Paul McCartney - The Boys of Dungeon Lane
“It was a good way to get to know you/Before we learned to twist and shout”, so sings Paul McCartney on “Down South”, one of the tracks on The Boys of Dungeon Lane. Lyrics like this are at the heart of The Boys of Dungeon Lane, an album that finds McCartney reminiscing about adolescence and the memories that led him to meet three other lads in Liverpool and form one of the most important pop and rock groups of all time. For a man who uses songwriting as a vessel for storytelling about every subject you could possibly imagine, Dungeon Lane is feels heavily autobiographical, and it might be McCartney’s most personal work to date.
Over fourteen tracks, McCartney uses his fuzzy blues-driven pop-rock and acoustic intricacies to bring memories of his childhood and pre-Beatles years to life. A dissonant chord opens “As You Lie There”, before melding into a sweet acoustic melody and song that finds McCartney’s voice at his screamiest in decades. For Dungeon Lane, he teamed with Andrew Watt, a pop producer who has managed to bring out some of the greatest career works of the late Ozzy Osbourne and Rolling Stones. Watt is excellent at working with these artists and bringing out the best in their material. I don’t know exactly what it is that he does, but it’s working.
The heart of Dungeon Lane is “Days We Left Behind”, a sweetly composed song that finds McCartney looking back with both fondness and (maybe) sadness. Lyrics like “Looking back at white and black/Reminders of my past/Smoky bars and cheap guitars/But nothing built to last” are packed with emotion; they don’t merely exist as a means to create another rhyme and move the song along. Those fond moments continue with love song “Ripples in a Pond” and the folksy yet trippy acoustic number “Mountain Top”. “We Two” is a song about dreaming of someone lost that tugs at the heartstrings with lyrics like “Last night, I dreamed of you/And all that we could do/Together, side by side/We two can do/Whatever we decide is right”.
Earlier in this review, I started to write that “We Two” was the most Beatles-like moment on the album. I had to edit that - No, “Home To Us” is the Beatles song on the record. For the first time in almost two decades, McCartney and drummer Ringo Starr reunite on a song all about their childhood homes. While it’s always sad that we will never see the two perform with Lennon and Harrison, it’s still a wonderful reminder that The Beatles existed, and these two have been carrying the torch for decades.
“Life Can Be Hard” feels like a cut from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; you can picture McCartney meandering down a road somewhere in the countryside while singing about love and life (common themes on The Boys of Dungeon Lane). “First Star of the Night” begins with a voice note from Sir Paul, noting that it’s “raining in Costa Rica”. Droplets fall hard against the rooftop as he sings about how even when emotions can be at their lowest, the positive feelings can always come shining back, like the first star in the night. “Salesman Saint” recalls the work of his firefighter father and nurse mother during his childhood, while big-band style horns accentuate the song in the background, feeding into the time period. “Momma Gets By” closes the album, with McCartney switching between minor and major chords about what feels like a difficult relationship, with lines like “She’s got her own philosophy of life/It wasn’t too long ago that she agreed to be his wife/And even though he’s complicated/She takes it in stride”.
The Boys of Dungeon Lane is an album about love - friendship love, romantic love, familial love, and all of the complicated emotions that range from it. Specifically, it is about what happens to love over time. Sometimes it grows fonder, sometimes it starts to fade. But how lucky it is that we are to have loved at all. McCartney seems to know this. Starr knows this. The Beatles knew this. How lucky we are to have lived and loved.
