Overdubs for "(I Want To) Come Home"

In my mind, what they wanted at the end of this film is a song from me, not so much a piece of the score. And that was like one of the questions I had to work out, am I just going to go segway seamlessly from Dario’s score, and I just happen to start singing, or am I going to actually let his score finish? And then I come in with something that is like recognizably to be a song. So that was what I decided to do in the end. And I said to Dario, “no, I want that to happen”. After Bob De Niro’s last line (“your family is making its way in the world. And you can be proud of the children and their achievements. And if you were to ask me, I would have to say in all honesty, everybody’s fine. Everybody’s fine”), I’d like then my record to kind of unfold, and then work its way to the end credits. It would just be the kind of emotional end of the movie. Originally I had this song as a very simple me and pianos, a little bit of bass and drums, acoustic guitar, and then I started to think it might be good with a bit of orchestration. I talked to the director, who told me that he’d been using Dario Marinelli. And I knew of Dario’s work. So I thought it’d be nice for me to use him rather than get some other orchestrator. So Dario and I just talked, I went to his house, in Highbury, offered to tidy his garden up for him. It’s just a little bonus. It still needs tidying up, by the way, Dario!

Paul McCartney – From the special features of the film “Everybody’s Fine.”

It was going very well. And we decided to basically throw everything at it, and just see what happened. And in fact, we threw too much at it. So and he did a demo on a synth. But then we thought, “No, we’ve put too many notes or too much in it”. So it was like in Amadeus, the film, when the king sort of says “too many notes”. So we had another meeting where I can express that to him, I said “I think we’re going to simplify it, and what we do is, we keep just a kind of solo voices like a cello, or like just a couple of violins before we go to the big orchestra”. So it kind of stays quite intimate, and not too overblown. Just trying to keep the simplicity of the song. Once we got that together after a couple of meetings, we thought “Okay, I think we just got it right now”. So we came here to AIR London. And this morning, we did the session, and I think they played great, everyone played very well, the soloists and the ensemble. And so we’re just about to mix it now. And it’s been great.

Paul McCartney – From the special features of the film “Everybody’s Fine.”

Session activities

1. (I Want To) Come Home

   Written by Paul McCartney

   Recording