For Paul McCartney, songwriting isn’t only a job, a craft and an emotional outlet. It’s a compulsion and a craving.
“People say, ‘Well, why do you still write songs?’ And it’s just because I love it. I’m addicted,” he said in an interview at Boulevard Carroll, a warren of recording and rehearsal studios on Manhattan’s Far West Side, where McCartney, 83, had just wrapped up an afternoon of band practice for the season finale of “Saturday Night Live.” “Out of a black hole comes forth milk and honey. And it’s so great, the feeling.”
Prolific as he has been — through the Beatles, Wings and solo albums — McCartney doesn’t follow any songwriting discipline or routine. “I’ll just be somewhere, and with some time to spare, and my guitar will be there, or I’ll be near a piano. And the urge will take me,” he said. “Whenever I’ve hit something, it’s just like, ooh, wow. It’s a great feeling. You know, the whole creative thing is a great thing. I say it beats working.”
Even for a rehearsal, McCartney was nattily dressed. He sported a blue jacket, a black shirt with pink pin dots, black pants, white-soled shoes like karate slippers and socks with a psychedelic design of blue bubbles below a bright yellow stripe.
A few days afterward, McCartney would perform on “S.N.L.,” playing old and new songs, including “Days We Left Behind” from his new album, “The Boys of Dungeon Lane.” Then, five days later, McCartney was the surprise final guest on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” onstage at the Ed Sullivan Theater, where the Beatles made their North American debut in 1964. As a musical finale for Colbert, he sang the Beatles’ “Hello Goodbye.”
In person, McCartney carries his six decades of fame with extraordinary grace. He’s genial and unpretentious, proud but not arrogant and still amazed and delighted at his life as a musician. “I wonder these days at how I ended up as a songwriter,” he mused. “Because, you know, I’m just some kid who went to school, went to the careers master who said to me, you know, ‘You haven’t got qualifications and, there’s not … I don’t see a great future for you.’
“So I had to take that and just sort of think, ‘Sod you — I’m gonna do something.’ And it made me work for success harder, because I wasn’t supposed to be successful. So writing songs was one of the great things about my growing up.”
The first song he wrote was a rockabilly-flavored tune, “I Lost My Little Girl.” McCartney recalled, “Someone pointed out to me later, ‘That was about you losing your mum.’ I wrote it at about 14, 15 years old, and she had died quite recently.” Although the Beatles didn’t record the song, McCartney would later unveil it in the 1970s with Wings. “This is an interesting thing about songs,” he said. “Without knowing it, you’re delving into stuff that maybe would be difficult to talk about.”
