Paul McCartney says he often found himself consulting an old songwriting partner while writing his latest solo album, The Boys from Dungeon Lane.
The record is an ode to the Liverpool streets, landmarks and memories that shaped McCartney's youth — territory he famously explored decades earlier alongside John Lennon in some of the Beatles' most celebrated songs.
“My collaborator was probably one of the best writers of the century,” McCartney tells The Guardian. “So, yeah, you're going to miss him.”
![The Beatles - The Beatles - Penny Lane (Official Music Video) [Remastered 2015] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/S-rB0pHI9fU/maxresdefault.jpg)
As the Beatles' principal songwriters, McCartney and Lennon spent years in constant creative dialogue, challenging and inspiring one another both in conversation and through song. Their shared memories of Liverpool often became fertile ground for that exchange.
When the pair turned their attention to childhood memories in late 1966, Lennon wrote “Strawberry Fields Forever,” inspired by the grounds of a Salvation Army children's home near where he grew up. McCartney answered with “Penny Lane,” a vivid portrait of the Liverpool street and surrounding neighborhood where he, Lennon and George Harrison spent time as teenagers.
Nearly 60 years later, McCartney found himself revisiting the same landscape while writing The Boys from Dungeon Lane. Even without Lennon by his side, he says the conversation continued.
“I kind of know he would've known it,” McCartney says. “I can gauge his reaction: ‘That's good, stick that in.'”
The imagined exchanges were a reminder of a partnership that helped define popular music — and of the loss that came when Lennon was murdered in 1980.
“But that's life,” McCartney says. “You lose people.”
The subject of loss is one McCartney has thought about increasingly as he has grown older. He recalls Beatles producer George Martin, who was older than the band members, warning him that aging inevitably means watching friends and colleagues pass away.
“Now I'm probably at that age,” McCartney says, “and I'm very conscious of that, having lost John and George — two big touchstones for anything we're talking about.
“So, yeah, you do miss them,” he continues. “I start to get very sad, and I have to think, ‘Wow, wait a minute, everyone misses them.' It's not just me. So that makes me feel a bit better. I think: ‘Well, sod it, it's life, and it's what we've got.'”
McCartney and Lennon grew up together and learned to write songs together, face to face, with acoustic guitars in hand. While one half of the partnership has been gone for more than four decades, McCartney's comments suggest that, in some ways, the conversation never really ended.
