The Rationale

The rationale behind Paul McCartney After The Beatles A Musical Appreciation is to offer a deeper musical insight into the work of the most successful composer in history, but to focus on his often-neglected career after The Beatles.

Although it is true that McCartney cannot read or write music, it is an overstatement to say that he is totally “musical illiterate”. He understands the relationship between notes and chords/harmony and is a highly skilled arranger in his own right. In particular, he has a thorough working knowledge of vocal harmony and uses this device throughout his post-Beatles career. In addition, he is able to arrange a song for voice and instruments to produce an accomplished final recording. Any aspiring musician or song-writer can learn an enormous amount by spending a little time studying the methods and practices of McCartney and his team of arrangers, such as George Martin or Tony Visconti.

My books aim to give such an insight into the compositional techniques of McCartney. They proceed in a chronological manner, reviewing songs from each decade from the 1970s. Each song is heavily annotated with time codes, so that the listener can hear a particular musical effect at a given moment in the song. At the end of each book, all of these techniques are collected in a glossary, so readers can see at glance in which songs McCartney has used techniques such as secondary dominants or ostinato.

However, music is more than simply the collection of sounds and notes in a recording. It is vital that we place the artist in the context of his or her times. For this reason, volume one traces McCartney’s work with an introductory chapter for each decade. In volume two, I have reviewed McCartney’s music in the wider context of musical trends in each decade. The second book finishes with an extended essay titled The Cultural Impact of Paul McCartney 1970-2020.