Motor Of Love

Song facts

“Motor Of Love” is a track from 1989 album “Flowers In The Dirt“.

We made a version I wasn’t too happy with, but I liked the song. It was gonna get dumped off the album…so I said why don’t we give it to some independent people…get some objectivity? I think it’s a good song and it might get back as a contender. I’d liked Chris Hughes and Ross Cullum’s work with Tears For Fears…and they worked up a more modern, hi-tech version…’Heavenly Father’ is like an old trick for me, it’s like ‘Mother Mary’. I have a father who’s no longer with us…but I realised the moment you say ‘Heavenly Father’ or ‘Mother Mary’ there’s also that connotation. I like a bit of God though, nothing wrong with that.

Paul McCartney – From Club Sandwich 52, Summer 1989

From “In Their Own Words: The Producers discuss McCartney’s Flowers in the Dirt“, by Super Deluxe Edition blog:

[Paul McCartney] sent over the tapes of Motor of Love, and back in the day it was two-inch tapes. It was basically “have a little listen to this, and see what you think”. I went to a studio in Fulham, I listened to the track, and I instantly thought, well it’s unfinished as a piece of writing. There’s no middle eight. It was somewhere between a demo and a master. But I made a copy of the tape and basically cut it at a certain point and put 12 bars of just time, just a little drum box in time, and glued it back together.

He came over to the studio, and this is the amazing thing… I said, “forgive me, but I think there is a middle eight missing here, it just feels incomplete. I’ve put a landing strip of 12 bars blank in the track, and wondered if you just wanted to try something out.” This was astounding. We plugged in a little electric keyboard, and he said, “ok, run it down”. We ran down the track, and literally, as it got to the blank bit, he started playing, and humming, and played it and finished it and rounded it off into the track. It was astounding, it was one take. Literally the second take, the second pass, he’d written it with the tune, and ten minutes, quarter of an hour later, he said, these could be the words. Honestly, it was astounding watching him create from absolute scratch and putting it in the track. That was for me, amazing. Anyway, he quite liked the fact it had gone well. Then we went down to his place, the Windmill, and started recording for real. […]

Motor of Love, even in its demo version, was alluding to being quite lush. It was slow and it was this slushy, lush ballad-y thing he was trying to get. We did layers and layers of Linda and samples and God knows what, as one did at that time. I listened to it the other day and I thought, fucking hell it’s so much of its time. That little place where there were string pads and synths and Fairlights and snare drums that went on for days, and snare drums being too loud. I think he was quite enjoying the nature of it sounding a little less like him and sounding a bit like some records that sound like that. The two or three things that are typical of him are the chord progressions [which] are Macca-y and his bass playing, as you’d expect. […]

Producer Chris Hughes

Last updated on April 29, 2021

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