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June 2, 2026

The dark side of Paul McCartney

7 songs, 30 min 35 sec

	By Lindsay Zoladz

Paul McCartney performing with Wings in a 1976 concert. John Sotomayor/The New York Times

Dear listeners,

My colleague Jon Pareles recently had the enviable experience of sitting down with Paul McCartney to talk about his new album, the just-released “Boys of Dungeon Lane,” and the entirety of his long (and winding) career. Sounds like it was a good time: “In person, McCartney carries his six decades of fame with extraordinary grace,” Pareles wrote. “He’s genial and unpretentious, proud but not arrogant and still amazed and delighted at his life as a musician.”

That impression is perfectly in keeping with the happy-go-lucky image that McCartney usually projects. He was “the cute Beatle” (though, he told Pareles, he loathed that moniker), overflowing with cheery melodies and unafraid to indulge in what some critics (and, allegedly, John Lennon himself) dismissed as “granny music.”

I appreciated that Pareles’s profile mentioned the gloomier side of McCartney’s songwriting — an aspect of his talent that his free-and-easy reputation often obscures. (He may be the “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” guy, in other words, but he’s also the “Eleanor Rigby” and “Helter Skelter” guy, too.)“His melodic gift can hide his darker moments,” Pareles wrote, noting that when he asked McCartney to choose a few of his “lesser-known songs he’s fond of,” he picked “Daytime Nightime Suffering” and “Arrow Through Me,” “two Wings songs from the 1970s that are not only full of musical twists, but also harbor troubled thoughts.”

When Pareles told me about that part of the interview, we agreed that “the dark side of Paul McCartney” would make for an interesting playlist — so here it is, featuring a few picks from each of us. You’ll hear the aforementioned Wings tracks, along with some solo tunes and my pick for the most depressing Beatles song of all time.

Especially when it comes to his melodies and arrangements, the “dark side” of Paul McCartney is relatively bright. Still, listen closely and you’ll hear a recurring fascination with melancholy, loneliness and, occasionally, the outright macabre.

So sad, so sad,

Lindsay

Listen along while you read.

1. Wings: “Daytime Nightime Suffering”

As he did in “Eleanor Rigby” and “Another Day,” McCartney sings about a woman’s thankless life in “Daytime Nightime Suffering,” which was originally the B-side to the 1979 single “Goodnight Tonight.” It’s bouncy on the surface, thumping along as McCartney’s voice is answered by cheerful guitar licks; for musical tomfoolery, it tosses in an interlude of wordless vocal harmonies à la the Beach Boys. But its final question lingers: “What does she get for all the love she gave you?” JON PARELES

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

2. Paul McCartney: “Another Day”

Though released almost a year after his 1970 LP “McCartney,” this lilting, sweetly sad chronicle of one woman’s solitary, repetitive life was actually McCartney’s first solo single (albeit featuring the distinct backing vocals of Linda McCartney). Many critics disparaged “Another Day” when it was first released — John Lennon also took a not-so-subtle swipe at it in the lyrics of his McCartney diss track “How Do You Sleep?” — but, as with so much of McCartney’s early ’70s solo work, its reputation has deservedly improved over time. LINDSAY ZOLADZ

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

3. Wings: “Arrow Through Me”

The pain of a lover’s betrayal is barely contained in one of McCartney’s most chromatically devious songs, from the 1979 Wings album “Back to the Egg.” The song nods toward the jazzy R&B of Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind & Fire, with a clavinet among the keyboards and a jagged horn-section riff. (It was also funky enough for Erykah Badu to draw on in 2010 for her “Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long.”) McCartney’s vocal pretends to be nonchalant, hopping into falsetto, but it keeps shading into rawness. — PARELES

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

4. Paul & Linda McCartney: “Oh Woman, Oh Why”

This B-side to the aforementioned 1971 single “Another Day” is one of the odder (and darker) entries in McCartney’s vast catalog: A bluesy rocker about a jealous man who shoots his cheating wife — complete with gunshot sound effects! — that a possessed McCartney screeches from the tippy-top of his vocal register. I cannot think of another Paul McCartney song on which he sounds this much like Robert Plant, or, occasionally, Donald Duck. — ZOLADZ

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

5. Paul McCartney: “House of Wax”

McCartney verged on goth in “House of Wax” from his 2007 album, “Memory Almost Full.” Over tolling minor piano chords, soon to be joined by thundering drums and brooding strings, he sang an apocalyptic scenario: “Lightning hits the house of wax / Women scream and run around / To dance upon the battleground.” He finds momentary uplift when he sings about “the answer to it all” — but that answer is “buried deep below a thousand layers,” and the song concludes as a dirge. — PARELES

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

6. Paul McCartney: “Deep Deep Feeling”

One true outlier even in a catalog full of experiments, “Deep Deep Feeling” — from the 2020 “McCartney III” — sets aside verse-chorus-verse form to ride a stark beat and an agony-and-ecstasy mood: “the deep deep pain of feeling” that goes with loving someone “so much you feel your heart’s gonna burst.” The track is spooky and wide open, beginning with just a stark beat and introducing instruments and vocal — all performed by McCartney — to assemble a complex edifice of call-and-response, only to silence it completely and return with a guitar-strumming coda. It’s McCartney going wherever his ears lead him. — PARELES

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

7. The Beatles: “Eleanor Rigby”

Quite possibly the most crushingly sad Beatles song ever, “Eleanor Rigby” is a compassionate, vividly detailed meditation on loneliness and an ode to the sort of person who is not usually the subject of a pop song. Most Beatles compositions were collaborations, of course, but by almost all accounts “Eleanor Rigby” was McCartney’s baby — albeit with small but crucial contributions from the other band members and, in this particular case, the Quarrymen’s former skiffle player Pete Shotton. As McCartney put it in a delightful 2021 New Yorker essay about the creation of “Eleanor Rigby,” “it did feel more like a breakthrough for me lyrically — more of a serious song.” He added, with just a touch of pride, “Allen Ginsberg told me it was a great poem, so I’m going to go with Allen. He was no slouch.” — ZOLADZ

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

The Amplifier Playlist

“The Dark Side of Paul McCartney” track list
Track 1: Wings, “Daytime Nightime Suffering”
Track 2: Paul McCartney, “Another Day”
Track 3: Wings, “Arrow Through Me”
Track 4: Paul & Linda McCartney, “Oh Woman, Oh Why”
Track 5: Paul McCartney, “House of Wax”
Track 6: Paul McCartney, “Deep Deep Feeling”
Track 7: The Beatles, “Eleanor Rigby”

Bonus Tracks

I had the pleasure of profiling (and eating some very good knafeh with) the Syrian-born, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Azniv Korkejian, who records bewitching folk music under the name Bedouine; Norah Jones perfectly described her voice as being “like a warm balm.” Might I recommend “On My Own,” the lovely lead track from her forthcoming album “Neon Summer Skin”?

Popcast

Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times

And speaking of interesting conversations with musicians — a theme of this week’s Amplifier, apparently — on the latest episode of Popcast, my colleagues Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli had an in-depth chat with Olivia Rodrigo. I’ve enjoyed both singles so far from her upcoming release “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” and I’m looking forward to hearing the full album when it drops on June 12. Watch the episode of Popcast in full here.

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