| Product Summary | | Label: Universal Music Group | | UPC: 00888072303485 | | Release Date: 6/5/2007 | | Buy.com Sku: 204543764 | | Item#: M3LY4S | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 25050 | Format:  CD |
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| Song Listing |  |
Disc 1
| | Song Title | Sample | | 1. Dance Tonight ~ Paul McCartney |  | | 2. Ever Present Past ~ Paul McCartney | | | 3. See Your Sunshine ~ Paul McCartney | | | 4. Only Mama Knows ~ Paul McCartney | | | 5. You Tell Me ~ Paul McCartney | | | 6. Mr. Bellamy ~ Paul McCartney | | | 7. Gratitude ~ Paul McCartney | | | 8. Vintage Clothes ~ Paul McCartney | | | 9. That Was Me ~ Paul McCartney | | | 10. Feet In The Clouds ~ Paul McCartney | | | 11. House Of Wax ~ Paul McCartney | | | 12. End Of The End, The ~ Paul McCartney | | | 13. Nod Your Head ~ Paul McCartney | |
(P) 2007 MPL Communications Ltd. under exclusive licence to Starcon, LLC
(C) 2007 MPL Communications Ltd. under exclusive licence to Starcon, LLC
| From the artist:
The first recording session was back in the autumn of 2003 at Abbey Road with my touring band and producer David Kahne. I was right in the middle of it when I began talking with Nigel Godrich about a brand new project (which became Chaos And Creation In The Backyard).
When I was just finishing up everything concerned with Chaos and had just got the Grammy nominations (2006) I realized I had this album to go back to and finish off. So I got it out to listen to it again, wondering if I would enjoy it, but actually I really loved it. All I did at first was just listen to a couple of things and then I began to think, ‘OK, I like that track – now, what is wrong with it?’ And it might be something like a drum sound, so then I would re-drum and see where we would get to.
I took it from there and built it up. I went through, track by track, making changes as I went along. I fixed things I wasn’t too keen on and it just evolved from there. Without me knowing, or really trying, it started to get its own theme, a sort of thread that holds it all together. So I suppose it’s about half new stuff and half old stuff from 2003.
In places it’s a very personal record and a lot of it is retrospective, drawing from memory, like memories from being a kid, from Liverpool and from summers gone. The album is evocative, emotional, rocking, but I can’t really sum it up in one sentence.
There is a medley of 5 songs towards the end and that was purposefully retrospective. I thought this might be because I’m at this point in my life, but then I think about the times I was writing with John and a lot of that was also looking back. It’s like me with ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ - I’m still up to the same tricks!
| | Album Notes and Credits |
Notes & Personnel Info |  | Personnel: Rusty Anderson (guitar); Paul "Wix" Wickens (keyboards); Brian Ray (bass guitar); Abe Laboriel, Jr. (drums). | | The first release from the Starbucks-backed Hear Music label, 2007's MEMORY ALMOST FULL, is a significant point in Paul McCartney's long and legendary career. Not only does it mark the end of his decades-long relationship with Capitol Records, MEMORY is easily one of McCartney's most Beatlesque solo outings, a notion particularly reinforced by the album's ABBEY ROAD-styled closing suite. | | Even before that dynamic medley, however, McCartney offers up some of his most vibrant songs in years--most notably the jangly opener, "Dance Tonight," and "Ever Present Past," a wonderfully catchy ode to memory--and these tracks contrast well with the largely subdued numbers on CHAOS AND CREATION IN THE BACKYARD. As with that preceding pop-oriented outing, Macca plays almost all instruments himself, although instead of working with producer Nigel Godrich again, he goes back to working with David Kahne for a more muscular, straight-ahead sound. By the time the upbeat "That Was Me" signals the record's closing sequence, it is abundantly clear that this is top-shelf McCartney, and listeners can almost hear a hearty round of applause as "Nod Your Head" brings MEMORY to its majestic end. | | Allusion to the digital world though it may be, there's a sweet, elegiac undercurrent to the title of Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full, an acknowledgement that it was written and recorded when McCartney was 64, the age he mythologized on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released almost exactly 40 years before Memory. Certainly, McCartney has mortality on the mind, but this isn't an entirely unusual occurrence for him in this third act of his solo career. Ever since his wife Linda's death from cancer in 1998, he's been dancing around the subject, peppering Flaming Pie with longing looks back, grieving by throwing himself into the past on the covers album Run Devil Run, slowly coming to terms with his status as the old guard on the carefully ruminative Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. But if that previous record was precise, bearing all the hallmarks of meticulous producer Nigel Godrich, Memory Almost Full is startlingly bright and frequently lively, an