- Some Thoughts on The Boys of Dungeon Lane - June 3, 2026
- “Hope You Got That” - June 2, 2026
- Quick Housekeeping Note re: Moolah - May 28, 2026
(A friend of mine, Nick Zaino, wrote me his thoughts on Paul’s latest LP, The Boys of Dungeon Lane. I found them interesting, and asked him if I could share them here. Put your own feelings in the comments, hmm?
—MG)
I like it. He can still write a snarling guitar riff when he wants to, and his ability to chart a whiplash change in an arrangement is well intact. And he can still tell a story from a character’s point of view. The opening track is sticking with me. It’s about him having a crush on a neighbor when he was a kid, but it feels kind of menacing to me.
This is probably the most consciously nostalgic album he’s ever released, at least the most focused on one particular time, when he was a kid. He’s still ambitious, still wants to write a proper rocker. The range in his voice has shrunk, but he’s nimble enough with a melody so you might not notice so much. And his facility at arrangements means he can bring in other voices for some power to back him up, although he’s playing a lot of the instruments here.
My love of McCartney is partly aspirational. I admire the way he moved through the world, and the way he moves through the process of songwriting. I think his mindset is to not squash that initial impulse – to let the thing out in the writing stage. Don’t overthink it. But once it’s out in the world, polish that sucker and arrange it so everything’s perfect. And I think he’s still swinging for something. And he’s kept his mind open all these years, which sometimes looks like he’s chasing trends. But I give him the benefit of the doubt because I think he is endlessly curious. And that is about the best think a human being can be. Keeping looking at the new things popping up, take them apart, see what’s inside, see how it applies to you.
There is no world in which my creative output comes close to anything McCartney’s done. But watching him keep pushing, the drive he still has when he proved everything he ever needed to prove 50 years ago, is fascinating and inspiring.
And this new album, maybe because it is so focused on one period of his life – it does feel like there’s something he needed to address before it was too late. Maybe he’s feeling his mortality as he approaches 84. There are no huge revelations in the music. He established his skills and his voice over the decades. And there is some schmaltz here. But he’s still pushing himself, like he has always pushed himself (and everyone else he felt could make something special). And I will carry off any little bit of that I can to apply to whatever I’m doing. A real live beating heart.
NICK ZAINO lives in Massachusetts, where he is compiling a comprehensive history of Boston comedy.
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“Poor old Buddy”
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Various musings on Lennon and Addiction
Deconstructing The Beatles: The End
George Starostin on “McLemore Avenue”
Allen Klein Playboy Interview, 1971
Getting (a bit) better — and a Minus 5 cover
Try it, you might like it
George Orwell is reputed to once have said that he is more interested in how you think than in what you think. Obviously, there are caveats galore with this, but I have always hedged an appreciation for that ideal as it forms the basis of intelligent and constructive critique. In other words, if one is going to look at a topic from 360 degrees, then I would like to know the thought process behind the likes and dislikes and not just that “I really like it” or “I listened to it twenty times in the last two days.”
I am not at all saying that this is what this reviewer has done—not at all. Instead. I am merely using the recent drop of The Boys of Dungeon Lane album as a springboard as a chance to howl at the moon and to try to sort out some of the thoughts that have been, for better or worse, buzzing through my head recently regarding Sir Paul, fandom, and what I see as a reflexive inclination among many to praise him without holding him to the very high standards that he created so many decades ago.
I am once again, as is always the case when I assess anything by Paul post Ram and anything at all post 1970 by the other Beatles, feeling oddly guilty in not liking so much of it. I admit that I can be a rather thick-foreheaded cultural non-entity who is perhaps no further enlightened than the men of the Cro-Magnon Era, but I honestly wrestle with why almost none of it (Paul’s or the others) post-Beatles work piques my interest.
This problem requires a full disclosure: I don’t even like music that much, but I very much enjoy reading about the artists, the history, and the cultural changes they wrought. This is exactly what Michael and his readership do on the HeyDullBlog site and I am an eager reader of all of it even if I am that guy who could drive across the country and never once turn on music.
