Military Music - Military Times

McCartney’s future melds with ever-present past

That’s a comfortable upholstered chair on the cover of Paul McCartney’s “Memory Almost Full “album, but it’s not a rocker. On the cusp of turning 65, the ex-Beatle couldn’t be less inclined to cool his jets.

After wrapping up the new disc and a frolicsome video for “Dance Tonight,” McCartney is already resuming work on a classical guitar concerto and throwing himself into a photography project, inspired by late wife Linda.

“I’m lucky to have a life that contains all these things,” he says in a phone interview from a studio in Sussex, England. “I do have a lot of interests, and retiring isn’t one of them.”

Nor is that other twilight tradition: the memoir. McCartney freely rehashes his youth on “Memory,” yet outside of his input on The Beatles’ “Anthology” biography, he won’t consider putting his memories to paper, even if only to correct a record that’s been bent and stretched in countless accounts of his life story.

“I’d probably get it wrong, too,” he says. “This is the definitive version! “No, it isn’t, Paul. We measured it.’ I’m too busy doing it to write about it.”

In “Memory”’s five-song closing suite, McCartney revisits the signposts of his past. Elsewhere, he touches on issues of mortality and a shrinking future, but never without his signature optimism. Boy Scout days and childhood summers figure into “Memory”’s sunnier moments, and while he sadly ruminates occasionally and takes a dejected detour to examine a suicidal chap in “Mr. Bellamy”, the music bears his trademark bounce.

The vintage snapshots are not a function of age, he insists.

“A lot of our Beatles songs were quite retrospective,” McCartney says. ““Penny Lane” was about our youth. Songwriters often base material on memory. It happened by accident, as a lot of my stuff does.”

The album title, taken from a message that popped up when his cellphone’s memory bank neared capacity, was also a lucky accident.

“It struck me as quite poetic,” he says. “In modern life, there is so much sensory overload. There’s so much coming at you these days that you have to delete something to make room for something else. And it applies equally to a 20-year-old as it does to me.”

McCartney, who says “Memory”’s target demographic is “everyone,” hopes to reach 20-year-olds through the lighthearted video for mandolin-sweetened “Dance Tonight”, posted on YouTube. Directed by Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), the clip finds McCartney performing amid a swarm of high-stepping ghosts. One of them, actress Natalie Portman, was lured to the project by McCartney’s designer daughter, Stella.

“Natalie is vegetarian, and Stella does the world’s most stylish non-leather shoes,” he says. “That was the connection. I rang her up. I think the combination of Michel Gondry and myself interested her.”

Rave reviews are comparing “Memory “to Wings’ best efforts, and McCartney is eager to bring such tunes as “Only Mama Knows” and “House of Wax” to the stage. Between promotional duties, he and his band are rehearsing for a few surprise shows in the U.K., Los Angeles and New York.

“I won’t get seriously out on the road, I would imagine, until next year,” he says, attributing the delay to his widely dished divorce from Heather Mills. “I’ve obviously got my personal circumstances, and there’s a lot of sorting out to be done there.”

The topic of his broken four-year marriage is off limits. He is, however, voluble on a subject that he spent years dodging.

“For a while there, I just had to say, “Look, I don’t want to talk about The Beatles,’ “ he says. “I was trying to set up Wings and we knew we had a mountain to climb, and The Beatles were a bigger mountain. I didn’t do Beatles songs. All of that’s gone away. I look at it now with great fondness and as something to be proud of. I love singing Beatles songs.”

He’s also delighted that the legal fight between Apple Corps and Steve Jobs’ Apple finally ended so that Beatles tunes will go online before year’s end. And he has no problem with buyers enjoying “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, history’s most hallowed concept album, one digital slice at a time.

“It’s still available as a sequenced program,” he says. “But if people want to change it, hey, it’s a free country. I had my own (copy of “Memory”) shuffled by mistake on my CD player, and it was a freak-out coming at me from another direction. It freshened it up. If people want to shuffle it, cherry-pick it, re-sequence it, that’s fine by me. All I want is for people to listen to it.”

The Beatles catalog may expand with “Now and Then”, a late-’70s John Lennon demo that was considered for the mid-’90s “Anthology “series, which yielded the refurbished “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”.

McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr added parts to “Now and Then”, “but we gave up,” McCartney says. “John’s vocal on the tape, it’s pretty bad quality, but emotional. With technology these days, you never know. I’d be interested to see if anything could be done. There is something there in the bushes.”

He’ll talk to Yoko Ono, Starr and Harrison’s widow, Olivia, before exploring a technological fix. It’s just another item on a growing to-do list that he has promised his family will be set aside on June 18 for his 65th birthday celebration.

“My kids are throwing a little party for me, I hear,” he says.

What’s a suitable gift for the globe’s richest pop star?

“I never know how to answer that,” he confesses. “I always say, a pair of black socks.”