Tuesday, August 23, 2005

'Jenny Wren' and 'Promise to You, Girl'

The push pin board at paulmccartney.com is getting fuller. Just added is a video for the first single, Fine Line, from his new LP, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.

Also added are audio versions of two more songs.

Jenny Wren is an acoustic ballad which McCartney says is a sequel to his Beatles classic, Blackbird. That 1968 tune was meant to be an ode of encouragement to a young African-American woman facing injustice. This 2005 song, with very strong lyrics, appears to be a similar bit of encouragement for a woman confronting war and other hardships in Africa. Given McCartney's long-standing concern with justice issues, that would make sense.

Promise to You, Girl is an uptempo love song. It features a Beach Boy-like vocal arrangement at one point.

The three cuts on the McCartney web site fit the advance billing given to the LP by the musician's press release announcing Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. All three songs are more organic and sparsely produced, reminiscent of his first post-Beatles solo effort, the 1970 release, McCartney. Yet the songs I've heard so far are a bit different from anything McCartney has ever released before. Like the 1970 LP and the far less-satisfying McCartney II (1980), McCartney plays virtually all the instruments and does all the vocals on this new release.

The plan is for all songs to eventually appear on the push pin board at the McCartney site, with the LP to be released in September.

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