Much like the literal day-to-day movements of the Beatles in Mark Lewisohn's excellent TUNE IN book about their rise (ending in 1962), this second volume follows McCartney and his inner circle on a virtual day-to-day forensic accounting of their activities.

So, fair warning...though I assume anyone looking at this volume has already experienced the first one...you really need to be a major Beatles/McCartney fanatic to push through 800 pages of detail that can be sometimes a touch dry (I'm thinking about the listing of some of the chord progressions, or the overdub details here).

But overall, it does paint an interesting and, to my mind, more nuanced version of McCartney than I've read up to now. I've always known that Paul is a bit of a control freak and that there's time when he can trade his musical genius—or maybe, more accurately, he can, at times, mistake a silly little ditty as something that's musically genius.

But this volume in particular, as it runs through the rise and fall of Wings 2.0 as well as 3.0, and you get the small comments that have so much impact when they start to add up, in regard to McCartney defending his increasingly terrible lyric writing, or his bandmates tying themselves in knots to pay homage to the guy who basically tells them exactly how he wants things played (not always, but the majority of the time)...it shows how he really needed that equally genius musical peer to push him harder.

McCartney, when with the Beatles, was in constant competition with both Lennon as well as Brian Wilson. (Lennon, for his part, competed with McCartney and Dylan). In all cases, it pushed McCartney to be better both musically and lyrically.

In this book, we see him in far less of a competitive role and far more in an observational mode. Disco's hot right now? Let's try a disco song. Punk's getting big? Let's try some punk influences. The Mills Brothers want a song? Here's something from that era. It feels like he's given up on greatness and settled for homage. 1974 to 1980 feels like the years where McCartney relaxed.

After all, this is the period where he put out the worst Christmas song of all time. I was also shocked at another song that I hadn't heard. I had no idea he'd written the title song for the 1978 film, SAME TIME, NEXT YEAR, starring Alan Alda and Ellen Burnstyn. I'd never noticed the song attached to any of his collections, but come on! His movie songs were usually pretty good? SPIES LIKE US? LIVE AND LET DIE? So I googled this one and listened to it on YouTube. Once. 

Never again. It's utterly awful, and they were right to not include it in the film.

For all of that, it's still a really interesting, deep view into where McCartney was, who he was with, and what was pushing him to create what he created.

And, while we all know how the story ends (well at least until the early days of 2025), I love that they ended the book on a cliffhanger.