Paul McCartney has announced the release of a new album on February 6th. As yet without a title, it’s described as a "tribute to his personal favourites" and features covers of the songs the former Beatle grew up listening to as a child, as well as two brand new songs of his own.
The album features guest appearances from Stevie Wonder and Eric Clapton, was produced by Tommy LiPuma and features Diana Krall and her band. It’s described a "deeply personal journey through classic American compositions that, in some cases, a young Paul first heard his father perform on piano at home".
"When I got into songwriting," McCartney said, mentioning Harold Arlen, Cole Porter and Fred Astaire as examples, " I realised how well structured these songs were and I think I took a lot of lessons from them."
"It was very spontaneous, kind of organic," he said of the process of recording the album, "which then reminded me of the way we’d work with The Beatles. We’d bring a song in, kick it around, when we found a way to do it we’d say ‘Okay, let’s do a take now’ and by the time everyone kind of had an idea of what they were doing, we’d learnt the song. So that’s what we did, we did the take live in the studio.”
For premium members of McCartney’s site, one of the album’s tracks, ‘My Valentine’, will be streaming there for 24 hours from now until 14:00 GMT tomorrow (Tuesday 20th December).
