Paul McCartney, The Back Seat Of My Car
I’ve been writing sporadic blog posts on songs that have ‘shaped me’. And as it was Paul McCartney’s 80th birthday over the weekend, I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts on a Macca tune.
In truth, there are a quite a few that have shaped my life — going way back to when I was a kid — but The Back Seat Of My Car is a relatively recent discovery.
In my younger and more vulnerable years, I’d always dismissed the Ram album as a bit ramshackle and flimsy. I can only imagine that this is because my younger self was a total idiot and wasn’t listening properly.
My more recent reappraisal of the album (hot take: It’s frickin’ amazing) meant I actually got through to the final song, Back Seat, and wow am I glad I did.
It has a couple of ingredients which, for me, are clear and unarguable evidence for why McCartney is a songwriting genius.
Firstly, there’s the melodic fluidity. It’s just so damn effortless. The verse — built around some gorgeous Cm7 and F9 chords — flows as smoothly as a spoonful of honey over a baby’s bottom (my apologies for this mental image). Yet when you look at where the melody’s going, it’s crazy. The line, “But listen to her daddy’s song / Don’t stay out too long” climbs vertiginously through just over an octave and half. That’s Brian Wilson-levels of melodic virtuosity (and the song obviously owes a lot to Wilson and The Beach Boys).
If you’ve ever tried to write a song, have a go at writing two short lines which span that range and sound that natural. It’s not impossible. But it’s hard. And McCartney always makes it look alarmingly easy.
Secondly there’s the mashing up of different sections and styles. It’s a trick McCartney pulls over and over again, from the end of Abbey Road to Live And Let Die, Maybe I’m Amazed, Band On The Run, Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey, even a more recent track like Despite Repeated Warnings on Egypt Station.
In Back Seat, you get a piano ballad into lush orchestral pop into a raucous, anthemic singalong (“We believe that we can’t be wrong”).
Again, if you’ve ever tried to do this as a songwriter, it’s incredibly hard to make it sound natural, like it fits and was always intended to be that way.
I won’t dwell too long on the lyrics. On the one hand, I can easily see how you could dismiss references to speeding “along the highway” and heading to “Mexico City” as twee or clichéd. But on the other, there’s so much back story wrapped up in simple lines like “But listen to her daddy’s song / Making love is wrong”. And the final, defiant “We believe that we can’t be wrong” is just a perfect encapsulation of how it feels to be a teenager.
When I was a kid in the eighties and early nineties, Paul McCartney was deeply unfashionable. I remember a friend’s father sneering at me about how I could possibly like someone who would write a song called Silly Love Songs. And, objectively speaking, there are blots on his copybook (I’m looking at you, Mull of Kintyre and the song with the frogs).
But personally, I don’t care about any of that. For me, this is a man with an almost supernatural facility for melody, a good father and a decent bloke, with an insane work ethic to boot.
I’ll never be able to write a song halfway as good as The Back Seat Of My Car, but in a small way it’s shaped me nonetheless. And I’m very grateful for that.