IMPOSSIBLE FAN Q&A - EXTRA QUESTIONS #3

UPDATED - SATURDAY 27TH DECEMBER
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It was impossible (see what we did there!) for Paul to answer everybody's questions at his Impossible.com songwriting talk with Lily Cole.
Fortunately, PaulMcCartney.com was on hand to record a few more questions after Paul left, which he kindly answered for us later that day. Check it out below (sorry about the quality of the audio!)...
And remember to read the full transcript from Paul's talk HERE!
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QUESTION 1
"Hi Paul, I was wondering if you were interested in how the Foo Fighters recorded their new album in eight different cities across America? What affect does the location of a recording of an album have on you as a songwriter? For example, when you recorded 'Band on the Run' in Nigeria, how did that influence the songs on that album?"



Paul: "Yeah, I think there is a small affect. But generally it’s more of an atmosphere thing for me. Some people will go to Memphis and do a blues album. For me, I went to Nigeria loving the Nigerian rhythms, and that kind of crept into ‘Band on the Run’ a little bit. A couple of the tracks have got the sort of [sings ‘Ho! Hey Ho!’ from ‘Mrs Vandebilt’]. You know, that’s in there, and it’s a little bit African. 
"But I’d arrived there basically with the album written. So in the arrangements, it didn’t affect the songs at all. But in the atmosphere, it does a bit. 
"I think if I was writing songs in the place that would probably affect it. But actually in my case I think it’s quite small."

QUESTION 2:
"How do you feel about students now studying popular music with a focus on The Beatles?" (Asked by student studying for an MA in Popular Music in Liverpool.)

 

Paul: "For me it’s ridiculous, and yet very flattering. Ridiculous because we never studied anything, we just loved our popular music: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, etc. And it wasn’t a case of ‘studying’ it. I think for us, we’d have felt it would have ruined it to study it. We wanted to make our own minds up just by listening to it. So our study was listening. But to be told - as I was years ago now - that The Beatles were in my kid’s history books? That was like ‘What?! Unbelievable, man!’ Can you imagine when we were at school, finding yourself in a history book?!
"So it’s very flattering, and I think it’s a kind of cool idea really, you know, like in LIPA. So yeah, it’s very flattering. At the same time, I don’t think that by studying popular music you can become a great popular musician; it may be that you use it to teach other people about the history, that’s all valuable. But to think that you can go to a college and come out like Bob Dylan? Someone like Bob Dylan, you can’t make. It was an early decision when we were thinking of our policies for LIPA, we said: ‘We want to train people to be all rounders. Give them as much info as we can. But you can’t tell them how to become a Bob Dylan or a John Lennon, because you know, nobody knows how that happens’." 

QUESTION 3:
"How do you jot down ideas for songs when you don’t have an instrument, and how do you keep hold of them in your head before going into the studio?"



Paul: "I use a little cassette recorder, which is very old fashioned but it works for me. It’s like a Dictaphone that people would use, like to remember a speech or something. I will just go to the piano very quickly and sort of write a sketch. The trouble with that is you write too many sketches! I’ve got a lot of songs I need to finish!
"The good thing about it is that you didn’t really make a proper recording. Because what can become a problem is if you’ve got a really good sounding demo, you go into the studio to make the record and you can never get the feel of the demo. It’s like, ‘Arrghhhhhh!’ I make bad quality demos so that my record has to be better quality. So I can never say, ‘We can use the demo’."
PaulMcCartney.com: "Do you have the instrumentation and arrangements in mind before you go into the studio? Or do you experiment when you’re recording and go with what works best?"
 
Paul: "Yeah, often you have a pretty good idea of how you want it to sound and then you make the rest up in the studio. That’s how you record, you know. If it’s just me doing all the parts, then I really kind of make it up, but based on an idea of how I wanted it to sound. When you’ve written a song, you sort of think, ‘This should be a guitar, drums should be doing this’. It’s a bit of a combination of both."