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Similar to how Barry Lenser set out to profile every song by the Beatles in a series of Sound Affects posts last year, I’ve decided to do the same for the solo work of Paul McCartney. In this installment, we take a look at “The Lovely Linda” the first track off McCartney’s first solo album, McCartney.
Though McCartney was a No.1 hit album that went double platinum in the US, it is still mostly remembered for the controversy behind it. Released the same month as Let It Be, it spelled the end of the Beatles. To this day, certain fans blame McCartney for the group’s break-up, and comments by his former bandmates about the quality of his early solo work didn’t help matters much.
However, “The Lovely Linda” fits in with the album’s overall low-key, do-it-yourself approach. Recorded as a way to quickly test out his new Studer 4-track tape recorder that he had installed in his home, it is arguably McCartney’s first ever solo recording. I say “recording” because I’m not really sure if it can be considered as an entire song or not. It’s only 43 seconds long and is comprised of 30 words, if you count the la’s. In fact, McCartney himself once referred to it as “a trailer to the full song which will be recorded in the future”. However, Webster’s dictionary defines a song as either a “short poem set to music” or “the act or practice of singing”. Whether it is or isn’t really a whole song doesn’t really matter, though, because it is so pleasant and has a certain charm to it. You can’t help but be touched by the story behind its meaning. Like much of the album that it appears on, it is a delightful ode to Linda McCartney, Paul’s wife and future Wings bandmate. As a matter of fact, it has been said that you can hear her footsteps walking through the room in the background.
Next time, we’ll look at “That Would Be Something”, another song inspired by Linda.