To be even more honest, I am envious of those who have (many at a mere four or five years old if the Internet is to be believed!) had transformative musical experiences that forever set them on a course of listening, playing, and even performing. I lacked the musical gene and therefore there was no seedbed in my life where nascent interests would grow into forests of musical expression and experience.
Worse, I grow very weary of so much music. I find it to be achingly repetitive and I bemoan songs that might have a snazzy hook, beat, and intro, but then make a four-minute lunch out of saying the same things over and over again. My Sweet Lord anyone? It is the definition of repetition, but then my Cro-Magnon dictionary only has a few entries as reading was not quite in vogue thousands of years ago. I think of my unsophisticated musical horizon as that of a small garden ornament and thus limited to cool drumming (think of the jazz influences of John Densmore’s work with the Doors) or what we enjoyed on Friday nights in college with beer and the likes of Van Halen’s Outta Love Again or Queen.
Not to say that I cannot be moved at all. The early Beatles and Beach Boys catalogs were bursting larders of the eerily evocative and ethereal sounds of 1960s AM radios and dreams of worlds just over the horizon. Yet, like all the music we hear in our youth, these songs had a time and a place even if they, fortunately, can still bring us great pleasure.
Ok, I engage in this prolix, and fully unsolicited, confession to say that I am genuinely curious as to what other listeners are hearing, and enjoying, when they say they just love everything Paul has written. I am obviously missing a great deal but I do not know exactly what or where to start to remedy those shortcomings.
I am being neither snarky nor snobby here. I genuinely do not understand and since I do not understand then I cannot appreciate. My nephew, the art student, once explained to me the artistry behind Gustav Klimt and Egon Shiele and once he did, I have been an eternal aficionado of that style.
Yet yesterday my better half and I listened to snippets of a few of the tracks from The Boys of Dungeon Lane. She, with a musical ear, could handle more than I as I had to tap out after only 15 seconds of each song. Was I indeed hearing the man who resides on the Mount Olympus of pop music? I felt bad as to me it was just the cloying and anodyne whispers of an 84-year-old man—and that is not age discrimination as I am not too far off the pace in the years-gone-by sweepstakes.
I have read that those who do not like the music should instead focus on Paul’s magisterial lyrics, deep reflection, and the skill with which he plumbs the emotional deep. Uh…ok. Was this the Freshman dorm poetry reading? Granted, no one expects the chops of a Heinrich Heinne, John Donne, or Siegfried Sassoon, but seriously. Is no one at all in a position to play the foil of John Lennon? Wait, ignore that question has been open since 1969 and the last time John played the foil to Paul’s ideas.
Paul is an entertainer of the absolute first rank who lives for the public eye. Good for him and good on him. To paraphrase the Black Eyed Peas – That’s what he does it’s who he be.
Nor can one begrudge those who spend a few thousand to go see him in concert. I say this with every intention of compliment when I say that he is a living museum and to witness an actual Beatle on stage must be, for many who are ardent in their fandom, truly a life’s experience.
Often this human quest to maintain a link with the past is admirable in paying homage to the greats of yesteryear while at times it can shackle us into smothering the object of our adoration with hagiographic phrases that have a weight but no longer any meaning such as when the media has to immediately report that this is an “excellent” album. Why is it? Tell me, says Orwell, how you came to that conclusion. Paul is not a jello mold, he is an artist and the art demands clear viewing.
I have watched one too many videos today of YouTube influencers who are shedding diluvian tears in real or imagined emotional release over this new album. I just wish they could spare a dime for those in the corps of the Philistines and tell us why this is good music and not just because “It was released on what would have been my Nan’s 95th birthday, or “he is as good as he was when he was 25.”
In the meantime, I will fall back on the words of Aldous Huxley and his worry that silence in the 20th century would be completely pushed to the side. I would have liked to have driven across the country with him. Maybe Sir Paul could have benefited as well.
Thanks, as always, Michael for having this great site! It is, by a mile, the best Beatle one out there.
@Neal, I must admit I recognize a lot of myself in this comment, especially:
“I am once again, as is always the case when I assess anything by Paul post Ram and anything at all post 1970 by the other Beatles, feeling oddly guilty in not liking so much of it.”
