say nothing of McCartney’s own delicately unreserved commitment to the material.
During another era, you just know this would have been a gauzy mess, and Paul himself would have spent too much time letting you know he was in on the joke to fully inhabit this moment. Instead, and from the first, Kisses on the Bottom was not just a love letter to a lost era of songmaking, but one of the most evocative, deeply ardent records that Paul McCartney has ever issued.
Working in a higher vocal range that remains largely untouched by age, or his rugged third-act touring schedule, the ex-Beatles star stirred up a spectacular range of emotions: The hushed, crepuscular melancholy of Peter van Steeden’s “Home (When Shadows Fall)” was matched only by the stirring resolve found on Haywood Henry’s “Get Yourself Another Fool.” McCartney’s trembling rapture throughout Irving Berlin’s “Always” found a balancing moment in his impish hat-tipping joy during Johnny Mercer’s “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.”
Did this set resonate for those looking to relive the anthemic glories of “Hey Jude,” or the sequential pop complexity of “Band on the Run” – or, heck, even the ear-worm bromides of “Ebony and Ivory”? No and no and, well, I hope not. It was time to move past that, anyway.
McCartney had, over the previous 15 years, put out better music than many gave him credit for. In fact, I’d argue that a sequence of albums highlighted by 1997’s Flaming Pie, 2005’s Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (maybe his greatest post-Beatles work, with the exception of Band on the Run), 2007’s Memory Almost Full and 2008’s Fireman collaboration Electric Arguments could rightly be called the most consistent and creative of any in his solo career.
In keeping, Paul McCartney had every right to the odd vanity project. That this one made so much sense, and connected on such a deeply personal level, wasn’t so much a surprise as it was another welcome success in a period that was so unexpectedly filled with them.
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Interesting review. I’m a relatively new McCartney fan and I guess I was lucky to miss his dreadful 80s period, but I’ve really come to love his Chaos and Creation album and even more so, the latest one, Electric Arguments. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this standards record and my biggest fear was that it would be, as you put it, “a gauzy mess.” But you’ve got me actually wanting to hear it now.
McCartney’s ‘dreadful 80’s period’ really isn’t that dreadful. He was certainly knocked for six by Lennon’s death and it shows but ‘Tug of War’ (1982) is a none-too-shabby album as are 1986’s ‘Press to Play’, 1987’s ‘Choba B CCCP’ and 1989’s ‘Flowers in the Dirt’. The flak really focusses on the 1984 movie ‘Give My Regards to Broad Street’ which is mostly an embarassment and certainly plunged his commercial stock after the heights of his collaborations with Michael Jackson.
But it was all to the good as freed from stratospheric sales, he has been into plenty of new territories since the dawn of the 90’s, although still somewhat constrained by a commercial instinct that he would be better to let go completely.