Paul McCartney: Recording Sessions (1969-2013). A Journey Through Paul McCartney's Songs After The Beatles.

A loving book with an attempt to discuss McCartney's solo output song by song in a chronological order of recording: not an easy task. Each song has its own entry, it's described in its structure and instrumentation without being too technical. It also details all of the musicians, at least according to the available sources. The best addition are the 70 or so interviews made by the author, that certainly add interest to the story of the songs and reveals anecdotes about the recording. You'll find some nice surprises, like the episodes about "Mull of Kintyre" and a lot of tasty details about the RAM sessions, to name but a few. Very nice research about the musicians and their instruments: the question marks present in some cases confirm that the authour did a serious work and does not present as facts things he's not 100% sure. The volume is packed with a lot of information and period interviews and describes McCartney as a pure musical genius without being sychophantic. It also moves critics, but always with a tongue-in-cheek approach. It contains the songs written or co-written by McCartney: no surprise at all, as it's stated in the synopsis of the book. It's a very useful reference book.

A lot of info about Paul's career after the Beatles broke up!

This book is very well researched and written. This is for the McCartney fan or person interested in the recording of each and every track McCartney recorded since going solo after leaving The Beatles, including personnel on each song, where it was recorded, how each song came about, and each song progressed during its development in many instances. Information on the inspiration or circumstances of each song is provided as well. The research done to compile the information on these songs recorded from 1969 to 2013 is scholarly and amazingly thorough.

All the music it talks about. I'm a huge McCartney fan.

While nicely conceived and competently executed, this book is a hard slog. The author's opinions and (sometimes incorrect) suppositions, compounded by stilted English throughout, keep this work from being essential to its core audience. Most of the information compiled is readily available elsewhere, and the original material approaches superfluity. A new fan might find this of some use as a starting point, provided they like to digest information in a non-narrative, yet summarized format, in the glass decanter of some other guy's opinions. For me, it's not worth keeping.

It is a good reference book as you listen to the music or watch video. It is a fan made well researched material and I find it very helpful because all the post Beatles songs are given numbers and there are something new to discover every page. But the translation could use more editing as there are many simple mistakes and it is not easy to ignore. After all it is a book to keep all the time for each fan and it should not have been much trouble to ask native speakers to proofread. For that reason I could not give 5 stars.Also it should be noted that it has no pictures at all other than cover photo.

A pretty good song by song chronical of Paul's solo career. It doesn't compete with Mark Lewisohn's "The Beatles Recording Sessions" in detail, research or first hand access to session tapes, but it's the only book of its kind on Paul's post-Beatles music and is a good read. Oddly, the author only discusses songs written by Paul, so covers and songs written by Wings members are skipped. This leaves out many tracks, including the entire "Choba B CCCP" album. Still, it's worth getting.

Detailed analysis of each McCartney recording's history and process. If you are a fan, it will demand listening to your collection again as well as filling the songs you've missed!

Livro como novo. Recomendo

I'm really giving the book a 4.5/5 - since I have a few small complaints, written below. I just finished reading it and, for all the research and information here (that I've seen nowhere else), it deserves a superb rating.There are books covering all the Beatles songs, one at a time, detailing the story behind each song and giving some information about how it was recorded, its chart success, and its "life/history" afterwards. This book by Luca Perasi does the same for Paul's post-Beatles work through the years 1969-2013, and it does it well. I can highly recommend this book to others interested in Paul's post-Beatle songs, as opposed to his post-Beatle life. The focus is on the music, not the celebrity, so there's a lot of information here you don't find elsewhere.I'm learning a lot and impressed with the amount of research done, including plenty of interviews with musicians, engineers, ex-Wings members, etc. to give credibility and insight to the information. I like the references being shown at the bottom of each page, rather than indexed at the back of the book, and also that internet URL's and YouTube addresses are shown (which makes it easy to look up the videos for myself).There are some grammatical errors throughout but they don't detract from getting the point across. Perasi's original book was in Italian, and this is a "translated to English and expanded" version of that book. Some of the music descriptions are not useful to most readers, but may be of interest to musicians who understand them. There isn't too much of that in the book. And although the book is mostly factual, Perasi admit's to adding his own opinions about the music at times. From what I've read so far, he's sometimes too reluctant to criticize some of Paul's worst efforts.I have read some complaints about the text size being very small and I have to agree - even with my glasses on, it's small to read. The book size itself should be much larger. When it arrived and I saw the size of it, my first thought was "this small book, with a soft cover and no pictures, is NOT worth $36 CDN". However, make it larger, give it a hard cover, add a lot of pictures and you have a valuable book on par with Bruce Spizer's books.It is interesting to read the critical views of McCartney's post-Beatle work and also to see how much they changed over the years. Perasi does a good job of explaining this. For example, Paul's first 3 solo albums (McCartney, RAM, Wild Life) received mostly terrible reviews at the time - of a "once great but seems to have lost his way" nature. It also took Paul and Wings a few albums to find their way to greatness and critical acceptance. Decades later, the view has changed to "genius exploring new territory, not wanting to repeat his past formulae for success, writing more personal music" view. There's truth in both views and the information provided in Perasi's book helps to clear up some of it.I did not realize how prolific Paul was, how quickly he works based on spontaneity and improvisation, how much he takes simple influences from life experiences as the basis for songs, etc. As a songwriter, he's always "turned on". There are always multiple songs in progress, songs being shelved and brought back later, etc. Songs like Maybe I'm Amazed, My Love, Another Day, etc. were not new and had been shelved whilst he dealt with other, lesser songs. From that information it's easier to understand Paul's own admission of not being able to select the hits. He often leaves it to the record company to choose singles, except when he's passionate in the moment about a certain song's message and relevance - and not all of those make good hits. He's too close to the material, and although he just wants to get it done and out there (like John Lennon), he's also too much a perfectionist and will often shelf things and bring them back and re-approach them - but he won't let them go. In that sense, there are a lot of mediocre songs that are more important to Paul for his own musical growth than for the band or project at hand. This explains the frustration of other musicians in Wings - the other members of the Beatles had the power to veto Paul, but the members of Wings did not.So Paul is really his own worse enemy - there is no question of his musical genius; however, his genius would be better represented by a diminished and more selective output (i.e. good is the enemy of great). Paul needs to create, and to do so "in the moment" - that is how he works. However, that does not mean he has to release it all - which is the main view of his critics, that he is genius who allows himself to release too many unimportant works. The funny thing is, as I'm learning from this book, is that Paul does NOT release everything, and simply has so much material still "shelved" until he's more satisfied with it.Sorry if I seem off-topic. The things I'm reading in this book are giving me more insight into Paul the composer. Which is exactly what I hoped to get from buying this book. It definitely makes me want to revisit the music.

Great pool of information. A really good work. A bible of McCartney followers. I am enjoying of it. And discovering more of it.

Luca Perasi has done a brain-boggling amount of work to compile this information, and thank God he did. This currently stands as the most informative and accurate source of information on Macca's post-Beatles studio work. Originally written in Italian and now translated, it is a credit to Luca how vivid his translated prose is...taking you inside every guitar riff played, piano sequence rolled out, and vocal pass emoted. Unfortunately not everything can be 100% verified (even truer with each passing year and memories clouding), and '?' all too frequently follows an instrument attribution. But this is the best - and maybe final - word on Paul's studio work, and a worthy addition to every Beatles/McCartney fan's bookshelf.

Excellent!