At The Mercy

Song facts

“At The Mercy” is a track from Paul McCartney’s 2005 album “Chaos And Creation In The Backyard“. From an interview of Paul McCartney by Gary Crowley:

At the Mercy was one that I wrote on a day off in LA. Sometimes when you get into recording an album, you start to sort of get a feel of what you and the producer are going for and what kind of a new song might fit with what you’ve already recorded. So this one was just made up like on the Sunday when I  was having the weekend off. We’d worked all week. So on the Sunday I just sort of thought ‘Oh I’d like to take this in tomorrow’ and have a new completely new thing that he hadn’t heard that I hadn’t heard. Just very, very fresh. So I was just sort of messing around on the piano and I just got a couple of chords that I liked, slightly darker chords than I  might normally have. And this phrase just kept sort of coming.

A lot of people do this, when they’re writing, they just let anything happen, so that it can be “Scrambled Eggs, Baby o var, Baby’s legs Oh no ver, Man of here, Man of Fire” and you just suddenly go ‘Ooh Man of Fire that could be a direction you know’ and with me it just came ‘At the Mercy, At the Mercy‘ At the Mercy of what? At the mercy of a busy road. At the mercy of a busy road and I didn’t really attach any significance to it but one of the things that I like about my songs when I’ve written them is you can attach very specific significances to them. I was talking to Heather about that particular one and she said ‘Whoa! For me at the mercy of a busy road.’ Remember she lost her leg in an accident. You know that’s very appropriate. So that’s the kind of thing I was thinking of that how life can throw you a curveball, suddenly you’re going along and then suddenly ‘Oh no!’  and it’s a similar scene to Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. Only that was like a comedy dark black comedy based on that idea: you never know what’s round the corner kind of thing.

So At The Mercy was that and I took it in to Nigel next day and  said ‘What do you think of this?’ And he said ‘Oh great, great.’ It became his favourite, you know. So we just worked on it and that was it and I erm,  It was basically that it was finding a couple of chords that were kind of dark enough to get this sort of message that life can throw you curve balls and what do we do about it? Oh well I don’t know just keep on resolute, whatever you do.

Paul McCartney – from 2005 UK promotional-only interview CD, recorded July 2005 at Air Studios in London

From the beginning of the recording sessions of “Chaos And Creation In The Backyard“, Nigel Godrich, the producer of the album, made it clear to Paul McCartney that he wanted him out of his comfort zone :

The third session, he came back and played me a song, and I was like, ‘Fucking hell, that’s so much better.’ That was At The Mercy. He said, ‘I think I’m remembering how to do this!’ Maybe he was expressing the concept of having to better what he’s doing because someone was going to look at him and say, ‘Not sure,’ rather than just blindly taking everything that he proffers.

Nigel Godrich

Last updated on January 17, 2021

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