Paul Mescal Takes a Deep Dive Into ‘Dungeon Lane’ Album With Paul McCartney: ‘I Haven’t Got a Formula’

The first official meeting of the Pauls was about as lovely as you’d expect. Over the weekend, Paul McCartney sat down to talk about his upcoming solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, with actor Paul Mescal, who is slated to portray the former Beatle in director Sam Mendes’ The Beatles: A Four-Film Cinematic Event, due out in April 2028.

The two men sat down for The Boys of Dungeon Lane: In Conversation with Paul McCartney & Paul Mescal, which debuted on Monday (May 25) on Amazon Live and the Amazon Music app. The 11-minute chat in a restaurant opens with a seemingly nervous Mescal asking, “How do you feel about being interviewed?,” with veteran interviewee McCartney smiling back, “It depends if I like the person. Which is where we’re running into a problem already … No, I find if I like who I’m being interviewed by it comes easy.”

The intimate conversation finds Mescal diving right into the personal nature of the songwriting on McCartney’s album (due out on May 29), asking how the legendary pop songwriter is able to spin his memories into new music while also making them feel like they’re in the “present tense.”

“I don’t know how I do it,” says McCartney during the interview, which is broken up with glimpses of archival pictures of the Beatles and young people laughing at the tables around them. “I haven’t got a formula. They used to ask me and John [Lennon], ‘How’d you do it? Who writes the music, who writes the words?’ I don’t know. To me, I think any story or song you’re gonna do, it’s gotta involve memory. With the Beatles, we always tried to write something different.”

McCartney says he likes writing about Lennon and late Beatles guitarist/songwriter George Harrison these days, because it’s like “revisiting them.” He does just that on the new song “Down South,” which harkens back to his and Lennon’s pre-fame days as children.

They also discuss the new album’s collaboration with former bandmate Ringo Starr on the single “Home To Us,” as well as “Days We Left Behind,” a romantic tune looking back at what Mescal dubs McCartney’s “full, brilliant, complicated” relationship with his songwriting partner.

“Looking back on your life, I ran into this guy called John Lennon, and he was fighting life — he had a lot trouble, his dad had left home, his mom had got run over, he had a lot of trouble in there — so he was putting up a shield, so he was very witty, very biting,” McCartney says of Lennon. “When it came to writing, that kind of relationship stayed there, so on this record, I might even refer to him in my mind, as if we’re still writing together.”

They also discuss an emotional track written in honor of McCartney’s parents, “Salesman Saint.”

“I often remember that my mom and dad had me in World War II. I’ve always known that growing up, but at certain point you go ‘Wow.’ McCartney says of the track on which he paints a picture of his cotton salesman father and nurse/midwife mother, who in the song becomes a saint. “It occurred to me that it’d be good to just put down some stuff about them carrying on through whatever they had to put up with,” he says.

Watch the interview here.

This article was first published by Billboard U.S.