So why is Paul so very beloved? Why does he get such a pass?
In a world of marketing and fraudulence, Paul is the real deal; in a world that denies history, he embodies it; in a world that insults and disrespects craft, especially the kind painstakingly built over a lifetime, he exudes that. We do not respect our elders in this society — we do not even know what to do with them — but Paul has had the good fortune and good sense to remain productive and well, still cranking out tunes like it was 1965 or something. He is not stuck in a Malibu nursing home, ranting about “the great replacement theory,” but gallivanting around the world, sound of mind and nimble of fingers. Unlike John or even George in their later years, he does not bring up any uncomfortable questions, and one hopes his demise will do the same.
One could look at Paul McCartney and say, “What are you talking about? Late-state capitalism WORKS.”
But for the vast majority of us, it doesn’t, and hasn’t. There are no Beatles because the current world cannot produce them. The absurdly prosperous peace that was a necessary precondition for The Beatles is no longer. The post-Cold War English-speaking WW II-nourished monoculture — what I have called “mid-Atlanticism” — has been replaced by something much more tenuous, much more splintered; potentially freer and more diverse, but only if you have the personal wealth to pay for a musician’s career. Today’s Paul McCartneys likely work in tech, and they do not dream dreams of conquering the world’s women with love songs.
I think the praise we heap upon Paul is in some sense our guilt over what we have allowed the world to become over his lifetime.
Or perhaps not, but I don’t think it’s much about the music, and that’s okay, and I’m glad for anybody who wants to snap up his work. I think Paul isn’t simply a nostalgia act (not that there’s a bit wrong with that); I think he represents a time when popular culture was vibrant, almost impossibly rich, and acted powerfully to shape our world in (mostly) positive ways. I think people CRAVE that, and wonder where it’s gone, and rightly sense that we now live in a time that desperately needs what The Beatles made, and embodied, so effortlessly. And our feelings towards Paul are shot through with that longing, and the awful sense that, when he is gone, there will never be another like him, ever again.
Well said. Now I have to buy the album.
@Michael
Thank you. Your reasons are very much along the lines of what I have been looking for in a discussion regarding Paul’s quite devoted fan base. I can understand that they do like him, but it all too sadly, just supposed to be taken as a given that he deserves such a fervent/adoring/zealous following.
While we as humans are unable to tease out the exact ingredients and in what measure they went into the test tube to create the magic of the Beatles years, we fortunately are able to recognize, and then enjoy, what occurred. This seems to be the case with Paul and reading your response it made me think that the “magic” is different for every listener. The time, the place, the individuals, the cultural cross-currents, the technology. It all was part of a talent that, as you say, cannot be recreated and so remains personal, and treasured, by us.
There are many reasons though that I think that the nil chance of it reoccurring might not be so bad. While we might bemoan the slack tides in which we are musically and culturally sailing at the moment/decades, I find the diversity a good thing.
If talent, like energy, is neither created nor destroyed but is just stored and transmitted in various ways, perhaps the fracturing of things and the 1001 diverse directions in which they have scattered is something that might provide the impetus for an ultra-generational talent to emerge.
Since, as you say, the mono-culture is no longer intact any upcoming talent has a very high bar to clear of course, but I am not sure that such revolutionary ideas/persons set out to change the world, but then it suddenly occurs. Not that it “just happens,” but it ends up making the things that went before almost unrecognizable from how things are now.
That, though, is of course both the problem and the joy. A problem in that we feel as if we have been becalmed, but a joy in that something might very well come along and just pin everyone’s ears back.
Perhaps a long way to say that it won’t happen the same way, but hope, as fragile a filament as that is, leads me to keep an eye and ear open.
Btw. Just for fun I looked across a few sites that have covered the release of the album and the comments I read led me to that uncomfortable moment that you realize that you are at a gathering that you should not be or don’t want to be—that moment when you grab your hat and coat and back slowly toward to door.
One commenter said that he/she has listened to album 40 times already. Another opined that four of the songs should be considered among the very best that Paul has ever released as a solo artist. Yikes!
