House Of Wax

Song facts

“House Of Wax” is a song from Paul McCartney’s 2007 album, “Memory Almost Full“.

There’s something about chords in a song that can take you to a place. In this song they are not complex but there’s something in the tonality of them that takes you to what the vocal becomes. And I like the lyrics: ‘Lightning hits the house of wax, poets spill out on the streets, to set alight the incomplete remainders of the future.’ It’s quite surreal. I enjoyed singing them because of those chords and the mixture of the melody and the lyrics. I think this will be good to do live. It’s another one that my band played on. In fact the medley was conceived early on in this album and the band is featured on a lot of it.

Paul McCartney – interview with Mail On Sunday, May 12, 2008

Interview with David Khane, from Mix Online, October 1, 2007:

“House of Wax”: The climactic “House of Wax,” which McCartney played live on his handful of “secret gig” shows supporting the album, again features the band, with McCartney providing the crying blues guitar solo. “The solos were a big deal for me,” Kahne recalls. “Those sections were blank; we didn’t know what we were going to put there. I heard ‘Taxman’ on the radio, for which he’d done the solo, and I thought how great it would be if he would just rip in those big breaks. So I asked, ‘Instead of making a more complex part, can you just play guitar solos?’ He said, ‘Okay,’ sat in the control room with his Casino plugged into the Vox and just whipped it up, and literally, a half-hour later, they were done. I’ve never heard him play guitar like that. He just pushes the notes sharp perfectly at the right time.”

Last updated on January 18, 2021

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