W INTERVIEW
L
Sodajerker with Paul
PAUL McCARTNEY TALKS ABOUT
HIS NEW ALBUM ‘EGYPT STATION’
AHEAD OF LIVERPOOL GIG
As Paul McCartney prepares to wow the Echo Arena on December
12th with his new album ‘Egypt Station’, Wirral Life heard about a
podcast the former Beatle has just taken part in with two podcasters
from Liverpool who have interviewed some of the world's most
successful songwriters about how they approach the art and craft.
Our friends Simon Barber and Brian O'Connor are the duo behind
Sodajerker, the creative partnership of two long-time friends who love
songwriting. Their independent podcast, ‘Sodajerker on Songwriting’
has been downloaded millions of times by music fans the world over and
has charted in more than 50 countries via Apple Podcasts.
Since its launch in November 2011, the show has released over 120
episodes featuring in-depth discussions with the likes of Paul Simon,
Noel Gallagher, Joan Armatrading and Nile Rodgers.
Simon and Brian sat down with Macca at LIPA to talk about the writing
process behind the record.
The new album is just a fantastic collection of songs, completely
blown away by it.
Oh, thank you, yeah. I'm pleased with it, you know, we had a good time
recording it and I enjoyed working with Greg Kurstin and Ryan Tedder,
we had a laugh, it was great. We didn’t want to just do sort of everything
straight, you know, a lot of the songs I had were pretty straightforward,
love songs or ballads and stuff, you know, but we put in a couple that
were just a little bit left field.
Those very atmospheric stations that you’ve got book ending the
album, did you have those from the start, was that part of the concept
or was that something you brought in later?
It was about halfway through that I said ‘I think Egypt Station might be
a good title, for the album’ and Greg liked it. I kind of explained that it
was a painting and that I thought we might make a little sound scape and
then had this idea to have the choir come swelling out of it so it was like
heavenly vision. I was thinking in film terms almost in a station, then the
song comes out of it. So no, that was more towards the end, once we had
the title and we knew what we were going to do, making it all take place,
sort of start in the station and then going through with all the songs at
different stations and we end up at the destination.
The new songs came across great at your secret Abbey Road gig, ‘Fuh
You’ we thought was a particular highlight. Kind of a mischievous
word play on that one?
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, if you're in a studio, you're there, you're
working, but it’s music, so it’s a bit of fun and we like to not take it too
seriously, so you develop a little camaraderie where you're having a joke.
So on that song we were making it up and I went out and sang that and
we knew it would be misconstrued, but we were quite glad to put it in.
When you read the lyrics it’s perfectly straight, but my daughter, when
she heard it, she walked into the room, she said, ‘did I just hear what I
heard,’ [laughter], I said, ‘I don’t know,’ but yeah, it’s good to have a bit of
fun, you know.
Was that one you did with Ryan Tedder?
That was Ryan. I did three tracks with Ryan and that’s the one on the
album and then there's two others, they're nice. We only had a week,
because there was a time when Greg was doing something else and my
manager rung up and said you could maybe get with another producer,
just to switch it up a bit, so he sent me some suggestions and I liked
Ryan’s stuff. I rang him, and I think we decided he'd come to my studio
for a week and we’d just see how we went. I said, ‘I've got a lot of songs
we could do,’ but in the end, he just fancied making it up, so we just, you
know, we went in with nothing, just got a beat, got a thing, got an idea for
some lyrics and just built it up, you know, but he knows what he's doing.
You mentioned Greg Kurstin, who produced the rest of the record,
what kind of a collaborator was he?
Well, he's great, you know, I'd actually written all the stuff that I did with
Greg, so it was more a question of just trying to make good records of the
songs that I had, so that was how it worked out with Greg. With Ryan,
because we only had the week, it was going to be just make them up and
we did the three songs, you know, in the week, which is pretty good going
and they’ve just got a different feel, you know and that’s sort of what we
wanted to do, it was just break it up a bit, not have every station the same
sound, you know.
Greg’s a multi-instrumentalist as well, isn’t he, did you let him have a
go with the recording process?
Yeah, he plays quite a bit of the keyboard on the record. He's really good.
In one of the tracks, there's like an instrumental thing and I said, it would
be good to like break it down and just play this on piano, so I started
learning it, but then I said, ‘oh, this is going to take me forever, Greg,
could you do this?’ he goes, ‘well, let me try’ and he plays it perfectly,
of course, you know. So he did that and he’s got a great ‘producery’
feel, particularly for keyboard. I knew he’d done Adele’s Hello and he'd
done the instruments on that, so if you listen to it, it’s very simple but
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