Paul McCartney reflects movingly on life before Beatlemania on his first new solo release in four years, “Days We Left Behind”.
The Beatles legend shared the new song as he announced that his next album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, will be released on 29 May.
“Days We Left Behind” unfolds over soft strums of guitar, with McCartney singing of how “nothing is built to last/ Nothing ever stays/ Nothing comes to mind/ No one can erase/ The days we left behind.”
The poignant, timeless song features McCartney’s unpolished vocals as he reflects on treasured memories. While it is influenced by his memories of growing up in a post-war Liverpool, some of the lyrics feel strikingly pertinent today: “In the skies/ The skylarks rise/ Above the sounds of war.”
“This is very much a memory song for me,” McCartney said in a statement. “The album title, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, comes from a lyric in this track. I was thinking just that, about the days I left behind – I do often wonder if I’m just writing about the past but then I think, how can you write about anything else?”
He continued: “It’s just a lot of memories of Liverpool. It involves a bit in the middle about John and Forthlin Road, which is the street I used to live in. Dungeon Lane is near there.”
The street is a place McCartney still sees when returning home; he views it as a symbolic gateway to a world before Beatlemania, one of “smoky bars and cheap guitars”, or of afternoons spent birdwatching by the Mersey.
McCartney also recalled the working-class area he grew up in, Speke: “We didn’t have much at all but it didn’t matter because all the people were great and you didn’t notice you didn’t have much.”
Produced by Andrew Watt, whose recent collaborations include The Rolling Stones and Elton John, The Boys of Dungeon Lane finds the renowned songwriter in a particularly reflective mood.
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Among the subjects explored on the album are his childhood, his late parents, and the adventures he shared with school friends and future bandmates George Harrison and John Lennon, long before they went on to become one of the most successful and revered rock bands of all time.
The Boys of Dungeon Lane marks McCartney’s first album since 2020’s Grammy-nominated McCartney III, which received positive reviews including four stars from The Independent’s Helen Brown, who called it “weird, wonderful and whimsical”. She added that it sounded “more like a descendent of The Beatles’ White Album than anything else”.
Recorded by the artist at his Hog Hill Mill studio in Sussex during lockdown, it served as a continuation of his solo albums McCartney (1970) and McCartney II (1980), and also marked his first number one solo album since 1989’s Flowers in the Dirt.
The Boys of Dungeon Lane, meanwhile, came into being five years ago when McCartney met Watt for a cup of tea. Messing around on a guitar, he landed on a chord he didn’t recognise and worked it into a three-chord sequence, prompting Watt to suggest they record it.
In the spirit of his McCartney trilogy, he played the majority of instruments on the album himself, during speedy sessions conducted while he was touring around the world, and living between Sussex and Los Angeles.
The tracklist for The Boys of Dungeon Lane is as follows:
“As You Lie There”
“Lost Horizon”
“Days We Left Behind”
“Ripples in a Pond”
“Mountain Top”
Down South”
“We Two”
“Come Inside”
“Never Know”
“Home to Us”
“Life Can Be Hard”
“First Star of the Night”
“Salesman Saint”
“Momma Gets By”
The Boys of Dungeon Lane is out via MPL/Capitol Records on 29 May.
ENDS
