By Stuart Mitchner
I reluctantly passed up a staged reading of Shakespeare’s As You Like It at the library to listen, for the third time, to Paul McCartney’s new record, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, which opens with “As You Lie There,” a song phrased as if to pick up where the Bard leaves off. A strange song to begin an album with, it’s as if Paul goes from Orlando sweet-talking Rosalind — “Although we only met one time, I can’t forget the feeling that came over me: I like to think that we could be together forever” — to a thwarted lover giving way to his inner Iago as he stands outside “your house looking up at your window seeing your silhouette on the blind and wondering do you ever think of him, does he ever cross your mind,” as a no-nonsense crash of drums kicks things on to another, darker, angrier, more grimly insistent level: “As you lie across your bed, am I there inside your head. As you lie there, as you lie there?”
It’s as if he’s already forced his way into the room, no more pretty-please “I like to think,” he’s not singing, his voice is raw. edged with an animal growl, when he pushes on: “In the room beyond the blind, do I ever cross your mind?” Then again, this time underscored by the repetition: “As you lie there, as you lie there!”
Now it’s not enough to “be inside your head.” He has to be in “every book you’ve ever read,” front and center on your screen “in every film you’ve ever seen.” And he’s sounding just a tad demented when he croons in his pretty-please voice how he likes to fantasize he’s “something in your eyes ‘cause that would mean the world to me. Just say the word and we can be together forever.”
And “forever” takes on a quality of menace when you keep repeating over and over “As you lie there, lie there, lie there beyond the blind, beyond the blind.” And the intensity seems to invade the next song, “Lost Horizon,” where every day was “the first day of forever.”
Now look what that first song set into motion. Instead of kinder, gentler Paul, you may be thinking of Van Morrison’s “T.B. Sheets,” the singer outside poor Julie’s window and then inside the sick room, “Open the window and let me breathe.”
A Perfect Song
Since Sir Paul McCartney is well into his eighties, meaning this could even be his last record, I’m thinking back to “I’ll Follow the Sun,” which seemed “perfect” the first time I heard it on Beatles For Sale in the mid-sixties. “I wrote that in my front parlour in Forthlin Road. I was about 16,” McCartney said in an interview that dates the composition to around 1958. “I seem to remember writing it just after I’d had the flu … I remember standing in the parlour looking out through lace curtains of the window and writing that one.”
McCartney discussed the structure of the song in his book The Lyrics: “When you think about it, it’s a ‘Leaving of Liverpool’ song. I’m leaving this rainy northern town for someplace where more is happening. It’s an interesting melody too. I’d been searching for striking new combinations of notes. There’s something quite original about it. One of my favorite songs of my dad’s era was ‘Cheek To Cheek,’ the Fred Astaire song, and what I liked was that it starts with ‘Heaven, I’m in heaven,’ and it goes through two verses and comes back at the end of the middle eight to ‘heaven.’ It’s a single sentence. It was like our house in Forthlin Road. You went in the front door, went around through the living room, dining room, kitchen, hall, and ended up back where you started. ‘I’ll Follow The Sun’ does that too.”
Ways of Listening
My first time through the Boys of Dungeon Lane, driving around between Princeton and Kingston, I listened to the songs in order, meaning “As You Lie There” came first. The second time through, I listened on the computer, with the last songs first, partly because the ones that had impressed me the most were the two at the end about McCartney’s parents: “Salesman Saint” (“The war was nearly over/The peace would soon begin/Living on the edge of the city/When the roads were going in”) and the last and most moving piece on the album, “Momma Gets By” (“while Papa gets high”). The heart of the song, in every sense of the word: “She doesn’t care, she’s got her own philosophy of life/It wasn’t too long ago that she agreed to be his wife/And even though he’s complicated, she takes it in her stride/What are his silly faults compared to what she feels inside?” At this point, Paul delivers the record’s most beautifully sung lines: “She loves him, she loves him with all her heart and soul.”
Of course it’s hard not to flash back to the early Beatles here: “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.”
As You Like It
By the time I got back to “As You Lie There,” I found a much different song from what I first heard. It was an as-you-like it situation: the edgy, angry quality had come through less clearly as I drove down Snowden Lane. In the opening scene of Shakespeare’s play, Orlando refers to how his brother, the Duke, “will shake me up.” And while I don’t expect revelations on the same order from the 13 other songs, it’s interesting that the first highlight I quoted from the second song, “Lost Horizon,” is “That sound can shake me up/That sound can lift my spirits.”
As you like it, from “Days We left Behind”: “In the skies, the skylarks rise/Above the sounds of war.” From “Mountain Top”: “Now we’re really trippin’, everybody’s flippin’ out/Need to get a grip and slip away/”Little girl, you’re trippin,’ everybody’s flippin’ out.” From “Come Inside”: “all my life’s an open book/come inside my mind.” From “Home To Us”: “When the skies were grey it didn’t matter, it was home to us.”
Here’s a couple that sing like epigrams: “Life can be hard, but then that’s when we start to put it together again” and “First star of the night shows her light to me and I know my little world is still alright.” Probably the most liltingly McCartneyesque song is “Life Can Be Hard” — “… she calls me on, and I’m enchanted by her beauty, and if I’ll play, she’ll dance.”
Finally, the part I liked best while driving between Kingston and the lake was when Paul took me for a ride in a truck he calls a lorry (as my wife and I did when hitching through England). In “Down South,” Paul’s sitting next to John (and maybe George): “It was a good way to get to know you before we learned to twist and shout.”