Sidingsound

I might find this useful one day

File this under "just because I can", or possibly "something I'm doing while I'm waiting for some audio to finish processing"...

One of my favourite singles of the year would have to be "Dance Tonight" by Paul McCartney, from his latest album "Memory Almost Full". Full disclosure: I've been a Macca fan since the 1980s, but to be honest, I wasn't as keen on MAF as I was on Paul's last (pop/rock) opus, "Chaos And Creation In The Backyard" (2005), and I'm still not quite sure why. It's not just that I'd hold "Chaos" to be one of the best albums of Macca's career (yes, all of it)—I simply didn't feel that the songwriting on "Memory" was that consistent, and that there were just not as many strong numbers on the album as there were on "Chaos".

Maybe the key was Nigel Godrich, who produced "Chaos". I've read that McCartney himself credits Godrich with really "pushing" him on the project, rejecting many of McCartney's songs as "not strong enough" (my paraphrase) and encouraging him to show what he is capable of as a writer and performer.

Godrich also largely isolated McCartney from his usual touring band, persuading him to play most of the instruments himself. Whilst Macca is certainly no stranger to this approach (quite a few of his albums were recorded mostly or completely solo), being effectively forced to work differently to how he'd probably expected to do, may well have contributed to Paul producing an album quite different from most of its forbears.

But back to "Dance Tonight", which I think is just a great single. It has more hooks than an angling competition, not least with that thumping four-on-the-floor bass drum and the jangling strummed mandolin which provides the body of the song. It's almost primevally simple in concept, yet the song has a cheerful simplicity which just seems to pick me up when I hear it—and don't we all need that somedays?

And it gave me as good an excuse as any to try posting a YouTube video here :-)

Labels: music, youtube

posted by Tim @ 22:59