PAUL MCCARTNEY’S MUSICAL MEMOIR In Praise of The Boys of Dungeon Lane

Profonde Musique

June 2, 2026

On the cusp of his 84th birthday, Paul McCartney has released arguably his most revealing, poignant and personal of records, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, a musical memoir of his days before fame and fortune, before Elvis Presley and Little Richard, before John Lennon, the Beatles, Ed Sullivan, Shea Stadium, Sgt. Pepper’s, “Hey Jude,” Linda Eastman, the break-up, the dust-ups, Wings, and decades of hits and experimental albums of varying degrees of quality. The entirety of his canon, vast and sprawling, as of a piece, in the span of a lifetime spent becoming the most prolific and successful songwriter ever.  

It is the kind of artistic statement one would want from an aging composer, a personality who is as recognized as any in the history of celebrity, and who’s time in the limelight has been both an open book and a hazy mystery – a man once presumed dead because he decided to decamp to a run-down cottage in Scotland with his wife and kids for a spate, a man who has survived the death of two bandmates and his beloved wife of nearly 30 years. Yet, we know so little about how McCartney sees his life in song, how he views the destiny-altering moments that make up his story. He was hardly ever the Beatle who wrote from the first person – that was John’s thing, and sometimes George Harrison. Paul wrote third-person character studies about Eleanor Rigby, Lady Madonna, Uncle Albert and Auntie Gin, lovely Rita the meter maid and someone called Maxwell wielding a hammer.  

This makes, as stated above, The Boys of Dungeon Lane a remarkable document, a nostalgic notation from a man who clearly wants to get this down and put it out before those memories inevitably dim. His voice on the record is indeed ragged with mileage, softer than his halcyon days, surely, but his composing still displays a razor-sharp alacrity for melody and storytelling. This time, as his old mate John did with Plastic Ono Band at age 30 and Bob Dylan did with Blood on the Tracks at 32, he’s aimed his microscopic deconstruction of the human condition on himself – not Beatle Paul, but young Paul from the lazy riverfront hamlet of Speke some eight miles from the center of Liverpool. 

I was moved to give the album, named after a road in his hometown, a listen simply because I felt committed to comment, having written a book essentially about Paul McCartney as told through his most lasting song, Take a Sad Song – The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude, published in 2022. That was Paul as a 26-year-old rock star on top of the world, falling in love with the woman for which he will spend every waking hour from that time forward, and as comfort for the son of his songwriting partner, five-year-old, Julian, whose father would be leaving his family for a new love, Yoko Ono. Let her into your heart. Researching that song and the subjects that inspired McCartney then brought me to his losing his beloved mother, Mary to breast cancer when he was 14 and she was only 47, and how John Lennon too had suffered a similar trauma at 17 when his mother was killed by a drunk motorist. Take a sad song and make it better. That connection in grief, in drive, in a passionate need to express through the salvation of rock and roll informed their best love songs that reflected the search for a woman to fill the void.  

But although John was quite open about this, Paul never was, instead giving us songs celebrating the universal mother in “Your Mother Should Know” and “Lady Madonna.” It is not until the final track on The Boys of Dungeon Lane, “Momma Gets By,” perhaps his last and most precious statement – assuming the mid-eighties into his nonagenarian twilight doesn’t produce anymore music – that we’re invited into that chasm. The lilting verses with notions of a strong, impenetrable woman, who imparts her own philosophy of life, but agrees to be someone’s wife: And even though hе’s complicated, she takes it in her stride, he sweetly intones, singing What are his silly faults compared to what she feels inside? The final words sung on the album, She loves him / She loves him with all her heart and soul is moving stuff. 