album that embraces McCartney's unerring gift for melody. Yet for as pop as it is, this is not an album made with any illusion that Paul will soon have a succession of hit singles: it's an art-pop album, not unlike either of the McCartney albums. Sometimes this is reflected in the construction --- the quick succession of short songs at the end, uncannily (and quite deliberately) sounding like a suite -- sometimes in the lyrics, but the remarkable thing is that McCartney never sounds self-consciously pretentious here, as if he's striving to make a major statement. Rather, he's quietly taking stock of his life and loves, his work and achievements. Unlike latter-day efforts by Johnny Cash or the murky Daniel Lanois-produced albums by Bob Dylan, mortality haunts the album, but there's no fetishization of death. Instead, McCartney marvels at his life -- explicitly so in the disarmingly guileless "That Was Me," where he enthuses about his role in a stage play in grammar school with the same vigor as he boasts about playing the Cavern Club with the Beatles -- and realizes that when he reaches "The End of the End," he doesn't want anything more than the fond old stories of his life to be told. | | This matter-of-fact acknowledgement that he's in the last act of his life hangs over this album, but his penchant for nostalgia -- this is the man who wrote the sepia-toned music hall shuffle "Your Mother Should Know" before he was 30, after all -- has lost its rose-tinted streak. Where he once romanticized days gone by, McCartney now admits that we're merely living with "The Ever Present Past," just like how although we live in the present, we still wear "Vintage Clothes." He's no longer pining for the past, since he knows where the present is heading, yet he seems disarmingly grateful for where his journey has taken him and what it has meant for him, to the extent that he slings no arrows at his second wife, Heather Mills, he only offers her "Gratitude." Given the nastiness of the coverage of his recent divorce, Paul might be spinning his eternal optimism a bit hard on this song, but it isn't forced or saccharine -- it fits alongside the clear-eyed sentiment of the rest of Memory Almost Full. It rings true to the open-heartedness of his music, and the album delivers some of McCartney's best latter-day music. Memory Almost Full is so melodic and memorable, it's easy to take for granted his skill as a craftsman, particularly here when it feels so natural and unforced, even when it takes left turns, which it thankfully does more than once. Best of all, this is the rare pop meditation on mortality that doesn't present itself as a major statement, yet it is thematically and musically coherent, slowly working its way under your skin and lodging its way into your cluttered memory. On the surface, it's bright and accessible, as easy to enjoy as the best of Paul's solo albums, but it lingers in the heart and mind in a way uncommon to the rest of his work, and to many other latter-day albums from his peers as well. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine |
Producer: David Kahne |
Engineer: David Kahne; Geoff Emerick; Steve Orchard; Paul Hicks; Adam Noble |
| Entertainment Reviews
 | Paul McCartney - Memory Almost Full - CD By: Josh Hathaway - Blogcritics.org Reviews Published on: 6/5/2007 10:51 AM | | Memory Almost Full, the title of Paul McCartney's new album, is a good summation for the music presented on the record. This is an album of compact, ornate sketches detailed with a full palette of standard and unusual instruments. Most of the songs on MAF settle on a single pattern or idea and explore it quickly; only two of the 13 tracks extend beyond the four-minute mark. Where his previous album, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard had a grander, more sweeping feel to it, MAF has a comparatively simpler and sunnier feel....read the full review |
| | Compilation Appearances |
| | Associated Artists and Works |
| | Technical Info | | Release Date : 06/05/2007 | | Original Release Date : 2007 | | Catalog ID : HMCD-30348 | | Label : Hear Music (Starbucks) | | Number of Discs : 1 | | Runtime : 41m : 59s | | Studio/Live : Studio | | Mono/Stereo : Stereo | | SPAR Code : n/a | | UPC : 00888072303485 |
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| | Professional Reviews | | Rolling Stone (p.100)
- 3 stars out of 5 -- "'Vintage Clothes' and 'Feet in the Clouds' incarnate his nostalgia and whimsy with some wit and considerable musical invention."Rolling Stone (p.111)
- Included in Rolling Stone's "50 Top Albums of the Year 2007" -- "[A]t once briskly modern and obsessively retrospective." Entertainment Weekly (p.80)
- "It's his version of Bob Dylan's TIME OUT OF MIND...if TIME OUT OF MIND had cutthroat pop instincts and whistling solos....MEMORY is beautifully elegiac..." -- Grade: A- Uncut (p.106)
- 3 stars out of 5 -- [W]ith a breezy determination not to take itself too seriously....He downloads random memories in his journey from Speke to superstardom with warmth and more than a dash of wry humour." |
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