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Paul McCartney has announced his 18th solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane – its title a reference to the route from Liverpool to the Speke shoreline, the area where the former Beatle spent his young childhood.
A press release described the 14-track record as McCartney’s most introspective album yet, a “collection of rare and revealing glimpses into memories never-before shared, along with some newly inspired love songs”, presumably about McCartney’s third wife, Nancy Shevell, whom he married in 2011. The musical styles are said to span his entire career, including “Wings-style rock, Beatles-style harmonies, McCartney-style grooves, understated intimacy, melody-driven storytelling, character songs”.
The lead single, Days We Left Behind, references Dungeon Lane. McCartney debuted the song on BBC Radio Merseyside. “I want the people of Merseyside to hear my brand new song,” he said in a message read out by presenter Helen Jones.
In a statement about the song, McCartney, 83, said: “This is very much a memory song for me. The album title comes from a lyric in this track. I was thinking just that, about the days I left behind and I do often wonder if I’m just writing about the past, but then I think: how can you write about anything else? It’s just a lot of memories of Liverpool. It involves a bit in the middle about John [Lennon] and Forthlin Road, which is the street I used to live in. Dungeon Lane is near there.”
McCartney described Speke as “quite working class. We didn’t have much at all but it didn’t matter because all the people were great and you didn’t notice you didn’t have much.”
The Boys of Dungeon Lane is credited solely to McCartney, in the vein of his 1970 solo debut McCartney and its 1980 counterpart McCartney II.
The album was produced by Andrew Watt, the 35-year-old US producer who has become the go-to guy for classic rock acts including the Rolling Stones and Elton John. It came to fruition when McCartney and Watt met five years ago to exchange ideas, during which McCartney played a chord that he didn’t recognise. A song came together that Watt suggested they record: it became the opener to the new album, As You Lie There.
McCartney and Watt made the album in between dates on McCartney’s five-year global tour, in studios in Los Angeles and Sussex.
On the record, McCartney writes “with rare openness” about his postwar childhood, his parents and his formative relationships with Lennon and George Harrison before the birth of the Beatles in 1960.
“These were the years that historians continue to examine, the quiet, unguarded days that unknowingly laid the groundwork for a cultural revolution,” according to the press release. “Paul visits them not as myths or folklore but as his own memories.”
The announcement appeared to reference Danny Boyle’s 2019 film Yesterday, which imagined what the world might have been like had the Beatles never existed. “A world without Paul McCartney is impossible to imagine, yet here listeners can travel to a world that existed before everything changed, offering memories never previously shared and revealing, with extraordinary honesty, the human story behind a global icon.”
McCartney’s last solo release was McCartney III in 2020, continuing the trilogy of McCartney and McCartney II. He will be portrayed by Paul Mescal in director Sam Mendes’s biographical film series, The Beatles: A Four-Film Cinematic Event, due for release in 2028.
The tracklist for The Boys of Dungeon Lane
As You Lie There
Lost Horizon
Days We Left Behind
Ripples in a Pond
Mountain Top
Down South
We Two
Come Inside
Never Know
Home to Us
Life Can Be Hard
First Star of the Night
Salesman Saint
Momma Gets By
