Wild Life

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From paulmccartney.com:

Like many debut albums, Wings’ Wild Life wasn’t a real reflection of what was to come, its guiding ethos being Paul’s intention to record the entire piece quickly. Taking just two weeks, Wild Life was about spontaneity: the opening track ‘Mumbo’ was recorded in one take. “I’d read that Bob Dylan had just made a quick album,” Paul explains, “and I really liked the idea, because we tended to take longer and longer to make records. The early albums by The Beatles hadn’t taken long and it seemed to me that Dylan was getting to that. I was a great admirer of his – and still am to this day – so I thought, Well, if it’s good enough for him, let’s do it. Linda was heavily pregnant with Stella while we were recording. If she’d have wanted to stop the sessions we would have done, but it just didn’t arise. A lot of women work until two weeks before the baby is due and that’s what Linda did.” The actual pregnancy was a difficult one and as Paul slept next to his wife he had vivid dreams about angels: “And I thought, that’s a nice image, wings. I wonder if there’s been a band called Wings? That’s how the name came about, in King’s College Hospital, in London, as we recovered from the birth of Stella. So Wings became the name.” Paul, Linda and drummer Denny Seiwell were joined for the album by the former Moody Blues singer Denny Laine, destined to remain with Wings throughout. 

Dylan inspired “Wild Life” because we heard he had been in the studio and done an album in just a week. So we thought of doing it like that, putting down the spontaneous stuff and not being too careful. So it came out a bit like that. We wrote the tracks in the summer, Linda and I, we wrote them in Scotland in the summer while the lambs we gambolling. We spent two weeks on the “Wild Life” album all together. At that time, it was just when I had rung Denny Laine up a few days before and he came up to where we were to rehearse for one or two days.

Paul McCartney – Quoted from How Bob Dylan inspired the Wings album ‘Wild Life’ (faroutmagazine.co.uk)

Critics didn’t like Wild Life when it came out so I started thinking like them, that it was rubbish. Then, when I heard it a couple of years later, I really liked it and found it interesting. Okay, it didn’t make me the biggest blockbuster around but I don’t think you need them all the time. I like to have a couple of albums like that because it adds to the whole thing, really. But what made Wild Life okay for me was when I saw this fella heading for the hills in California holding a copy of Wild Life. So someone liked it.

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles: Off The Record 2 – The Dream is Over: Dream Is Over Vol 2” by Keith Badman

Last updated on March 5, 2022