Paul McCartney has spent much of the millennium playing Renaissance man.
Following the recent passing of his first wife to breast cancer after an arduous, emotional struggle, the 59-year-old ex-Beatle spent a year in anguished solitude, slowly finding the energy and the courage to put the pieces of his life back together.
They say all great art is born out of an element of misery, and Paul thus took a short detour down the dusty, unpaved backroads of his artistic ambitions, disappointingly keeping his guitar in its case for a while.
He became the pop icon dabbling in poetry, displaying his impressionistic paintings in some of the world’s finest art galleries, and watching orchestras perform his handful of fine classical compositions.
Getting back on his feet, the musician picked up a former model who’s half his age and made her his fiancée. And now, after shaking the dust off his guitar, Paul McCartney is finally ready to rock again.
McCartney’s new CD, Driving Rain, was released last Tuesday, his first album of original material since 1997’s Flaming Pie.
The CD is a spirited effort to encapsulate the best of the man’s post-Beatles work, bursting with beguiling melodies and inventive touches that are music to the ears of those of us who were hoping the creative spark in Paul had yet to flicker out.
Stylistically speaking, the CD is all over the place. It has Paul digging into his bag of old tricks unreservedly on songs like “Loving Flame” and “From A Lover to a Friend,” a tune featured on the soundtrack to the upcoming Cameron Crowe movie, Vanilla Sky.
He goes on to get a little country on “Your Way,” a little alternative on “About You,” and as catchy as he’s ever been on the title track, “Driving Rain.”
It has Paul coming up with a new trick or two as well.
Driving Rain finds Paul plodding across some weird, wonderful experimental territory. He raps the first verse in “Spinning on an Axis” as good as an almost 60-year-old man can, and later bounces his way through a breezy instrumental inspired by his new love, Heather.
But the final two tracks are where he really steps off the deep end.
“Riding into Jaipur” whisks us away to the foot of the Himalayas, inviting us into the mystical India that once enchanted the Beatles in the 1960s.
The CD’s closing track, “Rinse the Raindrops,” is a 10-minute-long experiment in electric insanity.
All of this goes to prove that Paul still knows his place in the rock pantheon.
He continues to remain the modest, elder statesman for a generation of the fading gray ghosts of rock and roll, and, hopefully, he won’t be unplugging his bass again anytime soon.
Grade: B-
