‘YOU GAVE ME THE ANSWER’ – Joe from the U.S. asks…

The next few months are going to be about all things Flowers In The Dirt, following the exciting announcement that the album would be the 10th release in the GRAMMY Award-winning Paul McCartney Archive Collection.

Flowers In The Dirt saw Paul team up with Elvis Costello to co-write a third of the album, the majority of which was recorded at Paul’s own studio in East Sussex. Joe from the US has been in touch to find out more about the dynamic between the two…

“What was it like writing and recording with Elvis? Did you learn anything from him in the process?”

We spoke with Paul in his London office a few weeks ago to find out,

“Thanks for your question, Joe. The answer is no! [Laughs] It was good! It was good fun actually. When we were about to start, I had said to Elvis that I kind of missed the way John and I used to write, which was sitting across from each other, with an acoustic guitar each. And I’d explain to him that the fun thing for me was, with John being right-handed and me being left-handed it kind of looked like it was in a mirror. So I said we should do the same thing. He just came down to my studio in Sussex and we used that same process. We just sat down, started banging away until one of us had an idea, or either of us brought in something that had inspired us and we wrote in the same manner that John and I had written in. So that was nice, it was kind of reminiscent of using this method once again. And the great thing was, this time, once we were finished, we could go right downstairs into the studio itself - because we wrote in my office above the studio - and we’d go right downstairs into the studio the minute we’d finished it. Five minutes later we’d recorded it. Talk about fresh! That was ‘hot off the skillet’."
 
PM.com: "And those are the acoustic demos on the reissue?"

Paul: "Those are the demos, yeah. That’s why they sound so immediate - because they are!"

PM.com: “We were listening to them earlier. They sound like they could have been recorded today!"

Paul: "Yeah, there was a very good spirit on them. We thought, ‘Just finished a song, yeah. Let’s go downstairs and just record it!’”