Ranking my favorite Paul McCartney albums

My friends will endorse Ram. They’ll endorse Venus and Mars. They’ll endorse Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. They’ll endorse one of those Fireman projects. But when I cross myself and listen to a Paul McCartney album I only reach for eight.

My list of McCartney tracks.

1. McCartney (1970)

This may shock my readers — hell, its placement shocked me. His debut remains my most played McCartney because, like Wire and the Minutemen and early De La Soul, he can’t sustain a song longer than a couple minutes without repeating himself or folding up his sleeve and reaching deep into the cookie jar of Sweet ‘n’ Low saccharine packs. Months after the Beatles dissolved, McCartney stood as a scared man with a garage full of equipment and a head full of tunes; every time he looked over his shoulder he expected Ringo, even sullen George. So he played his own lead riffs and triumphed (“Maybe I’m Amazed”), and played his own drums and — well, Ringo was Tony Williams after all. Often “Every Night” is the only valentine I ever need from his solo years.

2. Band on the Run (1974)

Well, here’s a surprise: it’s as good as critics said in 1974 and 1987. “Jet,” the title track, and “Nineteen Hundred Eighty-Five” are great-weird radio singles, and McCartney acquits himself well on drums and lead guitar, of course. If he’d cut “Bluebird” and the Denny Laine co-write “No Words,” he’d have the best end-to-end album of his career. His one-man rhythm section on “Mrs. Vanderbilt,” combined with the ho-hey-ho chorus, shames every bubblegum hook writer who isn’t Max Martin.

3. Press to Play (1986)

“If I’m completely honest then, the album we made called Press To Play wasn’t a very good album,” producer Hugh Padgham had to say. “I kind of fell out with Eric Stewart during it. Paul McCartney became quite annoying as far as I’m concerned, if I’m being completely honest.” No one would accuse him of perjury, for Paul McCartney could be quite annoying. Yet the annoyance produced three quarters of an expensive oddity, not much of a farrago as far as these things went during the High Eighties. What separates “Good Times Coming/Feel the Sun,” “Pretty Little Head,” and “Footprints” from their siblings on 1970’s McCartney in public esteem is an undue repugnance for digital technology and the producer of Invisible Touch. I’ve tapped on thousands of keys defending Press to Play since 2004, but just think: “Press” is erotic whimsy raised to the level of a stage of Paradiso.

4. Memory Almost Full (2007)

Driving Rain excepted, McCartney had a solid new millennium. This unassuming little thing, one of his one-man-band affairs, is as if the goofball had recorded six “Take It Away”s to accompany the seven “That Would Be Something”s. And, to quote the man, what’s wrong with that? Rarely obnoxious and often charming, MAF is the smartest album I can expect from McCartney in what pretentious people would call the sunset of his life. Key lyric: “The things I think I did/I did, I did, I did.”

5. Flowers in the Dirt (1989)

“The late eighties were an odd netherworld, a period when boomer icons could for a time rely on high schoolers buying their records. Compared to Back in the High Life Again and Storyville, Flowers in the Dirt has the tunes to support its undoubted ambition. Ordinarily his attention span doesn’t let him think songs through, therefore the arrangements are supposed to solve the problem. It augured nothing, though, except another decade of touring and Beatle nostalgia. For McCartney, whimsy was a job,” I wrote in my 2017 re-appraisal.

6. Run Devil Run (1999)

Rare is the moment when PR Paul disappears long enough for him to wring out a vocal that showed the depths of his range. This quickie covers album released after the death of his beloved Linda has “No Other Baby.”

7. Tug of War (1982)

Called a masterpiece when released in the summer of 1982 (at the same time Lou Reed redeemed himself with The Blue Mask), Tug of War gets less fulsome praise this millennium. McCartney, reuniting with George Martin, wanted a masterpiece yet included Serious Statements like the title track and “Here Today” amid offal like “Ebony and Ivory. As a solo artist, McCartney is incapable of masterpieces, and only boomers would want them anyway. We want insouciance that shades into grace like the Carl Perkins collab “Get It” or the Wonder co-write “What’s That You’re Doin’.” We want wonderful singles like “Take It Away.” Leave the masterpieces to Debussy or something.

8. Flaming Pie (1997)

Jeff Lynne?! He was George’s man. McCartney, watching his former mate land a top ten album and #1 single in 1987 and ’88, wanted his own man to oversee Beatles Anthology. Yet he worked with Lynne anyway. Bloated beyond rational thought, Flaming Pie was nevertheless the most relaxed McCartney album since 1986.