“The Boys of Dungeon Lane,” Paul McCartney’s twenty-seventh post-Beatles studio album, is the portrait of an artist in his twilight, a rich assortment of storytelling and nostalgia befitting the world’s greatest living songwriter. “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” rests easily alongside McCartney’s finest twenty-first-century LPs, especially “Chaos and Creation in the Backyard” (2005) and “McCartney III” (2020).
As with “McCartney III,” the former Beatle plays most of the instruments on the new album, a clear signal that his virtuosic musical talents remain in top form. Indeed, his playing is as supple and inventive as ever. But in an unusual twist, the real star of the show here is McCartney’s heartfelt lyrics. This is, to put it plainly, the stuff of well-considered emotional rawness, painstaking portraiture of our collective pasts.
Produced by Andrew Watt, whose credits include The Rolling Stones’ superb late-period “Hackney Diamonds” (2023), “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” takes listeners on an aural journey into the recesses of McCartney’s Liverpool childhood. The LP’s lead single, “Days We Left Behind,” pulls no punches when it comes to confronting time’s relentless forward momentum. “Looking back at white and black, reminders of my past,” McCartney sings. “Smoky bars and cheap guitars, but nothing built to last.”
McCartney’s sober reflections about the awesome power of the past take many forms on “The Boys of Dungeon Lane.” “This was a lot of memories of Liverpool for me,” he remarked in a recent Abbey Road Studios listening session, “but also any days we’ve left behind. Everyone’s got them — school, old mates.” For McCartney, “Days We Left Behind” holds special significance. It’s “a bit of a favorite,” he admits, about “John, and George and Ringo too.”
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While much of the album feels appropriately bittersweet, McCartney finds plenty of time for whimsical diversions. “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” begins with “As You Lie There,” his fond remembrances about a schoolboy crush. “Up in one of the windows, there was a girl I fancied called Jasmine,” he explained. “But I didn’t know how to approach her; I never spoke to her. The joke was, she did show up later that year and knocked on the door. I was indisposed — I was on the toilet — so I missed Jasmine!”
While boyhood memories of John Lennon and George Harrison are much in evidence here, McCartney devotes equal time to the living members of his museum of recollections, including wife Nancy Shevell, who features in “Ripples on a Pond,” and Ringo Starr, with whom he shares an earnest duet, the first in their storied career, on “Home to Us.”
Yet “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” doesn’t strictly limit its focus to the distant past. For “Mountain Top,” McCartney drew his inspiration from his recent headlining appearance at Glastonbury. Adorned with tape loops and colorful textures, the dream-pop track finds McCartney attempting to replicate the festival’s ambience with exuberance and innovation at every turn.
And then there’s “Lost Horizon,” another upbeat track that lightens the mood, even while being mindful of the power of friendship and the fleeting nature of our existence. As with “When Winter Comes,” the 1990s-era track on “McCartney III,” “Lost Horizon” is a throwback of sorts — a truly “lost track” that was rediscovered by McCartney’s longtime engineer Eddie Klein and resuscitated, thankfully, for “The Boys of Dungeon Lane.”
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Meanwhile, songs like “Down South” brim with nostalgia for days gone by — in this instance, memories of a hitchhiking jaunt with Harrison. McCartney’s musical time machine eventually alights on “Salesman Saint,” a reference to his father, Jim Mac, who died in 1976. A music man in his own right, McCartney’s father exerted a prodigious influence on The Beatles’ knack for ranging far and wide when it came to generic considerations.
“I was born in 1942, in the war,” McCartney explained during the listening session. “I was too young to appreciate that, but my parents weren’t. My dad was a fireman, putting out fires from the bombs. My mum was a nurse and midwife. But they carried on, because they had to. Like people in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere now.” It is precisely such instances — moments in which McCartney so deftly connects the past with the present — that make “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” something truly special. Music lovers will find plenty to adore on McCartney’s latest album. But they’ll soon discover, as his evocative lyrics wash over them, that the LP’s songs aren’t merely about the former Beatle’s past, but our own.
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