But McCartney, like David Bowie’s Black Star or Warren Zevon’s The Wind, albums by dying artists as their last statement, decides instead he’d like to stick around to see how this creation will land. It is so Paul. He makes music to please, not to expunge. And these songs are good, solid numbers, truly the work of a pro, as always. Right from the start with the bouncy, “As You Lie There,” McCartney treads the line between rock ephemera and Beatle-esque charm, but it is telling that an album that closes with the ardently dense, “Momma Gets By,” which significantly follows “Salesman Saint” with its opening lines, My father was a salesman / My mother was a saint launches with a song about a young girl Paul had a crush on but could never get. The most eligible bachelor in pop music history, the one that had all the girls clamoring for, wistfully recalls looking up at her window wondering (some seven decades hence) what she thought of him, if anything. Her name, we’re told in story is Jasmine, but never in the song. She is distant but inside his head, as he wonders if he is inside hers. He does tell of a chance passing, nothing that would matter to her, but is everything to him – preluding his love life for years, as the loss of his mother would. It is important to note “As You Lie There” is the longest track on the record at nearly five minutes (the second longest, ahem, is the closer, “Momma Gets By”). 

McCartney follows “As You Lie There” with two songs about his second and third favorite subjects after women, and that’s music and eternal friendships. “Lost Horizon” – apparently an older song from about a quarter-century ago – hints of his hearing Music from a distant fairground; the fête in which he first met a rough and ready teenage John Lennon fronting the Quarrymen – the legendary history-altering détente that Was the start of the first day of forever. “Days We Left Behind,” is a contemplation on what a young man ignores along the way to stardom in smoky bars and cheap guitars, but nothing built to last. Touchstones and road marks. Who pays attention to details then? McCartney did, or at least reinvents new ones, as we all do with our faulty memories. 

Later in the album McCartney uses conveyances like buses and their destination to express growing up with “Down South,” which means heading into Liverpool proper and then later into London to make his fortune. It is on a bus where Paul meets a 13-year-old George Harrison and puts him on a path to audition for this Lennon kid (on the same bus-line) and join a band that will tilt the axis of the planet: The morning bus was where we two would meet / I sat beside you on an empty seat / We’d talk about guitars and rock and roll / They were the subjects that would nеver grow old.  

Ringo, the only other living Beatle, gets his time to shine too, as he debuts the first-ever recorded duet between he and Paul in “Home to Us,” a quaint ditty about growing up working class where the roses in the yard began to wilt, and then they turned to dust / But it was home to us. This one, like most of the songs here, support the lyrics with musical nods to the period, like on “Salesman Saint,” where Paul’s dad, James, of the Jimmy Mac Jazz Band, is honored with old-timey fanfare in the background. McCarney showing off his well-worn talents to tell aural stories as well as literal ones. Plaudits too must go to producer, Andrew Watt (Lady GaGa, Justin Beiber, Post Malone), who is given writing credit on four songs, something to not take lightly on a Paul McCartney record. He also produced the upcoming Rolling Stones album and worked with Elton John. He can apparently jump generations with ease.

But McCartney holds out one memory of love in “We Two,” which he transmutes into Linda, the mother of his children, a woman for which he will spend only a handful of days apart starting in 1968 until her death in 1998. Although not meeting the timeline of this romantic excursion into the past, it is difficult to ignore the first mention of “two” in a McCartney-penned title since the exquisite, “Two of Us” that both he and John harmonized beautifully back in 1969. Many, including me, always thought it was about their journey in songwriting and rock star partnership, but it was about escaping the world to disappear into Linda. Two of us riding nowhere / Spending someone’s hard-earned pay / You and me Sunday driving / Not arriving on our way back home. With half a century in between them Paul sings, My thoughts return to you… / Always, always, my friend / You’ll be my only one, concluding with a nod to recalling Mother Mary who comes to him in a dream in one of his epic ballads, “Let It Be” – Last night I dreamed of you / And all that we could do / Together, side by side / We two can do.  

These are just some examples of what the 14 tracks, maybe Paul’s finest or at least most compelling songs in some time, offer. The album is a triumph in framing a life before the life. A tribute to those who loved or despised or even ignored him for him, not an icon in his winter years looking back in fondness, as only Paul could ever do. His emotional currency still worth every shilling.