I recognise I have become the one thing I said I would never be, a Wild Life bore. So I'll keep this short, really just 'putting it out there' on the off chance, message in a bottle style, that someone who can answer my curiosity sees it and lets me know wtf.
So. Wild Life is often panned for being scrappy, in fact (as my post from late last year showed) it was disliked by 'the critics' from the outset. Whatever it might seem like, I actually don't think that Paul McCartney needs me to defend his work and he can generally speaking look after himself. But Wild Life fascinates me, not just because I really like it, but also because of strangeness.
Wild Life is notoriously a bit of a slapdash affair, and it's up to you whether you find this appealing or disgusting; most people seemed to think it was the latter. One of the strangest things about it is the song 'Some People Never Know', which I really like, but which is mixed in such a way that in one section of the song (for instance) a whole vocal section (around 4:05) is knocked down in volume in a manner that really sounds like an error.
If it's an error, it's been replicated through at least 154 versions of the album (alright, I admit I haven't listened to them all). A recent remaster neither restores nor eliminates this 20 seconds of ghost vocal, just pushes it even further down in the mix, which makes it even stranger when the vocal comes back in solidly at 4:33.
A few months ago, to celebrate the 50th anniversary, I purchased the Wild Life box set which alongside the remastered album and a short DVD of not very exciting footage etc and the track with PMcC later recycled into his hit with Kanye in 2014, has a disc called the 'Rough Mixes'. What is weird about these (finally I'm getting to it!) is that these rough mixes are, by and large, much more robust and thought-through than what was released. For instance, not only is the full vocal present in 'Some People Never Know' but there's also trumpet in it (no bullroarer though). I just don't understand what happened and that's all I have to say.
No comments:
Post a Comment