Botswana

Song facts

“Botswana” is a 2014 experimental song mentioned by Paul McCartney in a July 2014 interview for RollingStone:

McCartney says the time off from the road let him catch up on all kinds of pursuits that his heavy touring schedule might have otherwise made difficult. “I just took it really easy at home in England,” he says. “My son-in-law had a film script – plenty of time to read that. I started jogging a bit. The weather was great, so that was cool. And then I went into my recording studio and did some music that I didn’t have to do, some experimental stuff. That was a really nice musical awakening, and it made me feel better.” […]

Tell us more about the music you were working on.
I have a studio about 20 minutes away from where I live, and sometimes I’ll go in and work on my computer. Even though I’m not really a computer guy, I have a music program that I’ve worked on for years, called Cubase. It’s incredibly addictive – I’ll just sit there for six hours, until someone has to nudge me and say, “Go home now.” Normally I work on my orchestral side on that, but someone said to me, “You know what? That’s not technically an orchestral program. It’s more of a pop program.” So when I had some time to do nothing, I went in and said, “Great. I’ll start on a dance track or something.”

I also got a sequencer, which I was revisiting from years ago. I did an album called McCartney II [in 1980],where I had experimented with sequencers and synths in their early days. I wanted to get back into that, but I really hadn’t had much time before. So I hooked that up with Cubase. It was really cool. I’d get the BPM on the sequencer, match it on the computer, put some drums in from the computer, put that all down onto Pro Tools, and screw it all up – because it was for nothing.

Over a week, I did a couple of tracks, and that reawakened my musical taste buds. I was really happy with those. They were just funky little experimental things, instrumentals. The first one I did was kind of African, so I gave it the working title “Mombasa.” The next one was faster, and that one I called “Botswana.” It was a good week. It was funny, I was talking to Joe Walsh about this. He said, “Yeah, man, that’s the best – when it’s for nothing and it’s not important and it’s just experimental, you have the most fun. It’s really good for your soul, that stuff.’ And I agree. It was very freeing.

It was used in the soundtrack of a short film to promote the “Meat Free Monday” initiative, released in November 2017.

Last updated on March 15, 2021