Macca Returns: Memory Almost Full — Jun 5th 2007

By James Marcus

Back in March, Sir Paul McCartney announced that he was ending his 43-year-association with EMI and recording his next CD for the nascent Starbucks label. At the time his decision raised a few eyebrows (and hammered EMI's already faltering stock). Yet it was hard to begrudge the former Beatle a fresh start, especially after the public meltdown of his marriage to Heather Mills the previous year. And Starbucks soon unveiled an ambitious marketing plan, pledging to play Memory Almost Full in 10,000 locations worldwide on its day of release. With an audience of six million caffeinated consumers on hand, how could Macca go wrong?


To find out, I wandered over to a local Starbucks. There was a poster of McCartney on the front door, and inside, the music was holding its own against the buzz of conversation and the tetchy sound of frothing milk. A bin of CDs sat by the register, along with a display of co-branded gift cards. I asked the friendly barista whether there had been much response from the customers. "Oh, a couple of people asked if this was Paul McCartney," she said. "The last one was an older woman." At this point the next customer on line weighed in. It was a good thing, he ventured, for an artist of the previous generation to keep producing.

Agreed. Still, that may be Sir Paul's problem in a nutshell. His original audience has aged with him, and while his work with the Beatles has lost none of its luster, his boyishness (as opposed to youthfulness) has worn thin in recent years. Even his reflexive mastery of the pop idiom has been a kind of curse: his sweet, relentlessly catchy melodies come to resemble a form of automatic writing. At my local Starbucks, anyway, the customers kept puttering away with their laptops or cell phones--sometimes both at once--and seemed pleasantly oblivious to music.

Which isn't to deny the disc's intermittent charms. Memory Almost Full (great title, by the way) kicks off with "Dance Tonight," a jolly mandolin romp complete with a whistling-and-washboard interlude. McCartney's voice, darkened with age, is still remarkably flexible, and he puts it to great use here or on a snappy rocker like "Vintage Clothes." Several cuts have a tinny, neo-Eighties sound--a surprise, especially considering that Geoff Emerick pitched in on the engineering. And sometimes Sir Paul seems to promise a certain gravitas, then fails to deliver. ("Ever Present Past," for example, is about ten times perkier than its title would suggest.) But the poppy arrangement of "Mr Bellamy" is offset by its note of plaintive isolation, and in "That Was Me," McCartney assertively zips through his past: "Yeah, that was me / Sweating cobwebs / Under contract / In the cellar / On TV / That was me." The galloping pace keeps the singer's sentimental touch at bay, and when he starts shouting at the end, he sounds almost surprised by his own passion. Not bad for a man of 64.

Tags: mccartney, memory almost full, starbucks

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