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Chaos and Creation in the Backyard

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In 1965, Paul McCartney, with all his vibrant, adolescent boyishness intact, solely recorded one of the most covered songs in contemporary music history: “Yesterday / Love was such an easy game to play / Now I need a place to hide away / Oh, I believe in yesterday.” Forty years later, after enduring the death of two of his bandmates and tumbling through marriages, it seems that McCartney had found the “place to hide away” within the emotionally revealing full-length Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, which features a photo of his younger self beneath the clotheslines in his parents’ backyard as the cover art. These tracks embody the Sir’s striking, resilient, lion-esque “Drive My Car” demeanor and most intriguingly, a personal and intimate darkness that gather within the record’s instrumental strides, each resounding with their own “Yesterday’s.”

Features of the McCartney repertoire can easily be gathered: it’s the rich, substantial chemistry of sashaying piano chords, the heavy, gravitating percussion and bluesy riffs that grasp our ears as if doing so with elastic bands. The first few seconds of “Fine Line” sprout with cheery pitches that sink fluidly down into McCartney’s vocal range. The persistent rhythms give momentum to the wise authority in McCartney’s words and allow for percussive dimensions that make the number all the more enjoyable to listen to. These abundant elements are dropped, however, when we arrive at somber numbers like “Jenny Wren” where the weight of the song is placed upon the isolation of McCartney’s slightly mournful voice against crisply picked guitar strings. “Jenny Wren,” in particular, sounds incredibly reminiscent of his earlier popular Beatles hit, “Blackbird” with its acoustic guitar tip-toeing and hushed, dramatic tones.

“This Never Happened Before” gives the impression of someone rising out of the fog and is also where I can taste, most vividly and accessibly, the atmosphere of Chaos. Arguably a continuation of “Maybe I’m Amazed,” this track arrives curiously out of someone who we believe has been through it all, given his age and his status as a legendary figure in our culture. Even as this album communicates frustration and somewhat despondent contemplations, especially in “Riding to Vanity Fair,” we feel an odd sense of optimism infused within words like, “This is way it should be,” that are not without awareness of a difficult reality that might say otherwise to a strong heart like his.

Having recorded Chaos and Creation in 2005, our Beatle’s still got it, proving his capability even further with the following record Memory Almost Full. Yet his eye is keen on the days of his youth, as if we are standing with him as he stares at his younger self, fooling around with a guitar in his old backyard, where all the trouble of music might as well have begun.