Paul came off the back of The Beatles Anthology with an itch to make new music. The Anthology was a refresher course. Watching it reminded him of the standards The Beatles reached, and how much fun they had making albums without taking themselves seriously. So he called up friends and family and got straight to work.
"You've got to have a laugh, because it's just an album," he said. "Hopefully you'll hear that in the songs."
Flaming Pie landed in May 1997 and climbed to #2 on the US charts.
The Song We Were Singing
Written in Jamaica in early January 1995, this was the first track Paul taped with Jeff Lynne for the album. Paul played standup bass that originally belonged to Bill Black, the same bass used on Elvis Presley's earliest hits, including Heartbreak Hotel. That recording had grabbed schoolboy Paul McCartney back in 1956.
"I was remembering the Sixties, sitting around late at night, dossing, smoking pipes, drinking wine," Paul recalled. "It's that time in your life when you got a chance for all that."
The World Tonight
The second song from Paul's initial sessions with Jeff Lynne started as an acoustic, folk-tinged demo and got a progressively heavier treatment. Paul wrote it while on holiday in America in 1995. Of the 14 songs on Flaming Pie, only the title track, Somedays, and Great Day came from England. The muse tends to strike Paul most often when he's away.
"The lyrics were just gathering thoughts," Paul explained. "Like 'I go back so far, I'm in front of me'. I don't know where that came from, but if I'd been writing with John, he would have said 'OK, leave that one in; we don't know what it means but we do know what it means'."
If You Wanna
Paul and Steve Miller had renewed their friendship working on Young Boy, and they combined again on If You Wanna the same way. Paul wrote the song a couple of years before, during his New World Tour when he had a day off in Minneapolis in May 1993. Stuck in a skyscraper hotel room, inspired by being in Prince's home city, he sat with a guitar and wrote what he called a "driving across America" song.
"I wanted to write something that would reflect America, for when you're driving across the desert on that big road with the flat horizon," Paul said. "I'll take you for a ride in my Cadillac. I'll take you to The Coast for a holiday. When they say The Coast, they don't mean Blackpool."
Somedays
One studio session was all it took at first, but Paul felt the song needed an arrangement. At the time he was occasionally meeting George Martin at Abbey Road, sorting through unissued Beatles library recordings for the Anthology albums. Paul asked George to listen to Somedays and consider scoring it for orchestra. "I see you haven't lost your touch!" George replied. A 14-piece ensemble overdubbed their parts on 10 June 1996.
Paul had driven Linda to a photo session for one of her cookery assignments. Knowing she'd be about two hours, he set himself a deadline to write a song in that time. "So that when she'd finished and would say 'Did you get bored? What did you do?', I could say 'Oh, I wrote this song. Wanna hear it?'"
Young Boy
Paul's son James, an emerging guitarist, kept asking his dad about the early days. Among the old vinyl pieces they'd replayed was My Dark Hour, recorded by Steve Miller and Paul (under the pseudonym Ramon) in May 1969, after a Beatles Abbey Road session fell apart over business squabbles. Listening to it again, Paul wanted to resume the collaboration after a 25-year gap. He flew to Miller's studio in snowbound Idaho after The Beatles finished Real Love. They worked the same way as before: Paul drumming while Steve played lead guitar, then Paul and Steve on guitars, Paul on bass and lead vocal, Steve on harmonies.
"This was another written against the clock," Paul said. "I wrote it in the time it took Linda to cook a lunch for a feature in The New York Times. It was great to renew my Sixties friendship with Steve Miller. Working with him again was like falling back into an old habit."
Calico Skies
Hurricane Bob made landfall in August 1991 and knocked out power in the northeast. Paul was staying on Long Island at the time. The blackout prompted him to pick up an acoustic guitar and write what he calls "a gentle love song that becomes a Sixties protest song." He asked George Martin to co-produce. The song's instrumental simplicity meant it was started, finished and mixed in a single session. It's the earliest recording on Flaming Pie.
"Bob, the hurricane, knocked out all the power. It was all candlelight, cooking on a wood fire," Paul explained. "Very primitive, but we like that enforced simplicity. I couldn't play records, so I made up little acoustic pieces. This was one of them. It's a primitive little powercut memory."
Flaming Pie
The "pie" lyric came to Paul while he was riding his horse. It fitted perfectly with some funky riffs he and Jeff Lynne had worked up days earlier while waiting to overdub guitars on Souvenir. With lyric and music suddenly in place, Paul suggested they tape the song the way The Beatles often worked, cutting three songs in a day. They set themselves a four-hour deadline. The track came together with ease: Paul singing live to his own piano with Jeff on guitar, then drums and bass, then guitars and harmony vocals.
"John joked that the name Beatles came in a vision from a man on a flaming pie, coming unto us, 'you are Beatles with an A'," Paul said. "I was riding with my missus, thinking of lyrics, searching for a rhyme with 'sky'. 'Bye'. 'Pie'. The story came back and I thought 'Ooo, flaming pie'."
Heaven On A Sunday
Paul was sailing his boat in America in August 1996 when Heaven On A Sunday arrived. He liked the idea of a celestial city busy all week but peaceful on Sunday. He developed the tune from there, its relaxed ambience matching his holiday mood. The song was recorded after the McCartneys returned to England.