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2 Paul McCartney solo songs that John Lennon said were good
After The Beatles broke up, each member focused on their solo careers, though Lennon’s and George’s were sadly cut short long before their bandmates. This left Paul McCartney as the Beatle with the most commercially successful solo career, placing him among a small group of artists who have sold over 100 million records both as part of a band and individually.
By 1980, when Lennon passed away, McCartney had released three solo albums and seven with Wings. The late musician had heard most of these records and revealed two songs he liked.
2 Paul McCartney solo songs that John Lennon said were good
"Coming Up"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5nzLQ63c9E&pp=ygUYY29taW5nIHVwIHBhdWwgbWNjYXJ0bmV5
"I haven't seen any of the Beatles for I don't know how much time. Somebody asked me what I thought of Paul's last album and I made some remark like, I thought he was depressed and sad. But then I realized I hadn't listened to the whole damn thing. I heard one track... the hit 'Coming Up,' which I thought was a good piece of work. Then I heard something else that sounded like he was depressed. But I don't follow their work. I don't follow Wings, you know."
"I don't give a shit what Wings is doing, or what George's new album is doing, or what Ringo is doing. I'm not interested, no more than I am in what Elton John or Bob Dylan is doing. It's not callousness, it's just that I'm too busy living my own life to be following what other people are doing, whether they're the Beatles or guys I went to college with or people I had intense relationships with before I met the Beatles. (...) I kind of admire the way Paul started back from scratch, forming a new band and playing in small dance halls. Because that's what he wanted to do with the Beatles. He wanted us to go back to the dance halls and experience that again."
John Lennon continued:
"But I didn't. That was one of the problems, in a way, that he wanted to relive it all or something. I don't know what it was. But I kind of admire the way he got off his pedestal. Now he's back on it again, but I mean, he did what he wanted to do. That's fine, but it's just not what I wanted to do," John Lennon said in an interview with David Sheff in 1980, only a few months before his death. Although Lennon said at that point that he really didn't care much about what his former bandmates were doing, according to Paul there was a healthy songwriting competition between them.
"I know that when I'd done 'McCartney II' (1980), he listened to it. Because I heard he was keen on the song 'Coming Up'. What would happen with me and John was... And he wrote this later where he's saying: 'Oh, bloody hell Paul's come up with something good. That means that I've got to'. Then he would come up with something good and I would go: 'Oh, bloody hell! I've got to go in the studio again'. It was a kind of creative competition, you know."
Paul McCartney continued:
"If he did something good, I wanted to do something good and better. Then he would see that and go: 'Right, I'm gonna do something better'. So it was very healthy, it meant that we were not just taking it easy. We were always trying for something good," he said told Zane Lowe in 2020 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).
Like all the songs on “McCartney II,” all the vocals and instruments were recorded by Paul himself. “Coming Up” ended up being the album’s biggest hit, reaching number one in the United States and Canada. Although it was performed live with Wings only 20 times, it became one of the songs most frequently included in McCartney’s solo shows. It has been played almost 400 times, with the most recent performances taking place in 2025.
"Band on the Run"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P_VfLun96o&pp=ygURIkJhbmQgb24gdGhlIFJ1biI%3D
When asked by Rolling Stone magazine in 1975 about George Harrison saying that if people wanted The Beatles they should go and listen to Wings' songs, Lennon mentioned "Band on The Run". "I didn’t see what George said so I really don’t have any comment. (pause) 'Band on the Run' is a great album. Wings is almost as conceptual a group as Plastic Ono Band. Plastic Ono was a conceptual group, meaning that whoever was playing was the band. And Wings keeps changing all the time. It’s conceptual. I mean, they’re backup men for Paul. It doesn’t matter who’s playing, you can call them Wings, but it’s Paul McCartney music. And it’s good stuff. It’s good Paul music and I don’t really see the connection," John Lennon said.
Biographer Tom Doyle wrote in his book "Man on the Run: Paul McCartney in the 1970s" that Lennon actually praised the album and its title track directly to Paul when they got together in the mid-1970s. "Paul, according to gossiping music industry tongues, was in town to meet up with John and talk about getting the band back together."
He continued:
"This story gained more credibility when Lennon and McCartney were spotted together, chatting and laughing backstage, at the sixteenth annual Grammy Awards at the Hollywood Palladium, where Stevie Wonder scooped Best Album for his peerless Innervisions and Roberta Flack walked away with Record of the Year for ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’. John, tempering his hardline attitude towards Paul, considered Band On The Run ‘a great song and a great album," Tom Doyle reported.
To this day, "Band on the Run" remains the most successful and best known Wings album. The title track was released as a single at the time and became a number one hit in countries such as the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. Since then, it has become a staple of McCartney and Wings concerts, having been performed by the band nearly 90 times and by Paul McCartney himself at more than 700 shows.The post 2 Paul McCartney solo songs that John Lennon said were good appeared first on Rock and Roll Garage.
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