“it won’t happen the same way, but hope, as fragile a filament as that is, leads me to keep an eye and ear open”
Excellently said.
“four of the songs should be considered among the very best that Paul has ever released as a solo artist”
This is not about the music. This is about fans’ need to be present at the creation. Since this is the album that came out when they were furiously fanning, it MUST be equal or better to any previous work.
Not to be a jerk, but this immature reflex is exactly why I keep doing this blog — to examine, and thus become comfortable with, the idea that The Glorious Moment happened before I was born. Since the arrival of the internet, people seem to resent history, because it was a party they weren’t invited to. And so we must endure an endless stream of “this [new thing] is the greatest ever!”
Fans, man.
Michael,
Your “fans, man” arrived at just the right time.
We were, by happenstance, given two behind-the-dugout seats to a major league baseball game last evening.
I have not been to a game in decades, but what a fun date night under the lights it was and we got to see, even though we were neutral as to who won, a couple of players who will be in the Hall of Fame one day.
The “fan experience ” as it is so labeled was however, to put it mildly, an eye-opener. Thousands of men and women wearing jerseys of their favorite player and frequently springing from their seats to cheer on their cherished team.
It was about the 4th inning when a group of guys, who seemed to have frequented the beer stand on more than one occasion, leaped up and waved towels around and lodged vociferous complaint with the umpire. They were, apparently, disputing the latter’s call at second base against the baserunner.
My wife, who had also read your reply, leaned over and asked “What was that you were saying about Paul McCartney fans?”
All I could do was shrug my shoulders and say “fans, man.”
Neal, for many years I found it difficult to appreciate almost any of Paul’s solo stuff because I found myself automatically comparing it to his work with the Beatles. But I’ve found it more rewarding to approach it on its own terms, as the deeply idiosyncratic, almost stream-of-conscious creations of a genius who felt free to indulge whatever weird musical whims popped into his head. I can’t think of any hit songs of the 1970s as profoundly odd as “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” and only Paul could have a hit in the New Wave era with “Mull of Kintyre,” a song that sounds like it could be hundreds of years old. Then there’s “McCartney II,” which gives us a Paul who sounds like he’s already anticipated the music of the 1980s before that decade was even a year old. I will say that my interest in Paul’s music rapidly declines after “Tug of War,” and I don’t have a ton of interest in his later stuff. I’m delighted that he’s still around and making music, and the stuff he’s doing is inoffensive enough that I don’t think it will mar his legacy.
@J.D., you’ve summed my thoughts on solo Paul pretty precisely. After Tug of War — that is to say, after Paul’s solo work loses the tension of a possible reunion with John or the other three — he becomes an Inoffensive Tunesmith that I am happy exists, but no more than that.
I will say I felt a stirring of interest when he collaborated with Elvis Costello, which is interesting.
@Mike, it does seem as if John’s death took something out of Paul; I imagine he rarely wrote a song without wondering, at some level, what his old partner would think about it, and surely the same was true for John. It doesn’t seem accidental that Paul seems to have been much more inclined to collaborate with other major musicians — Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson — after 1980; before that, I suspect there was some part of him always waiting for John to come to his senses and reignite the old partnership.
I will have to revisit the songs Paul did with Costello, who strikes me as someone who — at his best — displayed some of the best qualities of both Lennon and McCartney as a songwriter: sharp wordplay combined with surprising tunes.
@J.D., I have always 100% believed the rumor that John and Paul planned to write together in the UK in 1981.
Thank you for the reply J.D.
You make a great point about finding it rewarding to take Paul’s post Beatle career on its own terms.
Here I was bellyaching about how I get tired of his music, but then you named two of my absolute favorites in Uncle Albert and Mull and I had to immediately listen to them again. Great stuff!
They all have some great post Beatles songs imo, but I don’t have any of it on my playlist.
It’s more like a greatest hits, than like the Beatles music, which I like 99% of.
@Paul, that’s often how I feel. I like the Beatles’ whole catalog, and like a smattering of each Beatle’s solo work. It’s rather uncomfortable-feeling.