3 albums Paul McCartney said are some of his favorites

Paul McCartney is one of the most prolific and successful songwriters of all time and, obviously, a Beatle. His impact on music is immeasurable and was crucial to the development of Rock and Roll. Throughout his career, he has been part of many incredible albums, but there are three that he mentioned off the top of his head as some of his favorites.

3 albums Paul McCartney said are some of his favorites

“Rubber Soul” (The Beatles – 1965)

Released in 1965, “Rubber Soul” is the first record mentioned by Paul in a Q&A session with Tim Minchin. It was The Beatles sixth studio album and had songs like “Drive My Car”, “Norwegian Wood”, “Nowhere Man”, “Think For Yourself”, “I’m Looking Through You” and “In My Life”.

McCartney believed that album was a turning point for The Beatles: “Things were changing. The direction was moving away from the poppy stuff like Thank You Girl, From Me To You and She Love You… we’d come to a point where we thought, ‘We’ve done that.”

“Now we can branch out into songs that are more surreal, a little more entertaining’. And other people were starting to arrive on the scene who were influential. Dylan was influencing us quite heavily at that point,” he said in The Beatles Anthology (1995).

“Rubber Soul” was a number one hit in several countries like United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (The Beatles – 1967)

The second record mentioned by Paul was “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, released by The Beatles in 1967. Curiously, the idea for the name of that record appeared after the roadie asked him to pass the “salt and pepper”.

“I was listening to a lot of kind of offbeat music … crazy stuff like John Cage. […] I was coming on the plane with our roadie … he said, ‘Pass the salt and pepper’ and I thought he said Sergeant Pepper.”

“The whole concept was for us to pretend to be someone else so that’s why the uniforms … it was just a way to remove ourselves from just being Beatles and not be fed up with being musicians. […] It allowed us to do crazier things than we might otherwise have done. I wasn’t me. I was this guy in this other group – it was freeing,” Paul McCartney told Howard Stern in 2020.

Besides the two title-tracks, other praised songs of the album are “With a Little Help From My Friends”, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, “Getting Better” and “A Day in the Life”.

The album peaked at number in several countries at the time, including United States and United Kingdom. It is The Beatles’ best-selling album, having sold an estimated amount of more than 32 million copies worldwide.

Band On The Run (Paul McCartney and The Wings – 1973)

The third album mentioned by Paul was “Band On The Run”, his most famous album recorded with The Wings, the group he formed after The Beatles. Besides the title-track, that album also has songs like “Jet”, “Let Me Roll It” and “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five”.

As he said in his website on the 50th anniversary of the album, Paul knew from the start the title-track would be an epic song. “Those kinds of things – album titles and artwork – normally come later on in the process. I just wrote a bunch of songs, which luckily I remembered, because the demos got stolen! ‘Band on the Run’ was always going to be the big, epic track on the album. But I didn’t necessarily know it was going to be the title. But it eventually comes to the surface, and I thought, “Well, that’s an obvious title. That’s the one,” he said.

The album peaked at number one in several countries at the time. Some of them were Australia, Canada, Spain, United Kingdom and United States.