Inebriation

Song facts

“Inebriation” is a piece of classical music written by Paul McCartney. In early 1995, while working on what would become “Standing Stone“, he discovered how he could use the music software Cubase to compose classical music. McCartney has never known how to write music using classical notation, and therefore Cubase was the perfect tool for him to write classical pieces without some external help.

I had been hanging out with Allen Ginsberg, backing him on guitar for a [1996] recording and an Albert Hall concert he did of a poem called ‘The Ballad Of The Skeletons.’ So I thought it’d be a nice thing for me to condense the images for the symphony into a poem. And it felt kinda handy in such a big piece, because if I was wondering where I was going in the music, I’d just refer to the poem and say, ‘Right, that next bit is this bit.’ And as a practice for working in this new world, I started to compose smaller pieces.

Paul McCartney, from Billboard interview, 1997

“Inebriation” is the first of those smaller pieces written in anticipation of working on “Standing Stone“. McCartney described it, as “a crazy 10-minute string quartet […], wacky and very modern” (from Billboard interview, 1997). Lasting 9 minutes, the piece is composed of three segments, named:

I. Con temperanza
II. Moderato. Sempre con licenza, quasi cadenza
III. Ubbriaco

It was performed by the Brodsky Quartet, during the World Premiere and US Premiere of “Standing Stone” in 1997, but was never released on disc.

Last updated on July 6, 2020