Find My Way

Song facts

“Find My Way” is a track from 2020 album “McCartney III“. While there was no formal single released, “Find My Way” had a single-like treatment, with stickers “Featuring Find My Way” added to the “McCartney III” LPs and CDs, and a promotional video directed by Roman Coppola.

Paul had a lot of fun working on this track in his home studio. He had recorded two different drum tracks, and added two different bass parts. Paul then recorded a number of guitar parts onto a Brenell 1/4″ reel-to-reel tape machine, capturing some at different tape speeds. These guitar loops were then arranged and layered into the track.

From Spotify Storyline. Storyline is a feature of Spotify that gives behind-the-scenes information from artists about their songs, presented with a carousel of cards featuring a combination of text and images.

On “Find My Way”, you say, “You never used to be / Afraid of days like these / But now you’re overwhelmed / By your
anxieties”…

That was written at the beginning of lockdown. It was a very scary time. Other scares we’ve had – SARS, avian flu – they seemed to happen to other people. But this was happening to everyone, people you knew, everyone in the world. Some of my friends, some people I knew were close to going under with it.

Paul McCartney, in UNCUT interview, January 2021

I was thinking about people who worry more than I do. And I know one or two people which are just kind-of worried about life. And it’s not that I don’t, it’s just that I deal with those worries and think “No, it’s ok, there’s a way out of this” and I can generally find some optimistic exit from a bad situation. But there are some people who do get overwhelmed with it. So I think I was adressing those people and thinking “you never used to be so anxious but now you are, so let me be your guide, let me help you, to find the love that is inside you” it just felt like a natural thing to say. So that’s what it’s about. The rest of the song is me saying “I can find my way, I know my left and right”

Paul McCartney, interview with The Adam Buxton Podcast, December 11, 2020

Idris Elba: Have you ever written verses that you’ve listened to and you’re gonna I’m not interested in that and redone the whole thing?

Paul: Yeah, one of the songs I’d forgotten that happened with this song, it’s called “Find My Way”. And I had the chorus “I can find my way, I know my left from right. No, I don’t get lost at night”. So that was like a positive. You know, “I can do it” type-of verse. And then I had some rubbish stuff about going on holiday with someone and it didn’t work out. And she left and it was like… it was terrible. And so I came back and wipe it all that bit and put another middle int it, which is better.

Paul McCartney, interview with Idris Elba for BBC1, December 19, 2020

I started this on the piano and it was based on an idea that I’d had in the car, and I was listening to music and there was a beat on the radio that I liked, so I just started singing along with it but making up my own words and tune. So that was started in the car, then I wrote it when I got home on the piano, and took it into the studio and it actually had a whole other idea for the verses which I didn’t like, so I eventually put in a new idea which is the middle now, [sings] “you never used to be afraid of days like these”. So I think that was much better than the original idea.

Paul McCartney, from NME, December 23, 2020

For Find My Way we used a quarter-inch Brenell tape machine. It’s got a speaker built into it, Paul will record a lick into it, and then we’ll play it back at different speeds through the speaker. We’ve got a tape loop set up with a tape reel the lid of a coffee can so you get a continuous loop. It’s got a sound-on-sound mode where it lifts the tape away from the record head so you can have a couple of different sounds playing at the same time. Then when you put it into playback mode you can play it at different speeds and get different octaves. We’ll record that into Pro Tools and edit them up.

Steve Orchard, from interview with MusicRadar, December 2020

There’s Moog bass on Deep Down, and also on Find My Way the bass switches between the Hofner and the Moog, sort of intersecting in different sections of the song. We use the Moog a fair bit.

Steve Orchard, from interview with MusicRadar, December 2020

In 2021, for the “McCartney III Imagined” project, American singer Beck reimagined “Find My Way”:

I remember hanging out with Paul and his wife Nancy several years ago and Nancy mentioned that she wanted to go out dancing before calling it a night. We ended up at some club in West Hollywood and I remember noticing that Paul and Nancy were TEARING IT UP – really enjoying themselves more than anyone else on the dance floor. Last year when he asked me to remix this track, I remembered that night and wanted to try to recapture that amazing spirit I felt while watching him on the dance floor…sort of my little tribute to Paul “in his groove.” When I then heard the falsetto vocal in Paul’s original track I wanted to lean further into something really loose and funky – I pulled out my Hofner (because of course) and put down a few bass lines…and everything came to life from there. The best part of the entire experience, though, came just a week after I’d turned in the remix, when Paul called to tell me he’d been dancing in his kitchen to the track all week.

Beck – from Instagram, March 23, 2021

He just sent me that particular tune, so I just went right into it. The way I work with remixes is I’ll take the vocal and then I’ll just start from scratch. I’ll just build a whole new song. And that particular song, I actually changed it from major to minor, so I had to do a little bit of altering, but I think it served the groove a bit. And also Paul did the album himself as well, playing on the instruments. So it’s sort of done in the spirit of the record that he made. I think that’s, that’s what is great about remixes is completely take liberties and take the song completely somewhere unexpected.

Beck – talking to Zane Lowe for Apple 1 Music, March 25, 2021

Beck’s remix of Paul McCartney’s “Find My Way” contains a sample of the recording “Got To Be Enough” performed by Con Funk Shun, and written by Michael Cooper and Felton C Pilate.

A music video of “Find My Way” reinterpreted by Beck was produced and released in July 2021. The video shows a de-aged Paul McCartney dancing in the hallway of a hotel, transformed into various dream-like environments. 

Last updated on July 29, 2021

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