It’s never easy for any artist to try to outrun their legacy. For as many great songs as someone might try to write when working on their solo material, chances are they will always be compared to the classics that have come before, putting a mantle of pressure that they never asked for. While many modern artists have problems replicating their past glory, Paul McCartney has had his work cut out for him since the day The Beatles split.
Since the day that Macca announced that he would no longer be working with the band, he had started making music that was intended to be a deliberate separation from his previous work. Not completely comfortable as a solo act yet, McCartney would eventually start a new outfit with Wings, bringing in his wife Linda on keyboards and backing vocals alongside Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine.
While the band soldiered through the 1970s, McCartney thought it was time for him to go solo by the 1980s, putting out his first proper solo material since the homemade McCartney on McCartney II and Tug of War. For the next few years, McCartney would continue to follow the era’s trends and work alongside luminaries that he saw potential in, like Elvis Costello, helping craft albums like Flowers in the Dirt.
Once McCartney started putting together the basics of The Beatles Anthology with his former bandmates and ELO frontman Jeff Lynne, he started to see the benefits of cribbing from his past. Using the series as a creative refresher course, McCartney would lean into his pop tendencies in his later output, starting with Flaming Pie, whose title was taken from a nonsense phrase that John Lennon once used.
After working with various recording methods, McCartney saw it fit to go in a completely new direction with Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. Working with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, the producer was known to be tough on McCartney, not mincing words about when he thought a song wasn’t cutting it.
Despite the initial clash, McCartney would say that he and Godrich were able to get the best out of each other, giving way to the sturdiest collection of songs that he had made in years. As much as McCartney may have been looking forward, he also had one sequel song that traced back to his Fab days.
Manning the acoustic guitar once again, McCartney would say that the song ‘Jenny Wren’ was intended to be in the same vein as the song ‘Blackbird’, recalling in The Lyrics, “I think that when you’re sitting down with an acoustic guitar, there are a few ways you can go. With ‘Blackbird’, it’s a guitar part that you sing against, rather than strumming chords, and I think ‘Jenny Wren’ has the same idea. I think I was probably writing another ‘Blackbird’, and intentionally so”.
It’s easy to spot what McCartney was getting at, too, featuring a breathtaking melody alongside chord changes that dance up and down the guitar neck along the way. Although the legacy of The Beatles may have been firmly in the past at this point, McCartney’s attempt to capture his past glory may have been good enough to rival the original.
