Interview for Sodajerker

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From Paul McCartney interview | Simon Barber:

I am delighted to announce that my guest on the Sodajerker podcast this Friday will be Paul McCartney. My co-presenter Brian and I recently sat down with Paul at The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) for a conversation about his new album Egypt Station, which is also available from 7th September.

From Birmingham academic talks songwriting and ‘Egypt Station’ with Paul McCartney:

Dr Simon Barber, Research Fellow in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR), alongside collaborator Brian O’Connor, are more widely known as Sodajerker, the creative partnership of two long-time friends who love songwriting. Their independent podcast, ‘Sodajerker On Songwriting’, is comprised of long-form interviews with some of the world’s most successful songwriters about how they approach the art and craft.

Since its launch in November 2011, the show has released over 120 episodes featuring in-depth discussions with the likes of Paul Simon, Alicia Keys, Johnny Marr, Noel Gallagher, KT Tunstall and Joan Armatrading. The show has been downloaded millions of times by music fans the world over and has charted in more than 50 countries via Apple Podcasts.

There was, however, one guest that remained elusive; the man the pair describe as “the holy grail of songwriters” – Paul McCartney. Despite having studied at The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), where the former Beatle is Lead Patron, they hadn’t managed to interview the legendary artist – until now. […]

Paul McCartney interviewed for Sodajerkerpodcast, 2018:

You mentioned Greg Kurstin […] what kind of a collaborator was he?

Well, he’s great, you know, I’d actually written all the stuff that I did with Greg, so it was more a question of just trying to make good records of the songs that I had, so that was how it worked out with Greg. With Ryan, because we only had the week, it was going to be just make them up and we did the three songs, you know, in the week, which is pretty good going and they’ve just got a different feel, you know and that’s sort of what we wanted to do, it was just break it up a bit, not have every station the same sound, you know.

Greg’s a multi-instrumentalist as well, isn’t he, did you let him have a go with the recording process?

Yeah, he plays quite a bit of the keyboard on the record. He’s really good. In one of the tracks, there’s like an instrumental thing and I said, it would be good to like break it down and just play this on piano, so I started learning it, but then I said, ‘oh, this is going to take me forever, Greg, could you do this?’ he goes, ‘well, let me try’ and he plays it perfectly, Of course, you know. so he did that and he’s got a great ‘producery’ feel, particularly for keyboard. I knew he’d done Adele’s Hello and he’d done the instruments on that, so if you listen to it, it’s very simple but the keyboard is like a really good sound. Just got to have some space to breathe, you know, so yeah, he’s a keyboard wiz.

Paul McCartney