Taylor Swift arrived early to Paul McCartney’s
London office in October, “mask on, brimming with excitement.” “I mostly
work from home these days,” she writes about that day, “and today feels
like a rare school field trip that you actually want to go on.”
Swift showed up without a team, doing her own hair and
makeup. In addition to being two of the most famous pop songwriters in
the world, Swift and McCartney have spent the past year on similar journeys.
McCartney, isolated at home in the U.K., recorded McCartney III. Like his
first solo album, in 1970, he played nearly all of the instruments himself,
resulting in some of his most wildly ambitious songs in a long time. Swift
also took some new chances, writing over email with the National’s Aaron
Dessner and recording the raw Folklore, which abandons arena pop entirely
in favor of rich character songs. It’s the bestselling album of 2020.
Swift listened to McCartney III as she prepared for today’s
conversation; McCartney delved into Folkore. Before the photo shoot, Swift
caught up with his daughters Mary (who would be photographing them) and
Stella (who designed Swift’s clothes; the two are close friends). “I’ve
met Paul a few times, mostly onstage at parties, but we’ll get to that
later,” Swift writes. “Soon he walks in with his wife, Nancy. They’re a
sunny and playful pair, and I immediately feel like this will be a good
day. During the shoot, Paul dances and takes almost none of it too seriously
and sings along to Motown songs playing from the speakers. A few times
Mary scolds, ‘Daaad, try to stand still!’ And it feels like a window into
a pretty awesome family dynamic. We walk into his office for a chat, and
after I make a nervous request, Paul is kind enough to handwrite my favorite
lyric of his and sign it. He makes a joke about me selling it, and I laugh
because it’s something I know I’ll cherish for the rest of my life. That’s
around the time when we start talking about music.”
Taylor Swift: I think it’s important to note that if this
year had gone the way that we thought it was going to go, you and I would
have played Glastonbury this year, and instead, you and I both made albums
in isolation.
Paul McCartney: Yeah!
Swift: And I remember thinking it would have been so much
fun because the times that I’ve run into you, I correlate with being some
of the most fun nights of my life. I was at a party with you, when everybody
just started playing music. And it was Dave Grohl playing, and you…
McCartney: You were playing one of his songs, weren’t
you?
Swift: Yes, I was playing his song called “Best of You,”
but I was playing it on piano, and he didn’t recognize it until about halfway
through. I just remember thinking, “Are you the catalyst for the most fun
times ever?” Is it your willingness to get up and play music that makes
everyone feel like this is a thing that can happen tonight?
McCartney: I mean, I think it’s a bit of everything, isn’t
it? I’ll tell you who was very … Reese Witherspoon was like, “Are you going
to sing?” I said “Oh, I don’t know.” She said, “You’ve got to, yeah!” She’s
bossing me around. So I said, “Whoa,” so it’s a bit of that.
Swift: I love that person, because the party does not
turn musical without that person.
McCartney: Yeah, that’s true.
Swift: If nobody says, “Can you guys play music?” we’re
not going to invite ourselves up onstage at whatever living-room party
it is.
McCartney: I seem to remember Woody Harrelson got on the
piano, and he starts playing “Let It Be,” and I’m thinking, “I can do that
better.” So I said, “Come on, move over, Woody.” So we’re both playing
it. It was really nice.… I love people like Dan Aykroyd, who’s just full
of energy and he loves his music so much, but he’s not necessarily a musician,
but he just wanders around the room, just saying, “You got to get up, got
to get up, do some stuff.”
Swift: I listened to your new record. And I loved a lot
of things about it, but it really did feel like kind of a flex to write,
produce, and play every instrument on every track. To me, that’s like flexing
a muscle and saying, “I can do all this on my own if I have to.”
McCartney: Well, I don’t think like that, I must admit.
I just picked up some of these instruments over the years. We had a piano
at home that my dad played, so I picked around on that. I wrote the melody
to “When I’m 64” when I was, you know, a teenager.
Swift: Wow.
Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift, photographed in London on October
6th, 2020.
Photograph by Mary McCartney for Rolling Stone.
McCartney: When the Beatles went to Hamburg, there were
always drum kits knocking around, so when there was a quiet moment, I’d
say, “Do you mind if I have a knock around?” So I was able to practice,
you know, without practicing. That’s why I play right-handed. Guitar was
just the first instrument I got. Guitar turned to bass; it also turned
into ukulele, mandolin. Suddenly, it’s like, “Wow,” but it’s really only
two or three instruments.
Swift: Well, I think that’s downplaying it a little bit.
In my mind, it came with a visual of you being in the country, kind of
absorbing the sort of do-it-yourself [quality] that has had to come with
the quarantine and this pandemic. I found that I’ve adapted a do-it-yourself
mentality to a lot of things in my career that I used to outsource.
I’m just wondering what a day of recording in the pandemic looked like
for you.
McCartney: Well, I’m very lucky because I have a studio
that’s, like, 20 minutes away from where I live. We were in lockdown on
a farm, a sheep farm with my daughter Mary and her four kids and her husband.
So I had four of my grandkids, I had Mary, who’s a great cook, so I would
just drive myself to the studio. And there were two other guys that could
come in and we’d be very careful and distanced and everything: my engineer
Steve, and then my equipment guy Keith. So the three of us made the record,
and I just started off. I had to do a little bit of film music — I had
to do an instrumental for a film thing — so I did that. And I just kept
going, and that turned into the opening track on the album. I would just
come in, say, “Oh, yeah, what are we gonna do?” [Then] have some sort of
idea, and start doing it. Normally, I’d start with the instrument I wrote
it on, either piano or guitar, and then probably add some drums and then
a bit of bass till it started to sound like a record, and then just gradually
layer it all up. It was fun.
Swift: That’s so cool.
“I always thought, ‘That’ll never track
on pop radio,’ but when I was making ‘Folklore,’ I thought, ‘Nothing makes
sense anymore,” says Swift. “If there’s chaos everywhere, why not just
use the damn word I want to use in the song?’”
McCartney: What about yours? You’re playing guitar and
piano on yours.
Swift: Yeah, on some of it, but a lot of it was made with
Aaron Dessner, who’s in a band called the National that I really love.
And I had met him at a concert a year before, and I had a conversation
with him, asking him how he writes. It’s my favorite thing to ask people
who I’m a fan of. And he had an interesting answer. He said, “All the band
members live in different parts of the world. So I make tracks. And I send
them to our lead singer, Matt, and he writes the top line.” I just remember
thinking, “That is really efficient.” And I kind of stored it in my brain
as a future idea for a project. You know, how you have these ideas…?“Maybe
one day I’ll do this.” I always had in my head: “Maybe one day I’ll work
with Aaron Dessner.”
So when lockdown happened, I was in L.A., and we kind
of got stuck there. It’s not a terrible place to be stuck. We were there
for four months maybe, and during that time, I sent an email to Aaron Dessner
and I said, “Do you think you would want to work during this time? Because
my brain is all scrambled, and I need to make something, even if we’re
just kind of making songs that we don’t know what will happen…”
McCartney: Yeah, that was the thing. You could do stuff
— you didn’t really worry it was going to turn into anything.
Swift: Yeah, and it turned out he had been writing instrumental
tracks to keep from absolutely going crazy during the pandemic as well,
so he sends me this file of probably 30 instrumentals, and the first one
I opened ended up being a song called “Cardigan,” and it really happened
rapid-fire like that. He’d send me a track; he’d make new tracks, add to
the folder; I would write the entire top line for a song, and he wouldn’t
know what the song would be about, what it was going to be called, where
I was going to put the chorus. I had originally thought, “Maybe I’ll make
an album in the next year, and put it out in January or something,” but
it ended up being done and we put it out in July. And I just thought there
are no rules anymore, because I used to put all these parameters on myself,
like, “How will this song sound in a stadium? How will this song sound
on radio?” If you take away all the parameters, what do you make? And I
guess the answer is Folklore.
McCartney: And it’s more music for yourself than music
that’s got to go do a job. My thing was similar to that: After having done
this little bit of film music, I had a lot of stuff that I had been working
on, but I’d said, “I’m just going home now,” and it’d be left half-finished.
So I just started saying, “Well, what about that? I never finished that.”
So we’d pull it out, and we said, “Oh, well, this could be good.” And because
it didn’t have to amount to anything, I would say, “Ah, I really want to
do tape loops. I don’t care if they fit on this song, I just want to do
some.” So I go and make some tape loops, and put them in the song, just
really trying to do stuff that I fancy.
I had no idea it would end up as an album; I may have
been a bit less indulgent, but if a track was eight minutes long, to tell
you the truth, what I thought was, “I’ll be taking it home tonight, Mary
will be cooking, the grandkids will all be there running around, and someone,
maybe Simon, Mary’s husband, is going to say, ‘What did you do today?’
And I’m going to go, ‘Oh,’ and then get my phone and play it for them.”
So this became the ritual.
Swift: That’s the coziest thing I’ve ever heard.
McCartney: Well, it’s like eight minutes long, and I said,
“I hate it when I’m playing someone something and it finishes after three
minutes.” I kind of like that it just [continues] on.
Swift: You want to stay in the zone.
McCartney: It just keeps going on. I would just come home,
“Well, what did you do today?” “Oh, well, I did this. I’m halfway through
this,” or, “We finished this.”
Swift: I was wondering about the numerology element to
McCartney III. McCartney I, II, and III have all come out on years with
zeroes.
McCartney: Ends of decades.
Swift: Was that important?
McCartney: Yeah, well, this was being done in 2020, and
I didn’t really think about it. I think everyone expected great things
of 2020. “It’s gonna be great! Look at that number! 2020! Auspicious!”
Then suddenly Covid hit, and it was like, “That’s gonna be auspicious all
right, but maybe for the wrong reasons.” Someone said to me, “Well, you
put out McCartney right after the Beatles broke up, and that was 1970,
and then you did McCartney II in 1980.” And I said, “Oh, I’m going to release
this in 2020 just for whatever you call it, the numerology.…”
Swift: The numerology, the kind of look, the symbolism.
I love numbers. Numbers kind of rule my whole world. The numbers 13? …
89 is a big one. I have a few others that I find…
McCartney: Thirteen is lucky for some.
Swift: Yeah, it’s lucky for me. It’s my birthday. It’s
all these weird coincidences of good things that have happened. Now, when
I see it places, I look at it as a sign that things are going the way they’re
supposed to. They may not be good now, they could be painful now, but things
are on a track. I don’t know, I love the numerology.
McCartney: It’s spooky, Taylor. It’s very spooky. Now
wait a minute: Where’d you get 89?
Swift: That’s when I was born, in 1989, and so I see it
in different places and I just think it’s…
McCartney: No, it’s good. I like that, where certain things
you attach yourself to, and you get a good feeling off them. I think that’s
great.
Swift: Yeah, one of my favorite artists, Bon Iver, he
has this thing with the number 22. But I was also wondering: You have always
kind of seeked out a band or a communal atmosphere with like, you know,
the Beatles and Wings, and then Egypt Station. I thought it was interesting
when I realized you had made a record with no one else. I just wondered,
did that feel natural?
McCartney: It’s one of the things I’ve done. Like with
McCartney, because the Beatles had broken up, there was no alternative
but to get a drum kit at home, get a guitar, get an amp, get a bass, and
just make something for myself. So on that album, which I didn’t really
expect to do very well, I don’t think it did. But people sort of say, “I
like that. It was a very casual album.” It didn’t really have to mean anything.
So I’ve done that, the play-everything-myself thing. And then I discovered
synths and stuff, and sequencers, so I had a few of those at home. I just
thought I’m going to play around with this and record it, so that became
McCartney II. But it’s a thing I do. Certain people can do it. Stevie Wonder
can do it. Stevie Winwood, I believe, has done it. So there are certain
people quite like that.
When you’re working with someone else, you have to worry
about their variances. Whereas your own variance, you kind of know it.
It’s just something I’ve grown to like. Once you can do it, it becomes
a little bit addictive. I actually made some records under the name the
Fireman.
Swift: Love a pseudonym.
McCartney: Yeah, for the fun! But, you know, let’s face
it, you crave fame and attention when you’re young. And I just remembered
the other day, I was the guy in the Beatles that would write to journalists
and say [speaks in a formal voice]: “We are a semiprofessional rock combo,
and I’d think you’d like [us].… We’ve written over 100 songs (which was
a lie), my friend John and I. If you mention us in your newspaper…” You
know, I was always, like, craving the attention.
Swift: The hustle! That’s so great, though.
McCartney: Well, yeah, you need that.
Swift: Yeah, I think, when a pseudonym comes in is when
you still have a love for making the work and you don’t want the work to
become overshadowed by this thing that’s been built around you, based on
what people know about you. And that’s when it’s really fun to create fake
names and write under them.
McCartney: Do you ever do that?
Swift: Oh, yeah.
McCartney: Oh, yeah? Oh, well, we didn’t know that! Is
that a widely known fact?
Swift: I think it is now, but it wasn’t. I wrote under
the name Nils Sjöberg because those are two of the most popular names
of Swedish males. I wrote this song called “This Is What You Came For”
that Rihanna ended up singing. And nobody knew for a while. I remembered
always hearing that when Prince wrote “Manic Monday,” they didn’t reveal
it for a couple of months.
McCartney: Yeah, it also proves you can do something without
the fame tag. I did something for Peter and Gordon; my girlfriend’s brother
and his mate were in a band called Peter and Gordon. And I used to write
under the name Bernard Webb.
Swift: [Laughs.] That’s a good one! I love it.
McCartney: As Americans call it, Ber-nard Webb. I did
the Fireman thing. I worked with a producer, a guy called Youth, who’s
this real cool dude. We got along great. He did a mix for me early on,
and we got friendly. I would just go into the studio, and he would say,
“Hey, what about this groove?” and he’d just made me have a little groove
going. He’d say, “You ought to put some bass on it. Put some drums on it.”
I’d just spend the whole day putting stuff on it. And we’d make these tracks,
and nobody knew who Fireman was for a while. We must have sold all of 15
copies.
Swift: Thrilling, absolutely thrilling.
McCartney: And we didn’t mind, you know?
Swift: I think it’s so cool that you do projects that
are just for you. Because I went with my family to see you in concert in
2010 or 2011, and the thing I took away from the show most was that it
was the most selfless set list I had ever seen. It was completely geared
toward what it would thrill us to hear. It had new stuff, but it had every
hit we wanted to hear, every song we’d ever cried to, every song people
had gotten married to, or been brokenhearted to. And I just remembered
thinking, “I’ve got to remember that,” that you do that set list for your
fans.
McCartney: You do that, do you?
Swift: I do now. I think that learning that lesson from
you taught me at a really important stage in my career that if people want
to hear “Love Story” and “Shake It Off,” and I’ve played them 300 million
times, play them the 300-millionth-and-first time. I think there are times
to be selfish in your career, and times to be selfless, and sometimes they
line up.
McCartney: I always remembered going to concerts as a
kid, completely before the Beatles, and I really hoped they would play
the ones I loved. And if they didn’t, it was kind of disappointing. I had
no money, and the family wasn’t wealthy. So this would be a big deal for
me, to save up for months to afford the concert ticket.
Swift: Yeah, it feels like a bond. It feels like that
person on the stage has given something, and it makes you as a crowd want
to give even more back, in terms of applause, in terms of dedication. And
I just remembered feeling that bond in the crowd, and thinking, “He’s up
there playing these Beatles songs, my dad is crying, my mom is trying to
figure out how to work her phone because her hands are shaking so much.”
Because seeing the excitement course through not only me, but my family
and the entire crowd in Nashville, it just was really special. I love learning
lessons and not having to learn them the hard way. Like learning nice lessons
I really value.
“I often feel like I’m writing to someone
who is not doing so well,” McCartney explains. “Not in a crusading way,
but I’m trying to write songs that might help. I think that’s the angle
I want: that inspirational thing.”
McCartney: Well, that’s great, and I’m glad that set you
on that path. I understand people who don’t want to do that, and if you
do, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s a jukebox show.” I hear what they’re saying.
But I think it’s a bit of a cheat, because the people who come to our shows
have spent a lot of money. We can afford to go to a couple of shows and
it doesn’t make much difference. But a lot of ordinary working folks?…?it’s
a big event in their life, and so I try and deliver. I also, like you say,
try and put in a few weirdos.
Swift: That’s the best. I want to hear current things,
too, to update me on where the artist is. I was wondering about lyrics,
and where you were lyrically when you were making this record. Because
when I was making Folklore, I went lyrically in a total direction of escapism
and romanticism. And I wrote songs imagining I was, like, a pioneer woman
in a forbidden love affair [laughs]. I was completely?…
McCartney: Was this “I want to give you a child”? Is that
one of the lines?
Swift: Oh, that’s a song called “Peace.”
McCartney: “Peace,” I like that one.
Swift: “Peace” is actually more rooted in my personal
life. I know you have done a really excellent job of this in your personal
life: carving out a human life within a public life, and how scary that
can be when you do fall in love and you meet someone, especially if you’ve
met someone who has a very grounded, normal way of living. I, oftentimes,
in my anxieties, can control how I am as a person and how normal I act
and rationalize things, but I cannot control if there are 20 photographers
outside in the bushes and what they do and if they follow our car and if
they interrupt our lives. I can’t control if there’s going to be a fake
weird headline about us in the news tomorrow.
McCartney: So how does that go? Does your partner sympathize
with that and understand?
Swift: Oh, absolutely.
McCartney: They have to, don’t they?