Paul McCartney is going back to the start on his upcoming 18th studio album, the nostalgic The Boys of Dungeon Lane. The 14-track collection announced on Thursday morning (March 26) is due out on May 29 through MPL/Capitol Records and is prefaced by the wistful first single, “Days We Left Behind.”
McCartney’s first release since 2020’s McCartney III is described in a press release as a look backward at the former Beatle’s formative years, revisiting those youthful times that “shaped not only his life, but the very foundations of modern popular culture. In a career defined by timeless storytelling and unforgettable characters, Paul now tells the most personal story of all, his own. The Boys of Dungeon Lane is his most introspective album to date and takes the listener back to where it all began.”
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The proof is in the lyrics to “Days We Left Behind,” a gentle acoustic ballad on which McCartney sings, “Looking back at white and black/ Reminders of my past/ Smoky bars and cheap guitars/ Nothing ever stays/ Nothing comes to mind/ No one can erase/ The days we left behind.” The album’s title is also a youthful Easter egg, a reference to the road from the singer’s native Liverpool to the Speke shoreline in the region that McCartney grew up in.
The release says the songs find McCartney, 83, in a “candid, vulnerable and deeply reflective mood,” writing with “rare openness” about his childhood in postwar Liverpool, as well as the resilience of his parents and the early adventures he shared with future Beatles bandmates John Lennon and George Harrison years before the group changed the course of pop culture. And, in a throwback to his 1970 solo debut, McCartney and its 1980s sequel, McCartney II, the upcoming LP is credited solely to McCartney, who played the majority of the instruments on the album.
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“This is very much a memory song for me,” McCartney said in a statement. “The album title, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, comes from a lyric in this track. I was thinking just that, about the days I left behind and I do often wonder if I’m just writing about the past but then I think how can you write about anything else? It’s just a lot of memories of Liverpool. It involves a bit in the middle about John and Forthlin Road which is the street I used to live in. Dungeon Lane is near there. I used to live in a place called Speke which is quite working class. We didn’t have much at all but it didn’t matter because all the people were great and you didn’t notice you didn’t have much.”
The album was born five years ago when McCartney and producer Andrew Watt (Elton John, Ozzy Osbourne) met for tea and the former Beatle began noodling around on his guitar. According to the release, during that jam, McCartney happened upon a chord that he didn’t recognize and kept fiddling around until he locked into a three-chord sequence that Watt insisted they record.
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The LP was then recorded with Watt in bits in Los Angeles and Sussex, England between legs of McCartney’s tours, with no label pressure or deadlines. “Like his career, The Boys of Dungeon Lane is musically eclectic and sees Paul across an array of instruments and styles showcasing his broad musicality,” according to the release, which says it swing from “Wings style rock, Beatles style harmonies, McCartney style grooves, understated intimacy, melody driven storytelling, character songs – the common thread being Paul.”
Listen to “Days We Left Behind” and check out the tracklist for The Boys of Dungeon Lane below:
