McCartney lives up to challenge with ‘Chaos’

Writing songs isn't necessarily harder for him as he gets older, McCartney said. And for whatever reasons — time, a happy remarriage and new fatherhood — he feels he's writing better than he has in a long time.

“I still have this deep love for melody in particular and writing songs,” he said. “It isn't any more difficult. Obviously what made it easier then was writing with John (Lennon). He was such a great collaborator. The two of us were on fire every time we sat down to write.

“If he was stuck, I knew that I could help him out and vice versa. We normally sat down for three hours and bingo, a pretty good song came out. We never had a dry session. Every time we sat down, we came out with a song.”

That happened up to the end; Lennon even asked for advice on “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” he said. “We're not stupid,” McCartney said. “We knew a good thing.”

Yet it put in place the essential dilemma of his solo years. McCartney seems to intrinsically understand the value of a strong collaborator, but what can compare when you've had a partnership for the ages?

He enjoyed, for example, a brief songwriting collaboration with Elvis Costello that produced some good music (“My Brave Face”). But “you do something like that and it makes it even more obvious that there's no replacing John for me and no replacing me for him.”

McCartney spoke by telephone from a car driving to band rehearsals in Miami for his American tour. He's long past the period where he felt he had to prove himself post-Beatles so, twistedly, he avoided the band's work in concert.

Now the whole catalogue is up for grabs, and it's easy to find songs he's never played live before — like the voice-shredding “Helter Skelter,” which he brought out for the Live 8 concert.

One last query as the car pulled up: Has he ever thought over the years, I've put a pretty good songbook together, maybe it's just time to let it be?

“Pardon the pun,” he said. “The trouble is, I like it too much. If I was asked to retire tomorrow, if I was forcibly removed from my contract, I'd just do it for fun.”

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